By JOSEPH KELLARD
³You don¹t want to play games with those kids,² Arias said, noting that miscreants once tossed a flaming golf-sized ball through his photo drop box that burned his carpeting. ³Just play it safe and walk away. You don¹t want to make enemies with them.²
³Sometimes it¹s been a living hell here,² said one woman who has lived for 30 years in a row of houses on Fourth Street, abutting the alley. ³My neighbor told me the kids were playing music so loud back there last week, she thought they were in her bedroom.²
John Condon, a police officer with the 4th Precinct¹s Problem Oriented Policing Unit, said officers regularly patrol the area with marked and unmarked cars. ³It¹s one of the areas that people complain about most,² he said, noting that most problems revolve around the game room at Nathan¹s restaurant.
From there, Condon said, kids leave a trail of destruction that leads behind the shopping center to the yard at School 4, across the walkover bridge on Arrow Avenue to the back of Oceanside High School. ³This trail doesn¹t happen all the time, but we¹ve found it to be a pattern,² Condon said.
These activities are nothing new to the shopping center and Nathan¹s. On summer nights in decades past, motorcycles and hotrods would fill up entire parking lots, and everything from littering to roaring motorcycles and fistfights were concerns to residents.
³That has curtailed over the years because of the quality-of-life issues it has attracted,² Condon said. ³It¹s on the down side as far as noise or loud music, leaving trash behind and everything else.²
But Nathan¹s and the shopping center attract kids today as much as in the past. ³Like way back when, kids need a place to go,² Condon said. ³Unfortunately, the generation of today seems to be a lot more destructive than in the past. It¹s just a slightly different type of animal that¹s there right now.²
Perhaps the incident that stands out most is a murder that took place behind the alley in the early 1980s. A Nathan¹s employee was walking behind the shopping center alley at night and saw two teens trying to break into a store. He was killed when one of the burglars hit him in the head with a heavy object.
During those years, the entire back of the shopping center was defaced with graffiti, which has remained a constant there. ³One woman who lives in a house behind the shopping center complained to us that she couldn¹t sell her house, because when a guy interested in buying it looked out the back window and saw all the graffiti, he said forget it,² Condon said. ³This is obviously a problem.²
He said that police approached the shopping center¹s owner, Steve Kaufman, president of the Lawrence-based Basser-Kaufman real estate investors and developers, and brought him and his managers to the shopping center to see matters firsthand.
Kaufman, whose family has owned the shopping center since the late 1970s, said that while there have been ³issues² through the years with people who loiter at the shopping center, including kids skateboarding, drinking and scrawling graffiti, these have not been as consistent a problem, Kaufman said.
³We¹ve done whatever we needed to do and done what needed to be taken care of,² he said. ³We¹ve implemented some of the things we¹ve discussed with police. Anything that we¹ve agreed is a problem, we would absolutely be in favor of pursuing, and we have on occasion.²
Some suggestions, such as installing lighting in the dark alley behind the shopping center, are not necessarily the best solutions, Kaufman added. ³We love lighting,² he said, ³but if your home was right up against the back of the shopping center, you might not want a lot of lighting over there. So you have to be careful about that.²
³The shopping center¹s owners try to make a difference,² Condon said, ³but to a certain extent there¹s only so much they can or will do.²
The officer noted that the owners recently painted over the graffiti. ³But it¹s starting up again already,² he said, noting that in the back of the freshly painted T.J. Maxx store, graffiti was recently written that reads ³Police everywhere, justice nowhere² and ³Kill cops.²
Both the police and Kaufman have also worked with some of the shopping center¹s store owners, including Nathan¹s, to assist in their efforts to improve conditions there. Arias, for example, whose photo shop is at the north end of the center, cleared dumpsters from the entrance to the alley and had trees cut down so that police on patrol could have a better view of what¹s going on back there.
³We don¹t necessarily have the manpower on any given day to fully give our attention to these kids,² Condon said, adding that he has arrested and written court appearance tickets to kids at the shopping center. ³I¹ve had their parents come pick them up there at 1 [ in the morning].²
Comments about this story? JKellard@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 287.
