The gunpoint holdups of two Main Street businesses last month has downtown business owners rattled. That much was clear from a forum on public safety convened by the Riverhead Chamber of Commerce yesterday afternoon at the Suffolk County Community College Culinary Arts Center.
Claudio Sciara, proprietor of Uncle Joe’s Pizzeria, says he won’t soon forget the sight of a masked man holding a gun to the temple of his 19-year-old waiter on May 12.
“Just thinking about it right now I get all jacked up,” Sciara said. He said he keeps replaying the scene in his head — and having horrifying thoughts about how it might have turned out differently. If the waiter had panicked. If he had panicked. If the gunman had panicked.
Barry Barth, proprietor of Barth’s Drug Store, which was robbed at gunpoint five days before the holdup at Uncle Joe’s, said the after-effects of a crime like that are many, severe and long-lasting. It was the second armed holdup at Barth’s; the first occurred in November 2012. The holdups have cost him employees and customers, Barth said. (Police made arrests in both cases. The men responsible for the 2012 holdup were in jail two years. The man charged by police in the May 8 and May 12 holdups was arrested May 16 and is facing felony robbery charges. He is being held in lieu of $250,000 cash bail.)
Having a loaded gun held to your head causes lasting damage. One of last month’s victims didn’t sleep for a week. She’s out on disability. An employee in the 2012 holdup never really recovered from the trauma of what happened. Last month’s robbery made it fresh all over again. Both victims are friends of mine. Just thinking about what they went through puts a knot in my stomach.
As a downtown business owner myself, I don’t feel totally secure when I leave my office after dark, after regular business hours when the courts and offices in our neck of the woods have closed. It’s desolate and creepy. I’m not easily frightened. I lived in a Manhattan neighborhood that was still pretty seedy back in the early ‘80s. I rode the subways in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s — sometimes alone at hours of the night that were imprudent, to say the least.
Perception is worse than reality
When I first moved to Riverhead in the mid-1980s and heard people talking about how “dangerous” downtown Riverhead was, I laughed. And after I was elected to the town board and got a daily police activity report, I was amazed by the way-off-base perception people had about downtown. There was very little crime in the downtown district. Yesterday, Supervisor Sean Walter said that’s still the case. “There’s way more crime on Route 58,” he said.
But perception is everything — and downtown business owners hollering about crime and installing ugly pull-down metal gates over their storefronts, which happened back then, certainly didn’t help public perception.
I was convinced then — and remain convinced now — that the public perception of crime downtown is mostly fueled by racist assumptions. White people who see dark-skinned people, particularly young males, and jump to the conclusion that an area is “bad.” In too many eyes — in too many hearts — young black or Latino males are criminals, just by virtue of the color of their skin. I know this will elicit howls of protest, but fellow white people, before you make nasty comments at the bottom of this page or send me nastygram emails, talk to some young black men about what it’s like to be them — what it’s like to see and feel people react with tension and fear when they walk by on the street. Talk to them before you yell at me. I believe we all need to be honest with ourselves and come to terms with that reality. It’s the first step to take before it can be changed.
All that being said, what happened last month on Main Street is very real and the trauma inflicted on the victims of those crimes is very real. It’s dangerous to paint with a broad brush — about the perpetrators of crime and also about our downtown neighborhood.
How to fix Riverhead’s image problem
The business owners at yesterday’s meeting all recognize that. And the main complaints they had about doing business downtown were complaints about the things that contribute to public perception of a troubled downtown. The large vacant and decrepit stores in the central part of Main Street. Transactions that appear to be obvious drug deals on an East Main Street corner. The methadone clinics on West Main Street where numerous people gather on sidewalks every day. The emotionally and mentally ill people wandering the streets, sometimes engaging in lewd behavior. Drunks passed out on benches or in the park. People loitering. And the occasional public urination.
Cops can’t be everywhere at once. Everyone recognizes that. In fact the business owners had almost nothing but praise for police. They want more of them, though. And better lighting on streets and parking lots. And less tolerance of loitering, public intoxication and continuing code violations.
Stepped up enforcement is costly and our cash-strapped town will have to do some serious reallocation of resources to do what needs to be done. But it must be done.
Most agree that bringing more people downtown — to live, to work, to eat or see a show — and putting more people on the sidewalks at night will improve public perception. “Like Patchogue,” everyone, including the town supervisor, says.
But along the way, the Village of Patchogue got tough on code enforcement and it played hardball with the kind of intransigent absentee landlords whose derelict properties are a blight on our downtown. Patchogue used its power of eminent domain to make revitalization happen. Property owners were paid fair market value for their properties — instead of holding the town hostage while they await their anticipated big payoff. Owners who’ve been impossible to make a deal with suddenly get very cooperative when they know the town is willing to use its power of eminent domain to end the hostage situation.
The Riverhead Town Board has not been willing to go there. Town officials have said they believe the procedure violates property rights. The law and the courts say otherwise. It may be a bitter pill to swallow, but the medicine is needed to cure what ails Main Street.
Then there are the blighted properties and blocks whose condition simply should not be tolerated but have been allowed to exist for far too long. The immediate area around the railroad station is just disgusting. There’s no other word for it. Thousands of people — lawyers, jurors, litigants, court employees — come to the courts on Court Street and Griffing Avenue every week. If they take the train, they step off the platform to a filthy street where loiterers gather and panhandlers approach. If they drive and park in one of the lots on either end of Court Street they are greeted by vacant, boarded-up dilapidated buildings surrounded by overgrown weeds on litter-strewn lots. Homeless people and squatters have set up “quarters” in and around these buildings.
Is this the image we want to welcome thousands of visitors? You want to talk about perception problems? What kind of impression does this make on people?
These derelict properties have been like that for YEARS. Apparently the town is finally moving forward with an enforcement action against the out-of-town landlord that owns the former Courthouse Restaurant on the corner of Griffing and Railroad. Personally, I’d like to know what the hell has taken so long. I’d also like to know whether the town is doing anything about the eyesore at the other end of the court complex, a vacant former medical office. In addition to people going to the court complex, visitors to the Suffolk County Historical Society museum and Riverhead Free Library can’t help but see this gem. It was a pathetic, embarrassing — and insulting — backdrop for the Memorial Day parade and ceremonies at the World War I Memorial last week.
Yes, it’s true the town can’t prevent methadone clinics, halfway houses or shelters on Main Street, as the supervisor said yesterday, though it must suffer the consequences of hosting those facilities downtown.
But the town can and should take action where it has control: enforce its own codes relating to unsafe structures, dangerous conditions, loitering, littering, illegal rentals and overcrowded homes. And if the codes aren’t tough enough, change them.
We all agree that we want to bring more people to downtown Riverhead and to do that, we need to change perception of the place. Changing that perception requires more than adding cops and Guardian Angels and surveillance cameras to deter crime. It requires action by the town board — and the allocation of resources — to send a loud, clear, consistent message to property owners that conditions which detract from the quality of life in and image of our town will no longer be tolerated.
Has anybody in town hall got the courage to do more than talk about it?
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