Adams Vows to Keep Brooklyn Bridge Clear as Illegal Vendors Return to Walkway
The unlicensed purveyors of souvenirs, clothes, mangos, coffee, cocktails and more were booted from the bridge a year ago. A simple police presence did the trick. When the cops largely disappeared this past December, the vendors came back.
| 02 Jan 2025 | 11:22
Welcome to the Brooklyn Bridge, where history takes a back seat to rent and license free commerce. (
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A bridge between two boroughs, and a cart selling fruit and churros. Dec. 8, 2024. (
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John, Washington and Emily Roeblng who? (
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It was two nights before Christmas... bridge vending Dec. 23, 2024, 3:56 p.m. (
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Things are always happening at the Brooklyn Bridge. This is part of its great attraction, of course, as its architectural splendor and epic views attract tens of thousands of people, tourists and New York runners, walkers and stroller pushers alike, almost every day. Only the most inclement weather— heavy rain, howling snowstorm, a deep, deep freeze—can keep Brooklyn Bridge lovers away.
So far so good, though the issue of illegal vendors on the bridge has been a persistent nuisance—and underappreciated danger— in recent years.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The combination of a dedicated street level bicycle lane in September 2021, which opened up room on the bridge’s highly trafficked pedestrian walkway, a post-COVID laxity in basic law enforcement, and the migrant crisis had, by the summer of 2023, turned the bridge into an anarchic, overcrowded and occasionally contentious bazaar, as illegal vendors competed for space.
In January 2024, the city cracked down on the vendors and the change was immediate. A no vending bill was passed by the city council in Jan., 2024. It actually applied to all 749 bridges in the city, but Brooklyn Bridge seemed to be the main target since it had the biggest problem with illegal vendors. UWS Council member Gale Brewer introduced a bill that did not pass that would have allowed licensed street vendors on the bridge, provided they stayed at least 20 ft apart.
The bridge transcends cheap commerce, let alone torturous blare of the same Jay-Z song (“New York State of Mind”) played on infinite repeat, all day every day, by a half-dozen panoramic photo hawkers. (As if nearly everyone on the bridge doesn’t have their own camera.)
The presence of police and the disappearance of the illegal vendors was welcomed by most bridge regulars and tourists, the latter often taking officers’ pictures and asking for directions if needed. Problem solved, and NYPD’s reputation burnished.
Mayor Adams too was proud, boasting the bridge was “clear” and “the symbol of what I believe the city should look like.”
While Straus News did subsequently see two-man NYPD foot patrols traversing the bridge, the cops’ greatest effect was causing the dozen-odd vendors to pack up their wares before they were busted. Unfazed: the coffee vendor who regularly hauls a table, brewing equipment to the base of the Brooklyn-side tower.
Informed of the vending issue at his weekly press conference of December 31, 2024, Mayor Adams said he was going to personally check out the situation to make sure “chaos” had not returned.
“We have to maintain what we put in place,” Hizzoner explained. “You can’t just put an initiative in place and then walk away and think that is not going to follow.”
“So you have to break the habits of people. And so we’re going to... I’m going to look and see. Matter of fact, I’m gonna take a walk over there today and see if we are back to the state of chaos.”
“And I’m going to reach out to both the 84th [Precinct in Brooklyn] and the 1st [in lower Manhattan]. I’ll find out...We have to maintain what we put in place.”
In addition to the disappearing NYPD on the Bridge, the winter of 2024-2025 brought another curious change to the beloved span.
Police vehicles—sometimes a car, sometimes a golf-cart-like buggy— that were regularly parked at the Brooklyn side entrance have often been absent.
Their presence here, along with other security apparatus on the Manhattan side has long predated the illegal vendors. It actually had everything to do with terrorism, an issue that was given fresh concern after the horrific events on New Year’s morning in New Orleans that left at least fifteen persons dead.
Hizzoner is no stranger to the subject.
On March 1, 1994, on the Brooklyn-bound ramp to the Bridge, Lebanese-born livery car driver named Rashid Baz opened fire on a van full of fifteen Hasidic students, wounding four, including 16-year-old Ari Halberstam, who died five days later. Initially considered a case of extreme road rage, the shooting was later deemed an act of terrorism. Convicted of second-degree murder, Baz is serving 141 years in prison.
On March 1, 2024, Mayor Adams, Attorney General Letitia James, FBI officials, and Ari’s mother, Devorah Halberstam, commemorated the days’ 30th anniversary at the Bridge entrance which in 1995 was renamed the Ari Halberstam Memorial Ramp.
At around 9:43 a.m., on January 2, 2025, a single Fleet Services Division (FSD) Ford Police Interceptor Utility vehicle was parked at the Brooklyn entrance to the bridge.
At 10:00 a.m. on the Manhattan side, there were no police save an 83rd Precinct car parked next to City Hall on Park Row.
By 10:10 a.m., with about 1,000 persons on the bridge, there were no police on the Brooklyn side, save, on Tillary Street, a weaponless traffic cop in high visibility yellow doing her best to keep vehicular traffic flowing.