Midtown business leaders want to unplug LinkNYC, WiFi, and ad kiosks. They say they are a hub of perversion, harassment and crime.
“I want them to be removed,” said Barbara Blair, head of the Garment District Alliance, who is working on the wave of open heroin use on the sidewalk. “There seems to be no political will to restore order in the public territory. We have handed over the public territory to the villains.”
Prime Minister Blair wrote to the city’s Secretary of Information Technology and Communications (DoITT) again two weeks ago, but said he had not yet responded. Blair sent a letter to DoITT a few years ago requesting the removal of “troublesome links.”
According to Blair, there are only nine links between West 40th and West 36th on 8th Avenue.
“It’s tremendous redundancy,” she said.
Anthony Miniano, who manages the 1450 Broadway, a 42-story office tower on the corner of West 41st Street, said the homeless “create a living space with chairs, cardboard boxes, and tents” at the kiosk.
“They sit there, charge their devices, masturbate with full speakers, and sit in some sort of stolen chair …. In the open air, naked homeless people, the orange-colored administration of the Debrasio administration began. You can see the drug user using the needle, “Miniano said. “That’s all you see everywhere. The sea of orange needles discourages people from coming to our retail space.”
On Thursday, Mignano pointed out a grate next to a WiFi kiosk crammed with used hypodermic needles and broken glass pipes.
Miniano has witnessed two assaults since Memorial Day and called 311 “about 75 times” to complain about the homeless camp at the Link NYC spot in the Garment District. He knows “shoot and kill a woman right next to the rink and fall asleep” and “five or six men”.
The NYPD plays that role, but “they are handcuffed” due to staff shortages and bail reform, Miniano said.
“A policeman told me.” [A] The man can literally spit on my face and piss me, and I can arrest him, but he will go out tonight. “
“Kiosk is a disaster. They only attract drug dealers and homeless people,” said Steve Kaufmann, owner of the 46-story building 450 Broadway on Seventh Avenue between 34th and 35th Avenues. Told. “They are not serving their legitimate purpose.”
Mignano added: “Every company now offers its own WiFi. You don’t need a kiosk.”
Blair believed that the income generated by Link “much outweighs the financial damage done to the area where Link is located,” adding that city and state officials “need to restore order.” ..
In a September post last year, the plight of the Garment District was recorded as the latest shooting galley in the city where heroin addicts shoot in the daytime.
On July 14, NYPD, the Department of Health, and the city’s homeless support workers unlinked.
But it doesn’t solve the problem.
“This is a temporary solution. The kiosk is still there. They are already back,” Miniano said the next afternoon.
The city announced the Link NYC program in January 2016. It aims to provide free high-speed Internet access at previous telephone booths in the city. A few months after the project started, project operators were forced to add filters to the kiosk after the post reported that homeless people were using street kiosks with tablets to access pornography. it was done.
In the first two years of the program, the city raised a small amount of $ 43.4 million in payments, slightly above the guaranteed minimum of $ 42.5 million.
On July 10th, Mayor Eric Adams and Link NYC gathered in the Bronx to announce the city’s first Link 5G kiosk.
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