The Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on Canal Street was not a pretty sight. If President Trump wants to ensure Zohran Mamdani’s election so he can “take over” the city, as he’s warned, he couldn’t come up with a spectacle more certain to drive liberal New Yorkers into Mamdani’s camp than a squad of masked ICE agents, accompanied by an armored vehicle, descending on unlicensed street vendors in broad daylight to bust a dozen or so for peddling counterfeit goods.
But unlike agitators who screamed “Fascist!” at the agents, our emotions should be nuanced. With City Hall unable or unwilling to protect legitimate Canal Street businesses and the public from the scourge of unlicensed sidewalk merchants, somebody had to do the job—or at least begin to—even if the optics were terrible and the results minuscule.
I celebrate and honor the Big Apple’s diversity and singularly colorful street life. But Canal Street’s western portion is a civic disgrace. The cheap wooden animals, “I ❤️ New York” caps, bogus Gucci and Cartier products, and the guys who sell them have Canal in a stranglehold. The abandonment to sidewalk anarchy stalled a nascent revival that was on the point of making the run-down boulevard worthy of its potentially iconic crosstown location.
Imagine how much worse it would be if misdemeanor-friendly Mamdani gave the hustlers even more free rein than they already enjoy!
Developers began buying up small Canal Street properties a few years ago with plans to tear them down and put up modern new buildings. One owner told me in 2017, “Canal is in significant flux.” But that was before “bail reform,” “Raise the Age,” and legions of leftist judges and elected officials made prosecution of most crimes—short of murder—ineffectual.
As a result, little redevelopment has come to the street’s western fringe since 2017.
**Reason No. 1:** The lawless sidewalk scene scared off potential retail tenants needed to anchor new buildings.
“I buy and sell and lease on Canal, so you can’t use my name. It was already the worst and noisiest traffic bottleneck in Manhattan. But the vendors are the worst deal-breakers,” one real-estate executive told me after the ICE raid. “I don’t like the way ICE did it, I’m the farthest thing from a Trumper, but somebody had to get a handle on this thing.”
The day after the raid, with the hustlers (at least for now) chased out, I was able to truly see and appreciate the street for the first time I could remember.
Canal Street’s cacophonous western portion has long seemed more of a rough outskirt than a handsome boulevard—the border between Soho and Tribeca deserves better. Recent incremental changes made it a somewhat softer and gentler outskirt.
The familiar engines of urban regeneration—lower rents than in neighboring districts, easy transit accessibility, and enough surviving old-school grit to qualify as “edgy”—drew small boutiques, art galleries, and even a hotel or two.
The blocks along the Holland Tunnel approach now have enough interesting shops and galleries to seem cutting-edge, much like Alphabet City did before gentrification.
A stroller west of Canal’s bustling Chinatown portion will find the “largest Banksy museum in the world,” a former bank turned into a haunted house, Nordic Knots handmade rugs, the members-only “Social Wellness Club,” and a Brooklyn Circus menswear shop.
They uneasily share the sidewalks with mysterious shopping arcades and retailers of hardware, lighting fixtures, plastics, and a thriving foam-rubber shop with a “Now hiring” sign.
But as the funky brick-and-mortar improved inch by inch, the unchecked proliferation of menacing vendors made much of the street a creepshow, especially at night.
Hustlers so dominate Broadway and Canal’s south corner that my wife and I, having alighted from the subway, took a cab to a restaurant just three blocks away to avoid a gauntlet of aggressive, marijuana-puffing vendors backed by a soundtrack of boom-box rap music.
The scene wasn’t merely ugly—it was scary.
And it’s not only my impression. NY1 reported last month that 800 local business owners signed a petition demanding more NYPD enforcement on and around Canal Street, citing open drug dealing, unreported muggings and robberies, and sidewalk defecation.
The NYPD responded that it’s conducting “targeted operations” to stem the sleaze, but before ICE stormed in, there was little if any visible improvement.
Of course, shoddy goods fill sidewalks all over Midtown. Hustlers even took over the Brooklyn Bridge’s narrow pedestrian walkways until a New York Post exposé shamed Mayor Adams’ team into getting rid of them—although they’ve begun crawling back.
https://nypost.com/2025/10/26/opinion/canal-street-ice-raids-werent-pretty-but-something-must-be-done-to-clean-up-a-promising-nyc-block/
