New Yorkers love to complain about lots of things, including (but not limited to) bike lanes, hipsters, rats, post offices and whether or not a Gothamist post is newsworthy. But one New Yorker profiled in the NY Times today isn't content with casually dialing 311 or writing an angry blog post when he feels something is amiss; he's made it his business to hunt down and call the cops on supposed rulebreakers, and he'll stop at nothing until justice and subway drummers are done.
The Times' Crime Scene column today profiled one Robert Gluckstadt, a 61-year-old TriBeCa resident who is particularly invested in lodging complaints about city nuisances with the NYPD. He's called 911 on bongo drummers on the subway—"I can’t stand those subway drummers," he told the Times, describing an incident in which he pulled the emergency brake cord to call attention to some drummers—he had a subway preacher arrested when the preacher allegedly told Gluckstadt he would "burn in hell, he called cops on the same homeless person on his block nightly, he filed a complaint against a coffee cart parked on the sidewalk and he was accused of assault after getting in a scuffle with a man feeding pigeons.
Not that Gluckstadt's vigilante efforts are entirely unwarranted. Last year, he reported a "lush worker", or someone who robs sleeping people on the subway, to cops after getting punched in the face during an altercation with one. Unfortunately, detectives said Gluckstadt identified the wrong man, and then he showed up at the precinct so many times to complain he was threatened with a trespassing charge. Which, in turn, led to more complaining. But nothing gets this man down: “If everybody was doing what I’m doing,” he said, hopefully out of earshot of Dorothy Rabinowitz and the guy who keeps calling 911 on Williamsburg hipsters, “the world would be a better place.”
We can't wait to see how many calls he'll make when we descend back into the dark depths of the Bad Old Days next week. Buskers, beware!
