UPPER WEST SLIDE
Families flee nabe amid crime and chaos
Sick of junkies, vagrants and homeless hotels housing convicted pedophiles, residents of the Wild West Side are riding off into the sunset in droves. Married UWS mom Allison Eden, 50, (with her teen son, inset) has just put her beloved 22-year West End Avenue home up for sale. “I don’t want to leave,” she said. “How do I let my children cross the street when homeless people are shooting up? I feel like NYC is disappearing so fast and no one’s doing anything.”
START spreadin’ the news, they’re leavin’ today!
However, the people packing their bags are not coming to New York City — they’re fleeing it for good.
Due to increasingly squalid conditions on the Upper West Side, including two new homeless shelters packed with junkies and registered sex offenders, longtime dwellers are departing the Big Apple with no plans to ever return.
One of the Escape from New Yorkers is Elizabeth Carr, one of the area’s most vocal leaders in combating mounting crime in the well-heeled hood. She was an administrator of the Facebook group NYC Moms for Safer Streets and the face of a public-safety movement that has attracted thousands to demand better policing and city services.
“In the best of times, NYC is a hard place to live,” said Carr. “Now you have all this other stuff. It’s a question for families . . . to have to see a guy masturbating on the corner or explain to my kids while I’m buying diapers at Duane Reade why this guy wearing no shoes is collapsed on the floor and they’re doing CPR on him.”
She said she began planning to move before the COVID crisis and recent neighborhood developments, but officially put down stakes Sunday in North Carolina with her finance-worker husband and three kids under 7.
“We reached our New York expiration date,” the former nonprofit exec, who had lived on the Upper West Side since 2007, told The Post from her new home 600 miles away. “Things weren’t heading in the right direction. What we’re seeing now isn’t at all surprising.”
Crimes committed over the past several days would’ve been unheard of a year ago in the quiet neighborhood that’s home to Lincoln Center and restaurants by Daniel Boulud.
A 40-year-old woman was randomly stabbed in the 72nd Street subway station at noon on Thursday; a 56-year-old man was suckerpunched while dining outdoors with his wife Wednesday night; photos were posted online of a man masturbating on the steps of the New-York Historical Society; and onlookers witnessed an apparent overdose in the aisle of a Duane Reade across the street from the Lucerne Hotel.
The Lucerne, on West 79th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, and the Hotel Belleclaire, on West 76th Street and Broadway, were recently converted into homeless shelters, with nearly 300 vagrants between them. At least six of the men are registered sex offenders, including convicted pedophiles, all living a block away from a school playground.
THE alarming downturn of her beloved neighborhood, Carr said, makes it hard to look on the bright side.
“Some say, ‘It’s a great opportunity for my kids to learn compassion,’ ” she said of progressive pals’ response to their new homeless neighbors.
“I’m a pretty compassionate person, but . . . at least show some respect. [The Department of Homeless Services] is just putting 283 people into a neighborhood basically in the middle of the night?”
Carr said one friend couldn’t find a broker to take on her apartment listing on 72nd and Columbus, normally a desirable spot, because conditions were so bad.
“It’s this slow slide,” she said. “How can families stay here? Does the city want families to stay?”
Other lifelong residents are saying sayonara, too.
“There was no reason to leave before,” said born-and-bred Upper West Sider Bess Fern. “Now I’m done. I can leave tomorrow and never look back. If I never came
back to this block, that would be fine.”
Fern, who is six months pregnant and the mother of a toddler daughter, just put her apartment of a decade near the Lucerne up for sale.
“I have definitely seen more crime, drugs and harassment in one week than in my whole experience growing up here,” she said.
“I don’t want to see a child get hurt or raped before they realize maybe it was a mistake to put [hundreds of] drug addicts and sex offenders near schools in the most dense residential population in the city.”
SAFETY, as well as the state of schools, are common reasons given by nervous moms who are vamoosing.
Jennifer, an Upper West Side mother of two boys, ages 5 and 8, is concerned about the financial fate of PS 166 as more well-to-do families leave.
“The funding comes from family donations,” said Jennifer, 46, who declined to give her last name, citing privacy reasons. “If people move out of the city, there goes the funding for the school.”
She plans to relocate to the Hamptons.
“I don’t feel safe going to the Fairway and Citarella anymore,” she said. “I have to walk by the sex offenders at the Belleclaire with my kids. Not knowing what these people are on and what it does to them scares me.”
“[Mayor] de Blasio seems to have some sort of vendetta against this demographic,” added Jennifer. “There’s no incentive to live here.”
Allison Eden, 50, a married Upper West Side mother of two teens, just listed her gut-renovated West End Avenue apartment of 22 years.
“I don’t want to leave,” she said,
“But I don’t feel like I have a choice now. How do I let my children cross the street when homeless people are shooting up?
“As a parent, this isn’t the place I once knew. I feel like NYC is disappearing so fast and no one’s doing anything,” said the tile manufacturer, who drags her two boys to work with her so they’re not fending for themselves outside alone.
“There’s nowhere for them to go. I don’t want to feel afraid, and I don’t want my children to be scared to go outside.”
EdenlovesNewYork—andher “fabulous” four-bedroom co-op with a fireplace — but the city’s neglect of the neighborhood has forced her hand.
“People are leaving not because we want to,” said Eden. “This is my home. I have my whole life here. I feel like we’re being thrown out, and so quickly.”
Amid the chaos, however, some moms are proudly staying put.
“The focus of our group is to get parents to stay in NYC by advocating for public safety and quality of life,” said Veronica Vargas Lupo, an administrator of the NYC Moms for Safer Streets Facebook group.
“We’re not giving up.”