A Street Brawl, a Stabbing Spree and a New York Block No One Can Fix

On the first sweltering Sunday of the summer, East 14th Street erupted.

An aborted drug deal turned into a brawl with a glass lamp used as a weapon. An assailant in a homemade superhero cape pulled out a knife and started slashing. Three people were stabbed, one fatally.

To the Trader Joe’s shoppers who dropped their groceries and fled in horror, the violence that unfolded along a busy commercial strip in the East Village on June 23 was as surreal and random as it was terrifying.

But East 14th Street also embodies New York City’s struggles with a web of interconnected ills that have defied attempts to rein them in and have flared since the pandemic in parts of Manhattan: homelessness and mental illness, addiction and rampant shoplifting and seesaw battles for control of public space.

Along the stretch by First Avenue, even as the surrounding neighborhood grows shinier and blander and crime declines overall, there is a consensus that the forces of chaos have lately gained the upper hand.

It has been “like a game of Whac-a-Mole,” said City Councilman Keith Powers, whose district borders the stabbing site. “We have to show people that we can govern a block that is out of control.”

An angry letter he wrote in 2021 to then-Mayor Bill de Blasio citing “homeless encampments, illegal vending, obstructed sidewalks and unsanitary conditions” could have been written yesterday.