Strung-out junkies are turning the area near an East Harlem firehouse into a nightmarish playground, where they use the space between firefighters’ parked cars as private stalls for pooping and shooting up.
The addicts “break into the cars, they defecate on them, they leave trash . . . You see needles everywhere, all over the ground, all the time,” Battalion Chief Edward Burgess told The Post outside of Engine 35, Ladder 14 firehouse on Third Avenue near East 124th Street.
“These people are so far gone in their addiction that it’s hard not to feel bad for them, but you feel that rage when they’ve defecated on your car, like what happened to mine last week,” the chief griped.
Such issues occur “every day, multiple times a day,” he said.
A firefighter said that the junkies sometimes get aggressive when the smoke-eaters plead with them to move so they can get into their cars diagonally parked on Third Avenue.
“Sometimes they’ll get up and move peacefully and other times they’ll get up swinging – we never know,” said the firefighter.
“We say, ‘Hey, come on, really?’ . . . We can’t really do anything else. We just deal with it,” he continued.
A startling March 17 Instagram video captioned “Fire Station’s Parking Lot Turned Drug Den” shows three apparent addicts sitting on the curb between firefighters’ cars.
“Crack? This guy doing heroin?” the person filming can be heard saying as he strolls behind each man, two of whom appear to be handling needles.
The firehouse is only a few blocks from OnPoint NYC, a so-called safe injection site that critics say enables addicts and lures them to the neighborhood.
“We tell [OnPoint], ‘Hey, you know, [the drug users] come over here,’ but it doesn’t stop,” a firefighter lamented.
EMTs are picking up unconscious druggies off the block “all the time,” said a firefighter. “It’s out of control around here.”
Andrew Ansbro, the president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, called the situation “a disgrace.”
“The firehouse is supposed to be a place of rest and respite for the firefighters, and now they have to be on edge [and worry] that, while they’re not on runs, their cars are going to be broken into, or that, when they’re going to their cars, they’re going to be stepping on needles or human feces,” he fumed.
“Our FDNY shouldn’t have to deal with this,” echoed Xavier Santiago, the chairman of Community Board 11, which encompasses East Harlem.
“We should be able to have teams out there who can get these people into recovery,” Santiago said.
An FDNY spokesperson told The Post in a statement that the department’s leadership recently became aware of complaints from East Harlem firefighters related to the area outside of the firehouse, and “we immediately alerted our partners in law enforcement and will cooperate as they look into these concerns.”
