Big Apple straphangers are on board.
New Yorkers on Monday embraced the Guardian Angels and founder Curtis Sliwa as the anti-crime crusaders resumed patrols of the troubled city subway system for the first time since 2020.
One grateful New Yorker even planted a kiss on Sliwa as the red-beret-wearing crew poked around the darkest corners of Bronx and Manhattan stations looking for trouble — with The Post tagging along.
“It’s good to see ya’ll back,” Bronx resident Tammy Benson, 60, told Sliwa after giving him a kiss at the 125th Street station in Harlem. “You and them need to come back. I’m grateful to see it. I feel really blessed when I see [Sliwa] It’s been like 40 years and he’s really sweet and kind.
“You need to come back!”
Another straphanger, Manhattanite Natalie Lora, told The Post the Angels were a welcome sight.
“We need them,” said Lora, 40. “It’s that time: We need them again. We’re happy to see them. If you’re a native New Yorker then you know.”
Sliwa, a former Republican mayoral candidate, was flipping burgers as night manager at a Bronx McDonald’s when he founded the group in 1979 amid horrific subway violence at the time.
Once topping off with thousands of members worldwide, the Guardian Angels have since returned to the underground several times — but not since the last patrols nearly 15 years ago.
This weekend Sliwa announced that he was taking his volunteers back into the transit system following the horrifying arson death of a homeless woman on an F train in Brooklyn earlier this month.
On Monday cops reported two more transit attacks — a 48-year-old man slashed in the neck at the West 50th Street and Eighth Avenue station in Manhattan and a 52-year-old man stabbed in the arm at the Myrtle-Wyckoff station on the Brooklyn-Queens border.
NYPD stats show that over the past 28 days alone there were 48 felony assaults reported in the system, a jump of about 40% over the same period last year.
Sliwa said that’s why the Angels are back on the beat in the subways.
“We ride the trains and check every car and make the presence known in every car and then we get off and check the really bad stations like here at 125th and Lex,” he said. “Upstairs is like dope fiend city.”
Guardian Angels founding member Arnaldo Salinas said 70 people have reached out to volunteer for the subway patrols since The Post wrote about the new effort on Sunday.
But Salinas said applicants are carefully screened to weed out vigilantes out for blood.
“First, we do the interviews and we ask them questions like why do you want to do this, and if we get answers like ‘my mom was robbed the other day an I want to get out there and kick the f–king s–t out of somebody,’ then, no, we can’t use you,” he said.
“If you’re one of these Bruce Lee wannabes, I’m afraid not. We can’t use you,” Salinas added.
He said the gig is also dangerous — six Guardian Angels have been killed on patrols since 1980, and others have suffered injuries ranging from broken bones to losing an eye from an attack with a golf club.
The new patrols consist of three Guardian Angels each and will run around the clock on four-hour shifts, the group said, with the F line — site of the horrific arson attack — one of the main focuses.
On Monday two teams, including Sliwa, boarded an uptown 6 train up to Harlem, then back downtown and to the Coney Island station in Brooklyn — approaching the homeless and offering to help.
At one station a shoeless young woman approached Sliwa — asking if he was the mayor.
After a brief conversation a bystander stepped up and gave the woman a pair of socks.
“See?” Sliwa told her. “There are good people who care about you. You can get out of this.”
In one tense encounter, Sliwa approached a man who appeared to be selling drugs at the 125th Street station, chewing out the man until he walked away.
“You better get the hell out of the subway,” he told the man. “We will get you out of the subway if you’re here to sell drugs. Get the hell out.”
Whether or not the confrontation was largely for show, it was a welcome sight for many straphangers.
“You guys are needed down here,” 52-year-old Bronx resident Sonny Raimundi told Sliwa as he shook his hand Monday. “You guys are for the regular people who are working the night shifts and the late shifts and down here at night alone.
“The cops can’t cover everything,” he added.
Nonetheless, a rep for Mayor Eric Adams on Monday maintained that cops have put a dent in crime in the city, and suggested that the Guardian Angels’ new patrols are little more than “theatrics.” Adams defeated Sliwa in the 2021 mayoral race.
“The mayor surged 1,000 police officers per day into the subways, has brought down overall crime, and transit crime, delivering real action — not theatrics — but he knows there’s still more work to be done,” City Hall press secretary Kayla Mamelak said in an email.
“Unlike others who only seek attention with meaningless stunts, Mayor Adams remains focused on real solutions.”
The new patrols come as Gov. Kathy Hochul deployed 1,250 National Guardsmen to patrol the city’s transit system at 150 locations including the major hubs at Grand Central, Times Square and Atlantic Avenue/Barclays Center.
A spokesman for Hochul declined to comment on the Angels’ patrols but said the governor is working closely with City Hall and the NYPD to “remove individuals with mental illness who pose a risk to themselves or others.
“Governor Hochul understands there’s more work to do, and she will continue working with NYPD, State Police, MTA PD, National Guard and other law enforcement personnel to make our subways safer,” spokesman Avi Small said.
Additional reporting by Craig McCarthy and Carl Campanile
