On the People's Republic of the Upper West Side

How’s your Schadenfreude today? Does it need a boost? If so, here’s some news from the People’s Republic of the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Few Americans are so resolutely leftist that the residents of this neighborhood.

That being the case one understands why Comrade Bill de Blasio, currently the mayor, should have chosen the neighborhood, around West 94^th St, off Riverside Drive, to install a new homeless shelter. Of course, many of the residents of the sometime hotel, the Alexander, were displaced or seriously disturbed…  but they are certainly not the kind of people that Comrade de Blasio cares about. Apparently, the court does not much care about them either.

The story gets better. Now residents of the neighborhood, especially those who live on toney Riverside Drive have been obliged, by the influx of fine homeless people, to hire private security guards. Trust me, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of people.

The New York Post has the story:

The city’s homelessness crisis is so out of control that Upper West Side residents are shelling out $120 a month each for private security guards to patrol their neighborhood seven days a week, The Post has learned.

A dozen apartment buildings are part of the desperation effort that’s costing a total $140,000 a year, and they all surround the former Hotel Alexander that the de Blasio administration recently turned into a homeless shelter.

“It’s a classic case of adding insult to injury,” said a resident of 251 W. 95th St.

“The city dumped the problem in our lap, then refused to provide the tools to keep the problem at bay. So now we’re footing the bill ourselves, so at least we don’t have to worry about getting mugged. It’s a total outrage.”

The money pays for a single guard at a time from Cambridge Security Services to keep tabs on the four-square-block area bounded by West 95th Street, Broadway, West 93rd Street and Riverside Drive between 5 p.m. and 1 a.m., except for Fridays and Saturdays, when the hours are 6 p.m. to 2 a.m.

“My initial reaction was ‘I don’t want to do that,’ but people in this neighborhood are upset,” said veteran Broadway and TV actor Bill Tatum, who’s president of the co-op board at The Fremont, two doors from the new shelter at 306 W. 94th St.

Anyway, be thankful for the little things: New York is not San Francisco…yet.