Bushwick leaders are floating ways to manage the weekend party crowds on Wyckoff Avenue—which has pushed some longtime denizens to speak out about the abundance of trash, puke and late-night noise within earshot of residential blocks.
Though the strip has been a bustling hub for decades, the new cohort of larger, social media-hyped spaces are drawing crowds from across the boroughs—from Carousel (36 Wyckoff Ave.) to Xanadu Roller Arts (262 Starr St.) to the newly opened Saint Vitus Bar (428 Troutman St.)—while massive nearby new clubs like Pacha New York (140 Stewart Ave.), SILO (90 Scott Ave.) and the Chocolate Factory (70 Scott Ave.) have ushered in “thousands” of partiers into the area every weekend as of late.
It’s “a real oversaturation of nightlife establishments in our district, which has a huge impact on our residents,” said Brooklyn Community Board 4 sanitation chairperson Ben Tocker at a Sept. 28 sanitation committee meeting.
The State Liquor Authority’s own data supports these claims of oversaturation: the number of liquor licenses issued by the SLA to venues in and around Wyckoff Avenue far outpaces the state’s own licensing rules, area Assemblymember Maritza Davila said in May.
While more than three on-premises liquor licenses within 500 feet of each other are typically limited by the state’s 500 Foot Law, the corner of Starr Street and Wyckoff Avenue, for example, has more than 55 active licenses—and five pending—within a 500-foot radius.
The result is a deluge of drunk late-night partiers, leaving a trail of trash, puke, noise and excrement behind, per fuming testimony at a community board meeting last month.
“We’ve been getting more and more reports of just unruly behavior around the Jefferson L [train] stop,” community board member Yefim Vedernikoff said at the Sept. 16 full board meeting.
Giovannies Justiniano, another board member, argued that the oversaturation concerns are nothing new—but pointed instead to complaints over a “significant” volume of trash, noise and unruly behavior, as well as public urination and defecation.
“Maybe they could increase NYPD patrols more often,” he said, though he noted an internal board “debate” regarding over-policing versus response to quality-of-life complaints.
One Troutman Street-area resident, Thomas Green, lamented the thoroughfare has even become a late-night, open-air urinal for patrons seeking to avoid bathroom lines at the likes of nearby bars—and that once the bars close, nearby streets are converted into noisy after-hours drinking spots.
“Really, the core hours are between 4 and 6 a.m., we really can’t sleep on that street anymore,” he said. “Sunday morning, the entire block smells like a urinal.”
So far this year, 24 complaints have been made about public urination within the community board district, with just one resulting in a summons issued, according to city data. That’s compared to 14 calls and zero summonses in 2023.
At the same time, noise complaints stemming from bars, restaurants or nightclubs are up 24% and complaints about dirty street conditions, including trash, are up 75% compared to 2023 figures.
One Starr Street resident told me in August he too is unable to sleep in his apartment on weekends as a result of the noise—resorting to sleeping elsewhere—while neither 311 complaints nor the quality-of-life cops stationed a block away have done much to quell the issue.
“Luckily, we don’t get a lot of violence up there,” Deputy Inspector Thomas J. Maffei from the NYPD’s 83rd precinct touted at the Sept. 16 meeting, “but we do get a lot of noise [and] congestion. When you have that many locations so close to each other that kick everybody out at four o’clock, it’s just kind of like the perfect storm.”
Maffei said he has “a lot” of officers stationed along the strip on Friday and Saturday nights—and uses “discretion” when issuing noise summonses around local vendors like food trucks playing music, instead focusing on “abusive” ruckus emanating from drivers.
The more difficult part of the job, he said, is ushering drunk patrons out of the neighborhood.
“As far as everyone leaving together, they kind of always flow and go to the same locations. So, I specifically put cops there and try to have… a bar dismissal, like my school dismissal,” he said.
“You’re probably looking at thousands of people leaving… I think if we keep the presence of PD up there, and any community-based organization that would like to meet me out there at 4 o’clock in the morning and tell people to be quiet, I’m cool with that.”
Even elected officials are raising alarms about the issue. Council member Jennifer Gutiérrez introduced a bill in City Council earlier this year to designate hotspots as “nightlife districts” in order to tap increased sanitation services for more DSNY street sweeping and litter basket collection on weekends.
“If you reside in any area close to nightlife in Bushwick, if you wake up on a Saturday or Sunday morning, it doesn’t look great,” said Gutiérrez, who called the issue—at least in part—an equity one at the Sept. 28 committee meeting.
“If you live in parts of Manhattan that’s considered a nightlife [hub] and you’ve got a BID, you don’t have this problem,” she said, referencing private sanitation crews hired by Business Improvement Districts like Myrtle Avenue in Ridgewood or the Belmont BID in The Bronx.
“There are these districts, these communities, where there’s a lot more residential on top of nightlife and those are unique challenges,” she said.
Creating a BID isn’t cheap or fast, according to the city’s website, and involves a “multi-year” process. Commercial properties pay the bulk of the special assessment that funds a BID.
Some committee members noted that extra Sunday shifts from the Department of Sanitation, if the legislation is passed, may still be difficult to staff given union regulations regarding overtime.
And even if the union workers come to pick up the weekend’s leftover trash, some party-adjacent waste might not even be handled by DSNY.
“The trash on Starr Street is bad maybe half of the time, not just weekends, and we’re cleaning up vomit from our tree pit from time to time (which I don’t think the DSNY will address),” said the Starr Street resident.
“While I appreciate that folks are trying to come up with solutions, I think papering over the symptoms rather than addressing the causes, which are typically enforceable, is unlikely [to] put much of a dent in things,” he added. “A bill calling this area a nightlife district will invite more/be used to excuse more of the behavior that is damaging to the community, rather than addressing it.”
The Starr Street resident instead told me he is pushing for a “multiagency approach that focused on enforcement of existing laws,” like DEP cracking down on clubs breaking noise ordinances, greater NYPD presence on weekends, and fines issued for public urination and loud cars playing music, all of which “will address the cause rather than respond to the symptoms,” he said.
Gutiérrez, the council member, noted the added DSNY help is just one layer of a multi-faceted problem, and should involve agencies like the Department of Environmental Protection to clear catch basins to avoid flooding and the Department of Transportation to address street damage.
Still, community board chair Robert Camacho similarly argued against providing any community services to fund the cleanup of “nightlife” waste.
“We’re gonna use our tax dollars to clean their [mess] because other people come and dump,” Camacho huffed, adding that homeowners—including himself—are getting fined by the city for trash left behind by others.
Erin McHugh, also known as the Bushwick Trash Lady, has a different approach.
At the Sept. 28 meeting, McHugh pitched her own solution: offering up her nonprofit litter club to clean up Bushwick each week by paying members—largely unhoused locals—$5 for each bag of litter they clean up as a way to circumvent scheduling issues with union labor.
“I will die on the hill,” she said, that “Brooklyn will remain dirty until we pay people the same way Manhattan pays people to clean up litter on the streets, period.” She added, “It’s a job: as somebody that’s out there cleaning up litter, it is 100% a job.”
At the same meeting, Camacho offered to shell out $500 to her personally to expand the program.
“I prefer giving it to you than to giving it to Sanitation,” he said.
“I think you’ve done this in a really creative way,” Gutiérrez told McHugh. “I don’t think this legislation is perfect and I absolutely will take you up on that. I want to keep talking about it… this issue of trash, for me, it’s an equity issue, it’s a racial issue.”
Gutiérrez noted that many public school kids’ projects are aimed at cleaning up Bushwick’s streets—including partygoing corridors like Wyckoff Avenue.
“If I go to another, like, school presentation where the kids are squarely focused on cleaning up the dirtiest block that is their school, I’m going to lose my mind, because it is absolutely unfair.”
“We don’t have to live that way.”
Nicole Rosenthal is a Brooklyn-based investigative reporter. You can reach them at nicole.rosenthal1@gmail.com, @bynrosenthal on X or @nrosenthal.03 on Signal.
Photos taken by Nicole Rosenthal.
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