[NYPOST] Times Square is looking a lot like its bad old self, with vagrants, boozy migrants colonists, junkies, and scofflaws making the Crossroads of the World look more like the third world, infuriating those who played an important role in its cleanup.
They keep voting for the same set of dipshits. That must be the way New Yorkers wanna live.
| The City is so much more interesting and real when it’s gritty instead of livable, donchaknow. |
On three separate days over the past week, The Post saw junkies brazenly smoking crack pipes on West 43rd Street, drug pushers peddling their wares within eyeshot of cops, hobos conked out wherever they can find a spot, and scores of aimless migrants colonists loitering the day away.
"A lot of people are worried about [Times Square] collapsing. And unless they start getting it together for a rebuild, it might actually collapse," said William Bratton, the NYPD commissioner who helped then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani clean up the area in the 1990s.
"We had a lot more to work with than the current commissioner and the mayor have in 2023," Bratton added. "There was a lot more of a criminal justice system back then. The courts, district attorneys, and the police were pretty much united about doing something about crime in Times Square. So you had a collaboration that is not in place today."
By contrast, "we [now] have a number of district attorneys not wanting to deal with a lot of ... the so-called ’broken windows’," signs of social disorganization and lead to crime, he explained — referring to the far-left, soft-on-crime Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg
 ...Soros-owned and operated Manhattan DA. Putting vicious and blood-thirsty criminals in jail only makes them unhappy, and they've led such hard lives after all...
, who critics say is pushing "reforms" which favor criminals instead of victims.
"Until we get better collaboration between various elements of government, we’re not going to see it improve dramatically," Bratton warned.
The lawlessness, vice, and depravity that ruled Times Square since the 1960s came to a screeching halt in the mid-90s, when Giuliani cracked down on crime and closed down the area’s notorious sex shops and peep shows.
The redevelopment plan then accelerated in the 2000s under billionaire former Mayor Michael Nanny Mike Bloomberg
...former Republican mayor of New York. He tried to take the credit for Rudy Giuliani's actions in the wake of the 9-11 attacks. He was known as Nanny Bloomberg for his war on 32-ounce Slurpees. Nanny was a candidate for the Dem presidential nomination in 2020. He was born on Valentine's day, 1942, which makes him 81.45345 years old, which is pretty ripe. Mike has lots of money, some of which he spends on grass roots organizations pushing for common sense gun laws along the same lines as his common sense Slurpee regulations....
, who helped lure national store and restaurant chains to the new-look area and complete its "Disneyfication," as some critics whined at the time.
Since the pandemic, there’s been "a lot of change for the worse," in Times Square, said Raymond Kelly, the city’s police commissioner from 1992 to 1994 under then-Mayor David Dinkins
...the former mayor of New York. He sez he lost to Rudy Giuliani in 1993 because of racism, which is pervasive in places like Manhattan...
, and again from 2002 to 2013 under Bloomberg.
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