Blas' party block
Fewer street-fair permits
New Yorkers will have fewer opportunities to stock up on tube socks and chow down on MozzArepas at cookie-cutter street festivals next year.
Citing a need to better deploy police and curb overtime costs, Mayor de Blasio is extending a policy that limits the number of permits allowed for neighborhood street fairs in 2018.
The number of large street festivals has dropped 5 percent during the de Blasio era — from 201 in 2014 to 191 in 2017, city records show.
“Events like these require additional police officers, which increases overtime costs to the city,” the mayor’s Street Activity Permit Office said in a statement about upholding the moratorium on festival permits. “These events also divert police officers from core crime-fighting, public-safety and counter-terrorism duties.”
The freeze on new permits was first put into effect after the Sept. 11 terror attacks and was continued through former Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s tenure amid complaints that the number of similar multiblock and multiday festivals had spiraled out of control.
Many sponsors and vendors are the same from street fair to street fair, critics said, and the festivals generally are not unique to neighborhoods.
But while imposing a moratorium on new permits in 2018, the rule grandfathers in festival sponsors who received permits in the prior year — a “use it or lose it” policy that some argue limits diversity and opportunity for immigrant merchants in changing neighborhoods.
“They won’t allow any new groups, no matter how good they are, to hold a fair,” said Mort Berkowitz, who runs the San Gennaro festival in Little Italy.
“You have the same fairs year in and year out,” he added. “There are dozens and dozens of groups who want to participate and they’re not allowed to.”
Anne Seligman, a Turtle Bay resident and member of Community Board 6, agreed.
“The opportunities for good street fairs are squandered,” Seligman said during a public hearing last month. “I think what happens when you have a moratorium is, people say, ‘OK. We are just going to repeat what we had last year.
“The moratorium is the wrong way to do it.”
But one merchants’ group — the 34th Street Partnership — supported the cap on festivals.
The street fairs are “often very unsightly and uncontrolled,” said Kevin Clyne, the partnership’s district planner.
The de Blasio administration floated a proposal last year to end the post-9/11 moratorium and require that half the festivals’ vendors come from the community board district where they were being held, in an attempt to bring more local flavor.
The proposal was roundly criticized by festival sponsors and subsequently withdrawn.