City workers hauled off a local hoarder’s junk pile shortly after The Post reported that the unsightly mess had turned an Upper West Side street into a junkyard for months.
Sanitation workers showed up at 77th Street and Columbus Avenue around midday Monday and tossed the curbside clutter into a garbage truck — while cops slapped the hoarder with a summons.
“This is property, it’s unattended at night,” an NYPD lieutenant told the man. “You leave it unattended. It’s movable property. It’s against the law to leave it on a public sidewalk.”
“I want to sell the stuff, that’s why I’m out here,” the hoarder told the cop.
“This stuff is all contaminated, sir,” the lieutenant replied. “It’s not even sanitary to sell it to anybody.”
“You’re violating the law by having this stuff here,” the cops said.
That’s when sanitation workers moved in and hauled away the junk, which included everything from clothes and bedspreads to chairs and books.
The NYPD confirmed that the hoarder, who refused to give The Post his name, was “removed” and issued a summons for storing the junk on the sidewalk.
But that’s not the only junk pile the man keeps, the superintendent of his West 82nd Street building said.
“He has a mess in the apartment,” Elias Wester, 55, said Monday. “One day, one of the social workers came and evaluated him and she said he was OK just because he answered the questions.”
“But when you see a person living like this, that’s not normal,” Wester said. “We had two tenants in my building who moved out because of him.”
He said he understands why his tenant would want to set up shop on the sidewalk.
“It’s like an escape because he doesn’t want to be inside the apartment,” Wester said. “You should see the apartment. It’s bad.”
Additional reporting by Craig McCarthy
Add Comment