UPPER EAST SIDE — Street vendors are "plaguing" the Upper East Side and making parts of Manhattan's most exclusive streets resemble "downtown Cairo," community leaders were told.
Furious residents complained of mess and stenches on tony streets including Fifth Avenue at a Community Board 8 vendor task force meeting.
It followed a recent proposal that street vendors be forced to use matching furniture and a standardized font on their signs.
The board's street vendor task force committee chair Michele Birnbaum, who has said vendors were "proliferating in our streets."
The committee voted to push for electronic ticketing and barcode identification systems for vendors.
Upper East Side resident David Idzchak said the proposed measures were necessary because vendors posed serious quality-of-life concerns. He offered as an example recently coming across a stand with "flaming smoke" and a "horrible smell" at East 72nd Street and Fifth Avenue that forced him to walk to the other side of the street.
"This is unbelievable. This makes no sense. If I want to do barbecue on my terrace I can't, but on the street I can," he said.
"There's areas that we avoid walking along, that we try to avoid completely, it's so very sad. Fifth Avenue, around 57th Street, who wants to walk there? It's like you walk in downtown Cairo."
Upper West Side resident Avi Weiss echoed Idzchak's concerns. He was compelled to come to the meeting from across town because he, too, felt that vendors were ruining the neighborhood.
"The scourge that has been plaguing you guys on the Upper East Side has been managing to make its way to our little oasis," he said.
Weiss added that vendors "think this is an inalienable right to drop right in the middle of the city and set up shop."
The logistics of the proposed, tech-savvy ticketing system were discussed, but some wondered how electronic ticketing would work — and whether it might be premature to suggest the plan without knowing how to carry it out.
Birnbaum, who first floated the notion, said it wasn't the committee's responsibility to come up with the technical logistics, just to propose ways to improve quality of life in the neighborhood.
"We don't know exactly how they make an electronic ticket. They know how they make an electronic ticket," she said. "They have to figure out how they correctly do it."
The Street Vendor Project, which in the past has typically pushed back against additional regulations, said it did not have a position on the committee's proposals.
Also on DNAInfo.com:
SEE ALSO: Take A Tour Of The Most Expensive Zip Code In America
Please follow The Life on Twitter and Facebook.
Join the conversation about this story »
     |