The Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on Canal Street was not a pretty sight.
If President Trump wants to ensure Zohran Mamdani’s election so he can “take over” the city, as he’s warned, he couldn’t come up with a spectacle more certain to drive liberal New Yorkers into Mamdani’s camp than a squad of masked ICE agents, accompanied by an armored vehicle, descending on unlicensed street vendors in broad daylight to bust a whopping dozen or so for peddling counterfeit goods.
But unlike agitators who screamed “Fascist!” at the agents, our emotions should be nuanced. With City Hall unable or unwilling to protect legitimate Canal Street businesses and the public from the scourge of unlicensed sidewalk merchants, somebody had to do the job or at least begin to — even if the optics were terrible and the results minuscule.
I celebrate and honor the Big Apple’s diversity and singularly colorful street life. But Canal Street’s western portion is a civic disgrace. The cheap wooden animals, “I ❤️ New York” caps and bogus Gucci and Cartier products — and the guys who sell them — have Canal in a stranglehold. The abandonment to sidewalk anarchy stalled a nascent revival that was on the point of making the run-down boulevard worthy of its potentially iconic crosstown location.
Imagine how much worse it would be if misdemeanor-friendly Mamdani gave the hustlers even more free rein than they already enjoy!
Developers began buying up small Canal Street properties a few years ago with plans to tear them down and put up modern new buildings. One owner told me in 2017, “Canal is in significant flux.” But that was before “bail reform,” “Raise the Age” and legions of leftist judges and elected officials made prosecution of most crimes short of murder ineffectual.
As a result, little redevelopment has come to the street’s western fringe since 2017. Reason No. 1: The lawless sidewalk scene scared off potential retail tenants needed to anchor new buildings.
“I buy and sell and lease on Canal, so you can’t use my name. It was already the worst and noisiest traffic bottleneck in Manhattan. But the vendors are the worst deal-breakers,” one real-estate executive told me after the ICE raid. “I don’t like the way ICE did it, I’m the farthest thing from a Trumper, but somebody had to get a handle on this thing.”
The day after the raid, with the hustlers (at least for now) chased out, I was able to truly see — and appreciate — the street for the first time I could remember. Canal Street’s cacophonous western portion has long seemed more of a rough outskirt than a handsome boulevard the border between Soho and Tribeca deserves. Recent incremental changes made it a somewhat softer and gentler outskirt. The familiar engines of urban regeneration — lower rents than in neighboring districts, easy transit accessibility and enough surviving old-school grit to qualify as “edgy” — drew small boutiques, art galleries and even a hotel or two. --->READ MORE HERE
 |
| X/Savanah Hernandez |
Illegal immigrants selling illegal counterfeits were cleared from Canal Street — but to New York City Council Member Justin Brannan, I’m the problem.
Two days before the raid, a video I posted in the area went viral.
Brannan was furious, labeling me a “far-right poverty tourist.”
No, I’m a person who cares about the quality of life in this city.
A brief look into the nine migrants who were arrested on Tuesday will show that these weren’t simply street vendors.
They are in fact tied to crimes such as drug trafficking, robbery, forgery, possession of drugs, burglary, assaulting law enforcement, counterfeiting and domestic violence.
They crowd the sidewalks, undercut legitimate business owners and harass tourists and locals.
These aren’t people struggling with poverty, as Brannan claims.
Nor are they valiant “street vendors,” as Zohran Mamdani says.
They are con artists and they make our streets more dangerous.
NYC the epicenter
New York has been the epicenter of America’s illegal-immigration crisis.
Since 2022, roughly 220,000 illegal immigrants have made their way to New York City, costing taxpayers upward of $7 billion since the crisis began. --->READ MORE HERE
If you like what you see, please "Like" and/or Follow us on FACEBOOK here, GETTR here, and TWITTER here.
No comments:
Post a Comment