Upper East Side homeowners grumble New York City community ‘filled with s–t’

Metro

By Bernadette Hogan, Jack Morphet and Bruce Golding

March 21, 2023 | 9:08pm

It’s not the criminal activity that’s driving well-off Manhattanites up the wall — it’s all the other crap.

Literally.

Upper East Side homeowners are being flooded with poop left by inconsiderate dog owners and the “s–t” is striking the fan.

“The Upper East Side is supposedly a good neighborhood — but it’s full of s–t,” retired dental professional Frank DeGaetano fumed Tuesday after evading a horrible smear of canine waste on an East 74th Street walkway.

“I’ve gotta keep looking down. You gotta watch where you’re going. It’s like a maze. You gotta step around or over it.”

DeGaetano, 81, resides on Staten Island however says he needs to compete with the dog droppings when he checks out good friends on the Upper East Side “once or twice a week.”

He likewise blamed the mess on previous Mayor Bill de Blasio.

“It’s gotten terrible. Worse and worse,” he said. “When [Rudy] Giuliani was mayor, it got cleaned up. It went downhill the day after de Blasio was elected.”

Tatiana Shames, 51, of Brooklyn, works for an area family and said the expansion of poop was “very upsetting.”

“I walk around a lot during the day and dog poop is everywhere,” she said. “You know how many times I have to clean dog poop off the stroller? Three times at least this winter. I try and watch for it but sometimes you’re — how do you say? — in the s- -t.”.

Shames included: “And one time it was on my shoe. I had to scrape it off with a stick. It was really upsetting.”

Even community dog owner Kevin Vincent, 43, said he was stressed over the scenario as his Australian shepherd, Oliver, smelled at a mound of feces dropped onto a garden bed in John Jay Park.

“It is concerning how much dog poo there is around because there’s kids around,” he said. “Dogs want soil and trees but there are lots of kids that play in and touch the soil and trees.”

Vincent included: “I pick up after my dog.”

Things have actually gotten so bad that Councilwoman Julie Menin (D-Upper East Side) on Monday revealed a “Curb Your Dog” contest for a poster that will be shown around her district.

“When I’m walking my 4-year-old daughter to school, we are literally jumping over feces that are all over the street in the East 80s,” Menin informed The Post.

“I personally, over the year have received hundreds of complaints at every community board meeting and we are hearing a lot from school parents. It’s nonstop.”

The optimum charge for not cleaning up a dog’s droppings is a $250 fine however enforcement is delegated the city Sanitation Department, which said it just uses about 270 “civilian or uniformed enforcement staff” to carry out evaluations.

The Big Apple’s dog population, on the other hand, has actually been approximated as high as 600,000 by the city’s Economic Development Corp.

During a City Council hearing previously this month, Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch honestly acknowledged, “We don’t have an effective strategy.”

“The enforcement is not as productive as it could be because oftentimes when our enforcement agents stop people for not cleaning up after their dogs, they say that they don’t have their ID,” she said. “And we don’t want to lock people up for it because I feel like that would be inappropriate. But it is a conundrum. Because it’s a big problem.”