It’s a free-for-all at a metropolis park surrounded by properties boasting million-dollar views — with locals overtly swiping vegetation and even gravel from the long-neglected inexperienced house to beautify their very own properties.
The illicit exercise at Queens’ Powell’s Cove Park — which has included owners chopping down metropolis bushes to enhance their vistas, as The Submit beforehand reported — has solely surged as heat climate creeps in, outraged residents mentioned.
In one of many extra brazen daylight thefts, an aged girl started “stealing the trail” within the park lined with gravel — proper in entrance of an area environmental group whose identical volunteers had just lately carried out $13,000 in taxpayer-funded work to refurbish.
“We had been doing an evaluation for a cleanup that we had been planning, and we heard this noise. We flip round, and it’s someone scooping up the rocks and placing them into her buying cart!” mentioned Kathryn Cervino, the shocked president of the Coastal Preservation Community.
The scofflaw outdated girl had almost stuffed up 1 / 4 of her 5-gallon bucket with the pebbles when the group caught her red-handed, Cervino mentioned.
Cervino mentioned she confronted the girl, who feigned shock that her actions had been unlawful and dumped her rocky loot again onto the bottom earlier than storming off.
The piles of quarter-inch stone that the would-be thief tried to make off with had solely lined the roughly mile-long strolling path on the School Level park since final summer season as a part of a restoration mission spearheaded by the CPN.
The group used $13,000 in taxpayer cash from a Greener NYC grant allotted from Metropolis Councilmember Vickie Paladino’s workplace for the mission — which marked the primary time the trail had been refreshed since Powell’s Cove Park was created 20 years in the past.
Sadly, the theft shouldn’t be a standalone incident on the inexperienced house — the place some locals are already infamous for chopping down dozens of city-owned bushes to enhance their million-dollar waterfront views.
“I’ve seen individuals throw nets over bushes and take the entire berries,” Cervino mentioned. “I’ve seen individuals digging up vegetation, like actually going with a kind of particular person buying carts and a trowel and luggage to place the stolen vegetation in.
“I’ve seen loads. Many individuals on the town have seen loads, too.”
Different neighbors of the park raised related considerations on social media, with some claiming to have witnessed thieves hauling their plunder again to their properties.
The park can also be a haven for vandals and litterers, with graffiti protecting benches and ornamental rocks that line the peaceable sliver of bay.
The secluded nature of the neighborhood and the park — which doesn’t see typical patrols by metropolis Parks Division officers — gives the delinquents the proper cowl to proceed their antics.
A Parks Division rep informed The Submit the company has not acquired stories of such illicit exercise.
“If New Yorkers witness any criminal activity in our parks, we ask them to please alert Parks Enforcement Patrol or the NYPD,” the consultant mentioned.
Cervino mentioned the injury “leads some individuals to really feel like they will take what they need or do what they need, as a result of no person’s wanting.
“It’s actually disappointing. We’re spending Metropolis Council funding that we get from our group to make enhancements like this, after which individuals are simply doing what they please.”
