B’klyn lights naughty, not nice: neighbors
Brooklyn’s dazzling “Dyker Lights” Christmas displays are a winter wonderland for thousands of visitors — but neighbors are fed up with the traffic, trash and obnoxious strangers brought to their neighborhood each year by the famous decorations.
“People are just very frustrated because they feel overwhelmed by the volumes of tourists who are coming and the inability for people to access their driveways and leave their own blocks,” Community Board 10 district manager Josephine Beckmann told The Post Tuesday.
Residents are so upset that they packed a Dyker Heights-area community-board meeting Monday to complain about the annual holiday extravaganza, which includes numerous highly decorated houses over several square blocks and draws some 100,000 gawkers.
Some companies advertise threehour tours that can go for $50.
“It’s got to the point where it’s crazy,” said longtime resident Anne Donofrio. “There’s a tour bus that parks right by my neighbor’s house and it makes it hard to get in my driveway . . . It is an event and it needs to be monitored.”
One 12th Avenue resident said he has had to let visitors use his bathroom because “otherwise, they’re urinating in the driveway.”
A man who lives on 85th Street called the spectacle “a complete nightmare.”
“It used to be a neighborhood thing and it was nice,” he said. “[But now] I can’t even get home from work. People are parking everywhere, urinating in driveways.”
In an effort to quell an onslaught of complaints from residents of the south Brooklyn neighborhood, the community board applied for a permit in June from the Mayor’s Street Activity Permit Office.
Local leaders were hoping that the street permit would bring “more structure” to the over-thetop event, according to Beckmann.
But the city turned down the request last month.
“I’m certainly disappointed that the permit was not approved,” Beckmann said.
The Mayor’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on why the permit was denied. But an NYPD spokesperson, while noting that the department does not issue the permits, said that the Dyker Heights request “was not approved because it did not meet the criteria for which a street-activity permit is issued.”
Beckmann said that after last year’s Christmas season, a community meeting was held to review the many complaints the community board received from residents.
“They want assistance and resources and a traffic plan to address the quality-of-life issues,” Beckmann said.