Add metastasizing levels of graffiti to the disorders proliferating in these final months of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s rule.
As Wednesday’s Post reported, Soho residents and merchants are up in arms over the plague of tags, fearing “the spray-painted eyesores are turning the upscale enclave into a ‘junkier,’ down-market mess.” The vandals have turned entire blocks into “art” canvases, with zero effective response from the city.
Which has opened the door to outright hate: A black-owned art gallery whose current show commemorates the 1921 Tulsa massacre has now been tagged three times in a week.
And it’s spreading to other neighborhoods, too: The West Village is also seeing rampant graffiti, on top of overflowing rubbish that the Sanitation Department can’t seem to handle.
The mayor’s response is that his $234 million City Cleanup Corps will get around to it — though not until it’s up and running sometime this summer. Since he sees the CCC as his last “transformative” achievement, he apparently doesn’t want the city workers already paid to handle this stuff to work on it now.
Mayoral candidate Eric Adams has a far better understanding of the stakes: “Ignoring defacements and other quality-of-life violations only allows lawlessness to spread, and we can’t let that happen,” he told The Post. “We can’t go back to the ’70s and ’80s when the graffiti assault was the norm.”
Add this to the out-of-control homeless, abusive squeegee men and the junkies’ takeover of Washington Square Park as signs that City Hall is now asleep at the switch, with a mayor blaming all ills on the pandemic rather than doing his job.
Jan. 1 can’t come soon enough.