SOFT-SELL CRAB
Street vendors crowd city
Live crabs. Bras with rhinestones. Old shoes. Frayed electrical cords. Knock-off Louis Vuitton clutches. Disposable face masks. Mets caps.
Illegal street peddlers have taken over the outer boroughs, clogging sidewalks and pulling customers from pandemic-ravaged mom-and-pop shops.
And everybody is pointing the finger at Mayor de Blasio.
In The Bronx, 149th Street and Fordham Road are hot spots. So is Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park and Flushing’s Main Street, especially from the Post Office at Sanford Avenue to the 7 Train station at Roosevelt Avenue.
On Main, between Sanford and 41st Avenue, The Post counted 27 street vendors — on just one side of the street. Two pulled out yellow licenses, showing they’re military veterans. Six shook their heads like they didn’t understand English. The others turned away when asked to show their licenses.
DianSong Yu of the Flushing Business Improvement District estimates 90 percent of the vendors aren’t licensed. Citywide, the number of vendors stands at roughly 20,000, according to the Street Vendor Project. But general merchandise license-holders, not including mobile food vendors, total a few thousand.
“It’s a very tough time for everybody, we get it,” Yu told The Post. “But we need to be fair to the local merchants who are paying very high rent and taxes. And they’re hurting.”
The Department of Consumer Affairs caps non-veteran general vendor licenses at 853 and charges $100 or $200 depending on time of year. Permits are free for veterans.
On Sanford and Main, hawkers sell live blue crabs for a buck apiece. Whether they are legal
People literally have no choice but to walk on top of each other.
— Flushing store owner Ira Dananberg
or safe to eat is anybody’s guess.
New York state allows crabbing around Queens, but restricts the size and number of catches. The state Department of Environmental Conservation doesn’t require a retail permit to sell the crabs. The city Health Department licenses mobile food vendors, who can’t sell raw seafood, but doesn’t monitor street peddlers.
The wife of a licensed vendor bought a dozen several weeks ago but started to feel sick after eating them. Her husband dissected the leftovers and found white worms in the bellies. The Health Department is investigating, spokesman
Patrick Gallahue told The Post.
“I was an illegal vendor,” admitted the husband, now in his 70s. “I can understand if you can go out and sell. Why not? But the situation is . . . outrageously out of hand.”
Ira Dananberg’s hearing-aid business, Acousticon of Flushing, has been on 39th and Main for 19 years. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said of the vending crush. “People literally have no choice but to walk on top of each other.”
From January through Dec. 21, illegal vendor complaints across the city totaled 2,907, despite the lockdown. The 2019 figure: 3,101.
For the first nine months of 2020, the NYPD wrote 28 tickets to unlicensed vendors. Last year’s tally was 173.
Many blame de Blasio, who ordered the NYPD to stop cracking down on illegal peddlers in June.
But enforcement will switch from the NYPD to Consumer Affairs on Jan. 15, de Blasio spokeswoman Laura Feyer told The Post.
“It’s a circus,” said Councilman Peter Koo, who introduced a bill passed two years ago that bans all vending on Main Street. “This falls squarely on the mayor.”