The Drug Dealers of Washington Square

[Kris]

March 7, 2004

THE SOAPBOX

Face-Off in Washington Square

By NEAL HIRSCHFELD


The network of drug dealers in the park is so tightly controlled, some nighttime workers have been overheard complaining about having to work "the late shift.''

IN May 1895, at the dedication of the white marble arch that had been built to grace the entrance to Washington Square, the Rt. Rev. Henry C. Potter, Episcopal bishop of New York, stood resplendent in black robes with velvet mortarboard and purple tassel and implored his audience to honor the memory of the square's noble namesake by emulating "his freedom from sordid aims and motives.''

More than a century later and despite $3 million in recent renovations to the arch, it is clear that the bishop's prayer has fallen upon deaf ears. The evidence can be found a few feet away from the twin 10-foot statues of George Washington that rest upon the arch itself.

Whispering, winking, nodding, hissing, whistling, shouting, the drug dealers of Washington Square do business with seeming impunity. Although the city has tried repeatedly to chase them away, they return and thrive. Had you wandered into the park one frigid week earlier this year, you might have witnessed:

The usual group of a dozen dealers loitering by the entrance to the dog run.

Two dealers chasing a potential mark while hollering, "Yo, how many you need, my man!" and concluding the transaction in plain sight of everyone walking by.

Two other dealers avidly discussing their most recent arrests and strategizing on how to conceal future parole violations.

Three Police Department vehicles in a circle at the center of the park, where a half-dozen officers debated whether to issue summonses to two neighborhood residents who had let their dogs run unleashed on the park grass late at night; meanwhile, the drug peddlers trolled for business around the perimeter.

That Washington Square is populated by drug dealers is hardly news. The park has been plagued by users, abusers and purveyors of one recreational substance or another for decades. In the early 1900's, the onetime potter's field and dueling site that was later converted into a grassy enclave for the city's well-to-do became a popular snoozing spot for seedy drunks of both sexes. In 1964, The New York Times reported that park habitués were "being driven from their favorite benches in Washington Square Park by alcoholic derelicts, narcotics addicts and sexual perverts.''

The novelist Cynthia Ozick, who attended New York University in the 40's, later wrote of "this hell-tossed crew, these Mad Margarets and Cokey Joes, these tremblers, droolers, blasphemers, these public urinators with vomitous breath and rusted teeth-stumps, dead eyed and self-abandoned, dragging their makeshift junky ward shows, their buttonless layers of raggedy rat fur.''

Determined to rid the park of drug trafficking, the Giuliani administration beefed up its undercover police presence and, beginning in 1997, installed video cameras in and around the park that can be monitored by officers in a mobile command post. According to the police, drug arrests began to drop, prompting officials to declare a concomitant decline in drug dealing.

Drug arrests may well have decreased. But the dealers remain. They continue to flock to the park, most prominently congealing into a surly clot on the western side of the central fountain and looking not a little menacing under their sweatshirt hoods and ski caps. They force mothers with toddlers, children on skateboards, dog walkers and strollers to give them a wide berth, lest a disapproving glance or an inadvertent bump set off an argument. Or worse. The only time the dealers disappear altogether is the week in May when New York University cordons off much of the space and installs bleachers and security guards so it can hold its commencement ceremonies there.

According to Deputy Inspector Kevin Fitzgerald, commander of the Sixth Precinct, the square is safer than it used to be. "I have my street narcotics enforcement team in there all the time," he said. "We've upgraded our video surveillance cameras. We're making more arrests this year than last year."

Over the years, some of these dealers have become fixtures. There's the gargantuan, gray-bearded oldster who sits Buddha-like just to the right of the arch. And the lanky youngster with the googly eyeballs and haunted stare who seems to take all refusals to buy his weed as a personal insult. And the guy who stands by the arch late at night with a plastic "I Love New York'' bag dangling from one hand, as if to suggest that he is nothing more sinister than a bargain hunter on his way home from shopping.

The dealers appear to be part of a coordinated enterprise. They know one another by name. They seem to make use of an elaborate shell game in which the guy who makes a deal with a customer is rarely the same one who actually hands him the drugs. They warn each other whenever the police appear, barking back and forth like a colony of sea lions to make certain that all of their ilk have time to scurry out of sight.

Clearly, they are worker bees toiling in a single, tightly controlled hive, so much so that some nighttime workers have been overheard complaining about having to work "the late shift,'' particularly on frigid winter evenings.

MY own encounters with the dealers stem from the fact that I live across Washington Square North from the park. In warm weather, they camp out on our corner, sitting on the concrete wall around our building and tossing their chicken bones and beer cans through the wrought iron fences.

My efforts to chase them away have been futile. One dealer likened me to George W. Bush, who he claimed was "murdering all those people in Iraq.'' Another, whom I made the mistake of challenging while he was urinating into Fifth Avenue in broad daylight, threatened me; when I asked, "Don't you have respect for other people?'' he snapped back, "No, I don't got no respect for other people.''

For a while, I called 911 almost nightly, and radio cars responded quickly. But the moment they arrived, the dealers would disappear, bleating their usual warning cry of "Yo! Yo! Yo! Yo!'' as they drifted down the side streets. A few minutes after the radio cars left, they reappeared. "For these guys,'' one scooter cop said, scoffing, "time served is no deterrent at all. It's simply the cost of doing business.''

According to the officer, some of the dealers have been arrested 60, 70 times or more. With judges setting them loose almost as quickly as the police were arresting them, he said, the process has devolved into a pointless exercise in turnstile justice. A letter about the issue to the administrative judge for the city's criminal courts went unanswered, and although my local assemblywoman, Deborah J. Glick, informed me that discussions were under way to bolster sentencing laws, I realized that it could be years before legislation might be enacted.

What, then, should be done to keep Washington Square free of drug traffickers? Have police officers patrol it every 15 minutes? Turn it into a gated enclave, like Gramercy Park? Lease it to the Mafia?

Were the city to resort to the most extreme measures, it might look to the park's early history, as recounted by Bruce Weber of the Berry-Hill Galleries in a study of artworks depicting the park. In 1824, when the park was still a parade ground and a burial plot for paupers, criminals and victims of cholera and yellow fever, the French general and hero of the American Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette, was taken to see firsthand how the new republic was attending to matters of public safety.

What he saw must have made a vivid impression, for there, at the very center of the field, Lafayette was treated to the sight of 20 highwaymen atop a wooden gallows, hanged by their necks until dead.

Neal Hirschfeld is completing a biography of Kathy Burke, a highly decorated New York detective.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[NYatKNIGHT]

All day, any day, but especially at night they prowl the park. They say, "smoke"? "Yo, smoke"? If you say or nod 'no', they leave you alone. If you say yes, any number of things can happen, but usually it's either you make a transaction and buy crappy weed, or for the less savvy, they simply take your money and fail to give you anything in return, basically robbing you and leaving you with no recourse.

It seems utterly ridiculous that the police and justice system can't do more than they do to keep these criminals from prowling my neighborhood park.

[Kris]

March 14, 2004

LETTERS

Battling the Drug Dealers: Who's Really at Fault?

To the Editor:

Re "Face-Off in Washington Square'' (March 7), about the persistence of drug dealing in the park: Some wise person once wrote that the most important thing the city can do to improve the quality of life is simply to enforce the laws already on the books. It seems clear from Neal Hirschfeld's disturbing essay that this is not being done with respect to open, round-the-clock drug dealing in the square.

Perhaps the responsibility lies with judges who are too lenient and with a police force that is consequently too demoralized, but the fact that the park was substantially cleaned up during the aggressive crime-fighting days of the Giuliani administration suggests that the situation can be turned around again. All that's necessary is the political will.

Ted Klein
Upper West Side

To the Editor:

Neal Hirschfeld exaggerates the problem of drug dealers in Washington Square. The muggings, assaults and drug overdoses have nearly disappeared, and you can now safely navigate the park day or night. To be sure, the drugs are still there, and will never be completely eliminated. But if marijuana and some other drugs were legalized, we'd see few dealers in the park.

The police and courts cannot make anyone's quality of life perfect. If a person doesn't like living near Washington Square today, when things are so much better than in the 80's and early 90's, maybe it's time to move elsewhere.

Michael J. Gorman
Whitestone, Queens
The writer is a lawer and a retired New York Police Department lieutenant.

To the Editor:

That this activity continues virtually unchecked in a park at the heart of our neighborhood is disgraceful. The police and the courts should be leading the way in cleaning up the situation, not leaving it to concerned citizens.

Mickey Friedman
Greenwich Village

E-mail: thecity@nytimes.com

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company