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Downtown business leaders want to pull the plug on LinkNYC, a Wi-Fi and advertising kiosk they say has become a hotbed of perversion, harassment and crime.
“I want them to go away,” said Barbara Blair, head of the Garment District Alliance, which is fighting the open use of heroin on sidewalks. “There does not seem to be a political will to restore it in the public sphere. We have surrendered the public realm to bad actors.
Blair said she wrote another letter to the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunication (DoITT) commissioner two weeks ago but has yet to receive a response. Blair wrote to the DoIT several years ago to have “difficult links” removed.
Blair says there are nine links between West 40th and West 36th Street at Eighth Avenue alone.
“It’s too much repetition,” she said.
Anthony Mignano, who manages 1450 Broadway, a 42-story office tower on the corner of West 41st Street, said the homeless will “create a living space with chairs, cardboard boxes and tents.”
“They’re sitting there charging their devices, on full speakers, masturbating, in some stolen chair. … You see the naked homeless in the field, the open drug users using the orange needles that the de Blasio regime started,” Mignano said. “That’s all you see everywhere. A sea of orange needles will keep people from coming to our stores.
On Thursday, Mignano pointed to a grate littered with used hypodermic needles and broken glass tubes next to a WiFi kiosk.
Mignano said he saw two assaults and has called 311 “about 75 times” since Memorial Day, complaining about homeless neighborhoods in the Garment District on Link NC spies. He knows of “five or six men” who court women, “who sleep near the intersection with a shot.”
The NYPD is doing its part, but “handcuffed” by understaffing and bail reform, Mignano said.
“A policeman told me.” [A] The man literally spits in my face and pisses me off, and I can handle him, but he’s out tonight.’
“Kiosks are a disaster. They only attract drug dealers and the homeless,” said Steve Kaufman, owner of 450 Broadway, a 46-story building on Seventh Avenue between 34th and 35th streets. “They serve no legitimate purpose.”
Mignano added: “Every business now offers its own WiFi. No need for kiosks.”
The revenue generated by the links “far outweighs the economic damage to the neighborhoods where the links are located,” Blair said, adding that city and state officials believe they “need to restore order.”
The Post reported last September that the Garment District problem, where heroin addicts shoot up in broad daylight, is the city’s newest shooting gallery.
On July 14, NYPD, Department of Sanitation and city homeless services workers cleaned up the links.
But the problem persists.
“It is a temporary solution. The kiosks are still there. They’re already starting to come back,” Mignano said the next afternoon.
The city announced the LinkNYC program in January 2016, which is designed to provide free high-speed Internet access to former phone booths in the city. Months after it started, the project’s operators were forced to add filters to the kiosks after The Post reported that homeless people were using tablet-equipped street kiosks to access pornography.
In the first two years of the program, the city collected $43.4 million in payments, narrowly beating the guaranteed minimum of $42.5 million.
On July 10, Mayor Eric Adams and LinkNYC were in the Bronx to open the first Link5G kiosk in the city.
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