Fear and trembling on Broadway Ave, pt. 1

It was Wednesday, Aug 13, with the dusk darkening the last daylight outside the Broadway Light’s Diner when the young man came into the restaurant after having been stabbed in his neck.

“He wasn’t making noise or groaning or shouting or nothing,” recalled, Kevin K., who was at the diner that night, playing chess. “All I heard was the waitress saying like, ‘call 911, call 911’, No one was yelling, no one was freaking out. Maybe some like, ‘oh my gods!”.

Kevin’s line of sight to the front door and the cash register was obstructed by a wall, but if he leaned forward over the table, he could see everything he wanted to. Initially he did lean forward but quickly sat back down. He didn’t want the pictures to stay in his head. But he could still hear everything.

“They kept saying you have to keep pressure on it, the EMTs were on the way, just calm down. There was only one point where the kid, turns out he was 19, started to kind of freak out, before the medics got there. He was kind of like, ‘Oh my god, I need to go to the doctor,’ and all the women, like the owner and the waitress, I don’t know who else were just saying just stay calm.”

When first responders arrived shortly after, EMT’s told the young man he wasn’t going to die. They prepared him for transport and away they went.

Kingston Police later released a statement that the victim had sustained injuries to his head, neck, and face after being cut with a sharp, bladed weapon in midtown Kingston.

Kevin says he’s lived in neighborhoods before, where he feared for his safety. He grew up in Oxnard, California, and later in New York, lived in Crown Heights in the early 2000’s, when it wasn’t yet hip to do so.

“I wasn’t all that shocked that this sort of thing could happen in Midtown,” he said. “It’s pretty ghetto.”

Midtown

A three-quarter mile stretch of Broadway Avenue in Midtown Kingston where many locals have begun to fear to tread, starts approximately at the Restorative Justice Center near the traffic circle and heads downtown past the Ulster Performing Arts Center and under the CSX bridge, ending around City Hall. Day or night, a sort of emotional locus of existential dread has been growing in their imagination. In conversation it’s most often placed at the corner of Broadway and Liberty, at the small park with tables and umbrellas built out in front of Radio Kingston

Requesting his name not be spelled out, Kingstonian-born, Jimmy H. explains the perception he says is common.

“Every day, dozens of homeless, drug-addicted and mentally ill people congregate around Radio Kingston courtyard which Novo [billionaire Peter Buffet’s private philanthropic foundation] built to support the homeless community...But things are starting to get lawless and violent- there’s drug sales and prostitution, and police are increasingly having to show up.”

The daily police blotter for the city of Kingston provides a more empirical sketch of alleged criminal behavior in the neighborhood.

Officers responded to burglar alarms activated at the Broadway Bubble Laundromat, to trespassing on Liberty Street, to damaged property on Prospect Street. Gun shots were reported on Elmendorf Street and a fight broke out next to Matteo’s Pizza on Broadway. A woman was harassed outside the Sunco gas station on Broadway. A fight broke out on Broadway next to Radio Kingston park. In the blotters, prostitution was not alleged but the month was young.

Gun shots were the most alarming entry, but reading the incident report shows that no-one was injured.

However, exactly a month after the 19-year-old was stabbed and sought help and safety at the Broadway Lights Diner, an 18-year-old was stabbed in his thigh a half-block away, on Liberty between Prospect and Broadway. Described as an assault in the blotter, police believe two assailants ‘possibly known to the victim’ were responsible for the attack. At this time they remain at large and the criminal investigation is ongoing.

Police Chief

Crime and the reactionary struggle to suppress it wherever it appears in Midtown is nothing new. The situation predates even Kingston Police Chief Egidio Tinti joining the force as rank and file police officer.

When Tinti was hired as a police officer in June of 1992, it was the crack epidemic which was winding down. More recently, his officers have been dealing with the fallout from illegally obtained prescription opioids and fentanyl-fueled overdoses from intravenous injections.

“In the old days, you used to arrest them, hold them overnight in some cases and they were off the street, you know, allow them to sober up and by the time they got in front of the judge ‘I won’t do it again’. And that was it and then they went back on the street.”

Not that that fixed the problem. Only that the resources of police forces were limited: Bust. Arrest. Jail. Repeat.

Now police forces operating in Kingston, taking cues from the Sheriff’s department, have embraced the use of crisis intervention training for officers to help them recognize and deal effectively with individuals experiencing mental health crisis. Juan Figeroa’s Sheriff’s Office has a dedicated opioid response team known as ORACLE, which the Kingston police force co-ordinates with. Clinical social workers and mental health peer advocates, available for crisis intervention.

“Like the sheriff himself used to say, we can’t arrest our way out of this,” Tinti said. “It really has become a last resort to use any level of force. If we can have mobile mental health or crisis team provide the services we’ll stand by. But at the end of the day if they’re not willing to abide by the law then we have to enforce it and we’re entrusted with a level of force reasonable, necessary and justified to do what we need to do.”

Whether using and abusing chemical compounds deemed to be illegal under New York State or Federal Law or committing acts of violence upon person or animal, these behaviors plainly cross the line into the criminal. Regarding homelessness, or the condition of being unhoused, the law is more agnostic.

Most property in Kingston is privately-owned and what public spaces are left, like beaches and parks, are only nominally public. Rules which dictate in which fashion the parks can enjoyed must be followed. From dusk to dawn, the parks and beaches are out of bounds.

With nowhere to go, day after night after day, the unhoused must at least keep up the appearance that they are going somewhere. Loitering, even in a public space, is a crime.

The parklet on Broadway which Novo built, and which has since its completion in 2024 been perceived as the source of trouble for many, was always intended to be a community space and hub for all, regardless of housing status. A public bathroom facility was also built.

With limited places to loiter, much less to toilet, Novo’s parklet has acted as a magnet for, if not the most disenfranchised in the community, then certainly the most unstable.

“That a private entity is offering the park to these individuals to use is incredibly gracious,” Tinti said. “But at a certain point it shuts down after a certain hour, and they’ve got to go. So where do they go? Back in the city street. Back on the roadways, to wherever they’re sleeping.”

Putting aside for the moment, the legal jeopardy faced by the unhoused, for Kingston residents interacting with them on Broadway Ave, the most pressing issue is the often mentally, emotionally or chemically-imbalanced behaviors which many exhibit .

Take the sun-tanned, bearded fellow who often attempts to raise money at the intersection of Pine Grove and Broadway, on the corner by the YMCA. He will be singing or screaming or silently sitting in turns but unable to predict the significance of the behavior the man on the sidewalk is exhibiting, any cautious person could reasonably worry about violence without meaning or warning.

Laura Ward, a dance instructor who’s been coming to the city since the nineties mostly avoids walking Broadway by the Kingston Radio park. “I guess it depends on the time of day but if I found myself down there, I probably would walk on the other side of the street.”

“Obviously, when we talk about the unsheltered or homeless population,” said Tinti, “one of the concerns is allowing them to get the resources they need. But if you’re looking at the actual criminal activity, the homeless population aren’t really the ones committing the criminal activity. Are they committing violations of the law? Yeah. Open container, things of that nature, but when you’re talking about violent offenses, that is not the case that we’ve seen here.”

Erica Brown, community engagement organizer for Kingston Radio, made it clear that on the topic of perception of danger from the unhoused or emotionally troubled hanging out at the Radio Kingston Park, she was speaking for herself and not the organization.

“I have never felt the experience of fear in the [Kingston Radio] park,” Brown said. “I can understand how others could. There’s room for fear to be perceived differently amongst different people. My perception of fear is someone who seems to be physically threatening me- coming toward me aggressively.”

Answering questions while she walks, Brown leads a path down the sidewalk of Elmendorf Street, down the stairs to the Midtown Linear Parkway, stopping to check the level of Narcan supplies available in the emergency box and closing the panel firmly before continuing on. She waves to an assortment of characters along the way, many of whom loitering along the linear park pathway are either just careless in their fashion choices and hygiene or give the impression they were no strangers to substance abuse.

“Let’s just think about the fact that there are Native Kingstonians who are in this neighborship community,” Brown said. “Who are houseless, because not everyone is houseless who hangs out around the Radio Kingston Park or here along the linear park. That’s a misconception by the way. But some of us call them our neighbors, that’s just who they are. Some definitely have some mental challenges going on or whatever it might be.”

If there now seems to be more people on Broadway Avenue struggling with emotional, chemical and mental issues then in years past, it may be recalled that up until April of 2020 an 60-bed inpatient psychiatric and detox ward operated on Broadway Ave at the Kingston Hospital next to City Hall.

Westchester Medical Health, owner of Health Alliance Hospital vacated the ward during the pandemic, ostensibly to prepare for a potential influx of COVID-19 patients. They never arrived and the inpatient ward never reopened.

More than four years later, harried by the unrelenting haranguing of community activists and political leaders, as well as an investigation by the State Attorney General for which they paid a settlement, Health Alliance Hospital and WMC Health celebrated the opening of a slimmed-down inpatient psychiatric ward at their Health Alliance St.Mary’s campus. The only inpatient psychiatric ward in all of Ulster County- population 182, 977- Health Alliance Hospital now provides 20 beds for the mentally, emotionally and chemically disturbed.

Brown acknowledges the possibility that those unhoused and otherwise struggling members of society typically relegated to the shadows, now that they are on display on the side of the busiest thoroughfare in Kingston, have been invested with the fear and loathing generated by the dramatic incidents of crime reported over the last month.

In order to center the conversation properly, Brown offers a question she said she would ask to every person in the Kingston community if she could.

“Who do you consider to be deserving of the designation of community members?” asks Brown.

(Some version of this article was published in HV1, on November 19, 2025)