'HOARD' TIMES

Junk pile rots for months on UWS

A hoarder turned a Columbus Avenue block into his own outdoor junkyard, leaving the filthy items piled high for months despite repeated complaints from his neighbors.

Chairs, bedspreads, books and other heaping mounds of trash and debris were stacked next to a middle school near West 77th Street on the Upper West Side.

“This is disgusting,” Fazi Husain, a nanny who works nearby, told The Post. “It’s been more than a month since this garbage is here, probably since the summer — a long time. It is getting bigger and bigger.”

Residents said the trash-filled eyesore is the property of a local man, who uses the block near the MS 245 school as his own personal storage closet and flea market.

“The kids are right here in the school and that’s a concern,” said a neighborhood mom who asked not to be identified.

“This is their safe space and I don’t know what other stuff this is attracting,” she said. “It’s heartbreaking to see the state of things.”

Locals finally got relief Monday when Big Apple sanitation workers showed up and started hauling the junk away after The Post reported on the unsightly, blocklong mess.

The NYPD wasn’t far behind, slapping the man with a summons.

“This is property, it’s unattended at night,” a police lieutenant told the hoarder Monday. “You leave it unattended. It’s movable property. It’s against the law to leave it on a public sidewalk.”

The man told the cop, “I want to sell the stuff, that’s why I’m out here.”

But the lieutenant shot back, “This stuff is contaminated, sir. It’s not even sanitary to sell it to anybody.”

Police later confirmed that the man, who refused to give The Post his name, was “removed” from the area and cited for storing the junk on the sidewalk.

He told The Post he is not homeless and insisted that he hadn’t gotten any complaints about the sidewalk teeming with trash.

“There are so many bigger problems in the city, people getting murdered and people want to focus on this?” he snapped.

With the mess cleared out, the hoarder has one remaining issue.

“He has a mess in the apartment,” said Elias Wester, the superintendent of the West 82nd Street building where the man lives.

“One day, one of the social workers came and evaluated him and she said he was OK just because he answered the questions,” Wester said. “But when you see a person living like this, that’s not normal.”