A horde of junkies and vagrants who were kicked out of Washington Square Park by the NYPD last year didn’t disappear — they just found a new neighborhood to terrorize.
Sara D. Roosevelt Park on the Lower East Side has turned into the Big Apple’s newest eyesore with addicts shooting up just steps from young families while spent needles litter walkways next to playgrounds and babies in strollers, The Post has learned.
Locals said many of the crowd were booted from Washington Square and simply found a new haunt.
“I don’t take them into the park,” said Christy, a 32-year-old mother of two. “I’m definitely worried about my kids’ safety. The park is supposed to be for kids, it’s supposed to be a peaceful place, right?”
Another mom of two youngsters, Jessica, 29, said she’s lived in the area her whole life and had never seen conditions in the neighborhood deteriorate to this level before.
“I’m very angry because I grew up in this area, so seeing the change is very unsettling — and not in a good way,” she said. “Also ruins the experience for the kids when they see these types of people in their play area and what they are doing.
“Children should not be exposed to that,” she added.
The invasion of the tranquil park near Pace High School is heartbreaking.
A cleanup crew at Roosevelt Park recovered 400 needles during a sweep in late November, and a recent visit by The Post found discarded vials and a group of junkies shooting up — including one woman injecting her eyelid — in broad daylight next to families enjoying the park.
The popular Hester Street Playground at the southern end of the park is now a dumping ground.
“We used to go regularly, but then it started getting really bad here, so we don’t come as much,” said Destiny, a neighborhood mom of two young children.
“We did notice a lot of shady people recently. I noticed a lot of drug dealers lately,” she said. “I grew up my whole life in Brooklyn, and I never saw stuff as bad as I see here.”
Those used to be the gripes from Greenwich Village residents, who were terrorized by aggressive vagrants and brazen open-air drug peddlers, making Washington Square Park virtually unusable.
Conditions at the onetime bohemian mecca were the subject of hundreds of neighborhood complaints in recent years — a survey last year found that of 600 residents polled by the Sixth Precinct Community Council, 487 of them — 83% — wanted more cops on the streets.
Meanwhile, 74% said the state needed stronger penalties for drug dealing, and 80% thought New York needed stricter bail laws, according to the first-of-its-kind survey, conducted in February and March.
That all changed on Halloween, when dozens of New York’s Finest swooped in and flooded the park in a massive operation designed to knock vagrants and drug dealers out of commission.
But the sweep didn’t solve the problem — it just relocated it less than a mile away, critics said.
In a statement to The Post, the city parks department said additional cleaning crews have been assigned to Roosevelt Park, which is slated for upgrades, including new turf and improvements to the playground areas, noting that “positive activities drive out the negative.”
“Our staff engage with individuals experiencing drug addiction on a daily basis in parks across the city,” the statement said. “We work with our partners to offer resources and aid while treating people with compassion and dignity and promoting improved quality of life for all New Yorkers.”
But for neighborhood parents, it’s too little too late.
“Our children deserve playgrounds that aren’t littered with fentanyl capsules,” Brian Chin, a community activist and the father of two young children.
“This is a situation created by misguided and reckless policies, implemented by politicians who live in ivory towers, and who never step foot in the parks used by ordinary people,” he said. “Instead of pushing mandatory treatment, the city is enabling and encouraging drug addiction among the most vulnerable in our society, by funding and pushing failed ‘Harm Reduction Centers’ and free syringe programs.
“This is not compassion,” Chin added. “This is torture, both for the addicts trapped in an endless cycle, and the residents who live here who are forced to endure these conditions every day.”
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