Frustrated Hell’s Kitchen residents say illegally parked tour buses, commuter jitneys and limos have turned their neighborhood into a noisy, polluted parking lot – and they claim the city’s ignoring the problem.
“It’s a nightmare,” said Judy Shotwell, who lives on 51st Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues.
“We’re the town dump for New York. The buses, limos and jitneys park illegally. They idle and they pollute. They roar past, rev their engines and blow horns, and they do it 24 hours a day. There’s no relief at all.”
Chuck Spence, president of the West 44th Street Block Association, pointed angrily at the uninterrupted line of buses parked by “No Standing” and “No Parking” signs – some idling endlessly – on Eighth Avenue awaiting the return of Broadway matinee audiences last Wednesday afternoon.
The buses all carried the distinctive logos and names of Connecticut-, Pennsylvania- and New Jersey-based companies – Classic Lines, Arrow, Adventure Trails, Academy and Safety Tours among them.
“With tourism up in Times Square, there’s been a tremendous influx of buses during the past two years,” Spence said.
“While we welcome tourism, something has to be done about the drivers who park illegally outside our homes and pollute. We’ve had two meetings with the DOT [Department of Transportation] and NYPD, and basically they’ve been fruitless.”
The residents say they’re being brutalized by a maelstrom of misdemeanors – minor annoyances that, cumulatively, are maddening.
“The limo drivers urinate in containers when they park here at night and throw the containers in the tree pits or onto the curb,” Spence said.
“This is a residential area, but it’s hard to tell,” said Barbara Feldt of the West 44th Street Better Block Association, gazing at the jitneys along 43rd and 44th streets waiting to ferry passengers from the Port Authority Bus Terminal to New Jersey.
Maxine Carter, commander of Midtown’s traffic-enforcement agents, said she has tried to crack down on the drivers.
“We did a weeklong blitz recently but on the first day only wrote one summons,” she said. “It’s a cat-and-mouse game with them. We’re in marked cars, and once they see us they take off.”
Shotwell said the city just doesn’t care about the neighborhood.
“They say to us that this is the price we have to pay for living in Midtown and we’ve got to suck it up.”
Midtown North Inspector Tom Purtell agreed with that assessment, noting, “Traffic has always been a problem in Manhattan, and it’s not going to go away.”
While much of Hell’s Kitchen is off-limits to buses and other vehicles, DOT spokesman Mark Pattison noted, ample street parking is available in non-residential areas west of 10th Avenue.
But that’s not where the buses park, said Shotwell.
“Rudy Giuliani is just interested in the quality of his life and not in ours,” she charged.
“Our quality of life in Hell’s Kitchen is destroyed.”