Guardian Angels Patrol UES, But Not Everyone Wants Them

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — The Guardian Angels have started nightly safety patrols through the Upper East Side after hearing concerns that the neighborhood was becoming less safe — but some residents say the group’s presence in the neighborhood is unwanted.

The Angels, an unarmed crime-prevention group formed in the late 1970s amid a spike in crime in the city’s subway system, were invited by a resident who said he felt unsafe and by Lou Puliafito, a neighborhood doorman running for State Assembly as a Republican, founder Curtis Sliwa told Patch in an email.

Sliwa said the group is focused on a temporary homeless shelter at the Bentley Hotel on East 62nd Street, which has housed about 300 men since the beginning of the pandemic, and which Sliwa called “a big problem.”

“For the last 2 weeks we made practice patrol runs through the area,” Sliwa said, adding that the group did its first official patrol Tuesday evening between East 86th Street and 59th Street.

Others, though, are disputing Sliwa’s account, saying the shelter, which is managed by the nonprofit Doe Fund, has been a model neighbor.

“There hasn’t been a peep — not a phone call,” said Judy Schneider, co-president of the East Sixties Neighborhood Association, who said she has checked in frequently with buildings across the street from the shelter and heard no complaints in months.

One resident was asked to leave the shelter in the spring after refusing to abide by its curfew, Schneider said, but there have been no issues since then.

“Everything’s fine,” she said.

Crime has risen modestly on the Upper East Side so far this year compared to 2019, according to statistics from the NYPD’s 19th Precinct, with reports of robberies, burglaries and car thefts all increasing but rapes, assaults and other thefts declining.

Billy Freeland, a member of Community Board 8 who is also running for City Council, said he’s encountered no problems with the Bentley shelter in conversations with civic associations and after visiting it himself. He worried that the Angels’ arrival could bring about a battle over the shelter, like those that have played out in other neighborhoods.

“Not everything has to play out like it did on the West Side at the Lucerne, when people started attacking the men being housed there,” he said.

Puliafito, who told the New York Post that he’d summoned the Angels after hearing complaints from civic associations, declined to name those associations when reached for comment by Patch.

He said the Angels’ patrols would be composed only of volunteers from the Upper East Side, and that the group would disband if there wasn’t enough interest.

“If the neighborhood doesn’t want to volunteer, doesn’t want to be involved with the program, it’ll end,” he said. “It’s just an idea.”

In the meantime, some neighbors are planning to protest the group’s arrival. Patrick Bobilin, an Upper East Side activist also running for State Assembly, is holding a Thursday evening demonstration against the Guardian Angels at 86th Street and Lexington Avenue, timed to coincide with an Angels meetup planned for the same time and location.

Freeland said he remained unsure why people alarmed by the city's homelessness crisis would choose to zero in on a program that had ruffled few feathers.

"They’re using it to scare people, when in fact it's an example of how to do this successfully," he said.