Lower Manhattan Represents Disproportionate Share of City Vendor Enforcement
Law enforcement officers issue more tickets for illegal vending in the Battery (the historic park located south of Battery Park City) than at any other park in the five boroughs. In a development first reported by The City, a nonprofit digital news platform, publicly available data shows that nearly ten percent of all summonses issued citywide for unlicensed selling of items like souvenirs and food are handed out in the Battery by officers of the Parks Enforcement Patrol (PEP) and the NYPD.
Official statistics indicate that these two agencies issued a total of more than 1,600 such citations throughout all City parks in 2023, a jump of 30 percent from 2019, the last year before the Covid pandemic skewed such measures downward. Of this tally, 155 were given out at the Battery, which attracts more than four million tourist visits each year (largely drawn by the point of embarkation for the Statue of Liberty Ferry). This makes the park a magnet for peddlers hawking merchandise of all kinds, and also a target for enforcement.
This sometimes leads to fraught encounters between officers and vendors, as was the case several weeks ago, when a PEP officer attempted to handcuff and arrest a 14-year-old girl in the park for selling fruit without a license. As part of an enforcement sweep, PEP officers confiscated the fruit that the teenage girl and a woman who appeared to be her mother were selling. When the officers attempted to dispose of the merchandise (which was determined to be unsafe for consumption), the girl and the woman tried to retrieve it. The girl was subsequently issued a juvenile report, the equivalent of a summons for a suspect under the age of 16 who is accused of perpetrating an act that would constitute an offense if committed by an adult. The older woman was issued a desk appearance ticket, which is an order for an adult to appear in the New York City Criminal Court for arraignment.
As The City noted in its analysis, summonses issued to vendors in parks can cost more than $1,000, but average out to $414 per incident. In 2023, PEP officers issued violations to vendors carrying more than $250,000 in total fines.
Nor are PEP and NYPD officers the only law enforcement who focus on the Battery. Last August, the State’s Environmental Conservation (DEC) police were summoned to the Battery by PEP officers, in response to complaints about two men with large snakes wrapped around their shoulders. Both men were in the park offering tourists the opportunity to have their photographs taken with the snakes. The DEC officers (part of that agency’s Wildlife Response Team) determined that in addition to lacking a license for offering this kind of service, these vendors were in possession of potentially dangerous snakes, which are illegal to keep without a special permit. (The snakes were confiscated and turned over to a licensed reptile refuge.)
Elsewhere in Lower Manhattan, City Hall Park is a close second behind the Battery, with 112 tickets for unlicensed vending issued in the first six months of this year, compared with fewer than 30 in all of 2023. The increased enforcement activity there may be related to the 100-plus vendors who had for years been selling souvenirs on nearby Brooklyn Bridge, until a revised City policy made it possible to evict them in January. Since then, some of the displaced sellers have set up shop in City Hall Park, directly adjacent to the span.
Separately, the Downtown Alliance, which operates the Business Improvement District for Lower Manhattan and tracks statistics related to local 311 complaints, notes that in 2023, people reported more than 2,900 alleged violations related to illegal vending in the area south of Chambers Street.