A vacant lot in the shadow of Yankee Stadium was meant to be the home of a new five-story charter school. But the construction project was abandoned nearly five years ago and the site has since become an illegal dumping ground filled with festering garbage and rats, infuriating neighbors who are praying their stinky nightmare will one day come to an end.
The Bronx property at 700 Gerard Ave. was a tidy parking lot until 2019, when developers began building a new location for the American Dream Charter School on the site. The school never came to be, as the construction firm behind the project filed for bankruptcy months after the work commenced and the school abandoned its plans for the site.
The property has been in flux since then. Its sale to a new owner, the Vaja Group, was finalized in June after being held up for years over a legal dispute related to an alleged failure to disclose the parcel as a landmark. Neighbors hope the new owner will clean up the site — or at least put up a fence to keep people from dumping trash there.
Residents on the block said the property fell into disrepair after the plans to build the school were abandoned in late 2019. The lot has become a hot spot for illegal dumping. Sanitation department officials said they’ve been forced to send out crews to clear out trash that spills onto its sidewalk, even though the landlord is required to maintain the space.
The site is one of thousands of vacant lots across New York City and its sorry state shows how hard it is for officials to hold landlords accountable when they neglect their properties. City sanitation officials said the department cleans up roughly 3,000 vacant lots annually but noted that work was temporarily scaled back last year after Mayor Eric Adams mandated citywide budget cuts. Outside of issuing fines to landlords who refuse to keep up their properties, there isn’t much city regulators can do to prevent sites like the lot on Gerard Avenue from turning into dumping grounds.
Miguel Nieves, a super who works at a building next to the vacant lot at 700 Gerard Ave.
Liam Quigley
Residents in the area said the odor from rotting bags of garbage at the lot can often be smelled down the block. Rats saunter through overgrown shrubbery across the site, hopping across discarded construction buckets filled with gelatinized waste. The rodents also hunt for food scraps in the lot, forcing supers of nearby buildings to reinforce their defenses.
“When you go across, you have to be careful because they cross on your legs,” said Miguel Nieves, 81, a super whose building is adjacent to the vacant lot. “They come from the lot, they come all the way here. They go through the cement.”
“Everyday is the same,” he added. “After 6:30, they don’t care who’s around. They run over your feet.”
A person who answered the phone at a number associated with the Vaja Group said “we’re taking care of it [the lot],” before hanging up the phone.
After the charter school plans fell apart nearly five years ago, residents began making a flurry of requests for the city to do something about the abandoned property.
City data shows there have been 91 complaints to 311 about the lot since the start of 2020, most of them asking the sanitation department to clean up trash illegally dumped there. Records show that since 2021, the lot’s owners were fined 14 times by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, totaling $4,200.
Trash was strewn across the lot at 700 Gerard Ave., even after crews came to clean up the space.
Liam Quigley
“There’s dead animals. I never walk by here. I go across the street,” said neighbor Ashley Addison, 31. “I remember 2020, there was a fence up and it said a potential school [would come] here.”
A representative for American Dream Charter School did not return a request for comment.
Sanitation department spokesperson Vincent Gragnani said sanitation workers showed up to clean the lot on Tuesday but a private company hired by the landlord arrived at the same time to clean the space. Gragnani said it’s the property owner’s responsibility to maintain the lot, the sidewalk and 18 inches of the curb space.
“In some cases, we will clean private property, generally when it is accessible from the street and has the potential to be a hazard to the public,” said Gragnani. He added that over the last two years the sanitation department has pursued an aggressive crackdown on illegal dumping.
Sandra Lake, who’s lived on the block for 30 years, said she’s made dozens of 311 complaints about the lot. She wants the landlord to build a fence around the lot to prevent illegal dumping.
“I’m so sick of it,” she said. “You know how many years that damn thing has been going on? We call, we call, they come clean. They never fence it in.”