#UWS woman who grew up terrorized by homeless says she lives in fear again
“#UWS woman who grew up terrorized by homeless says she lives in fear again”
The bad old days that once endangered Eve Epstein when she was a girl have returned with a vengeance to her beloved Upper West Side neighborhood — exposing the longtime resident’s grandchild to the very same terror she faced as a 9-year-old nearly 60 years ago.
“Just as my parents had to worry for me, I’m worried for my one-and-a-half year-old granddaughter. How can she grow up here and be safe?” Epstein, 68, told The Post.
The media and crisis management consultant — whose clients have included former FBI Director Louis Freeh and former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan — fondly recalled growing up on the 300 block of West 94th Street, where her family lived in a railroad apartment and “Riverside Park was beautiful.”
As a young girl she could walk wherever she wanted and “everything was fine,” she said
But Epstein’s life changed when the city put in a homeless shelter hotel mid-block in 1961, which flooded the area with drunks, junkies and pedophiles, she said.
“There were addicts on the stoop. Fear, because they were shooting up, and they were making lewd remarks,” she recalled. “The same thing that is going on right now.”
Epstein revealed a disturbing ordeal she endured as a young girl.
She said vagrants molested her on three occasions: the first near the homeless shelter; a second time when she encountered a mentally ill miscreant in a nearby apartment building (“the neighbors screamed”); and a third assault on Broadway “in broad daylight” during a school performance. “The guy felt me up,” she said angrily.
Epstein said her immigrant parents, “who survived slavery, torture and starvation during the Holocaust,” moved the family to Queens.
“My parents scraped together any shekels they had and we moved to Kew Garden Hills in an attached home. I was relieved because it was scary walking by that hotel,” Epstein recalled. “The attacks really traumatized me.”
Epstein, who has a PhD in political communications from Columbia and worked with the White House under Bill Clinton and for Al Gore’s campaign, said it was only after former Mayor Rudy Giuliani “cleaned up the city” and his successor, Mike Bloomberg, continued to make changes that she decided it was safe to move back to the West Side.
She was joined by one of her two sons — a 39-year-old lawyer — and his family, which includes her granddaughter, whom she calls the light of her life.
For the last decade, Epstein has lived in a seventh-floor apartment on Columbus Avenue.
“My dream was to return to the Upper West Side in what’s supposed to be my golden years and be able to enjoy my passion for opera, theater, music and dance,” she said. “It’s essential to be able to walk to Lincoln Center, but it makes me more of a target for the crazies.”
Epstein, who has survived two bouts with cancer and two hip replacements, uses a cane to get around.
And she’s having flashbacks after the city opened three new homeless shelters, which has inundated the Upper West Side with some of the same kinds of people who terrorized her as a child.
“Don’t tell me it’s not happening again when I see it with my own eyes,” Epstein said. “Must I live in fear? Freedom from fear is a fundamental human right.”
Epstein, who lives with her french bulldog, Rebel, did a “double take” last month when she witnessed a “scrawny, long-haired” man about 40 years old defecating on 67th Street, between Columbus and Broadway. “I could not believe it,” she said. She said she’s also seen people on the street urinating and “screaming aggressively.”
The 5-foot-4 Epstein said she is afraid to venture out alone at night and that her “tall, husky” son is equally frightened — especially for his young daughter.
“Rather than preaching faux compassion, citizens should insist that our limousine liberal Mayor move his family into Hotel Lucerne — without his security detail,” snarked Epstein in a scathing post to the West Side Rag blog.
“History repeats itself. Does de Blasio not understand history?” she told The Post.
Epstein claimed Gov. Cuomo has the legal authority to impeach Hizzoner, whom she called a “delusional putz.”
“He just doesn’t have the balls to do it,” she said.
She urged police commissioner Dermot Shea, who lives on the Upper West Side, to “be more vocal, don’t be so afraid.”
She skewered neighborhood City Councilwoman Helen Rosenthal for not opposing the new shelters in the area and her take that “there is no reason to criminalize poverty.”
“It’s not about color and it’s not about poverty,” Epstein opined. “It’s about criminals and pedophiles and addicts. And it’s right in front of our eyes.”
She said she’s “very seriously considering” leaving New York — and moving to Israel.
“I have lived this story before so I am not jumping to conclusions when I assure you that, from my experience, it does not end well,” she said.
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