Lower East Side residents are making a stink — and this time, it’s not about the raucous, drunken clubgoers who routinely invade their neighborhood.
Instead, they’re griping about the responding cops — or, specifically, their horses.
“When I get here at 6:30 in the morning, from the middle of the street all over, there’s horse droppings and flies. It smells. No one’s picked it up yet,” griped Lester Gilliam, 31, manager of the Roasting Plant coffee shop at 81 Orchard St.
“The weekends are the worst.”
The NYPD Mounted Unit had been assigned to the neighborhood in January 2011 in response to complaints about clubgoers in “Hell Square,” the area bordered by Houston, Allen and Delancey streets.
Mayor Bloomberg and city Sanitation officials promised that the smelly messes would be taken care of, neighbors said — while the police say not to worry because their horses eat only hay and their poop is biodegradable.
Jason Eisner, 41, who has worked in the area for four years, complained that the dung just festers.
“It might sit there as long as a week,” he said. “It gets all mashed up — cars run over it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a street cleaner come down the Lower East Side.”
A rep for the city’s Sanitation Department said her agency is on top of the stinking situation. “That area is monitored by supervisors. If mounted police are used for crowd control, supervisors will dispatch cleaning crews to clean any mess created by the horses.”
The NYPD didn’t respond to a request for comment.