The great deliverista feud on East 11th Street

Stacked e-bikes, police sweeps, and an alleged East Village eyesore.

One block east of my apartment is a gathering spot for Manhattan’s deliveristas.

At any given hour, between 40 and 120 e-bikes and scooters line the curb, their Seamless and UberEats bags slung across the backs like motorcycle sponsorships. Across from this makeshift parking lot stands Madina Masjid, the East Village mosque where many of the workers come to pray. Next door, the East Side Community High School playground thumps with the high-pitched echoes of pickup basketball. Near the corner, a line of men in reflective vests spills out of an unassuming halal deli. Around lunchtime, small huddles of men convene outside, hunched over white foam clamshells filled with steaming rice and meat.

Though 11th Street’s trafficless, mosque-adjacent, halal-meat-serving trifecta is not a recent discovery for Muslim laborers (I’m told taxi drivers have long patronized this East Village consortium), it’s only in the last year, with the app-based delivery surge, that the block has been taken over.

I’m not sure how many of these deliverista sidewalk congregations exist on the island, but I’ve lived in the city for nearly a decade—traveling, like any New Yorker, mostly by foot—and have never encountered a communing of this extent. The New York Post reported on the “scourge” this summer, calling the block a “hideous dumping ground for e-bikes.”

Ignited by community complaints about quality-of-life issues (noise, congestion, food waste, and generally being an eyesore), and supercharged by the Post’s incendiary article, which caught the attention of City Hall, the NYPD and the Department of Sanitation began a coordinated effort to remove and relocate the delivery bikes (and, I’m sure, those who ride them).

EV Grieve reported on the scene during two sweeps this summer, when dozens of these bikes were cut from poles with power tools, impounded, and taken to the 9th Precinct on 5th Street. During the first operation, on July 30, delivery workers’ personal items were discarded by police and Sanitation. On August 28, when the NYPD returned, locals quickly grabbed the deliveristas’ belongings, stashing them in the community garden before the seizures began.

I’ve been fascinated by this block since moving to the neighborhood. Like so many streets in New York, within a few steps you’re transported across the globe. Walking past Avenue A toward 1st Avenue on 11th Street, you pass brunch mecca Westville, the high-intensity—or eerily empty—East Side Community High School, and then, suddenly, you’re somewhere else. Men crouched on flattened cardboard boxes angled northeast pray silently. There are always two jugs of water and a small wash basin for congregants to perform wudu, the ritual washing required before prayer. A woman sits on a folding metal chair beside a cooler of hot meals in takeaway containers. On weekends, the barbershop opens—which comprises of an office swivel chair, a pair of scissors, and a handheld electric razor.

If you live in New York, I would think (hope?) that the tremendous cultural vibe shifts from block to block are one of the reasons you choose to pay exorbitant rent prices for modest apartments. If you walked the twelve miles from Bowling Green to Inwood—or some proximate version of that mandatory tip-to-tip journey—it’s stunning and bewildering to experience the vast spectrum of cultures, communities, and architecture we’ve managed to pack into this relatively small cosmopolitan. East 11th Street now makes up part of that story: a colorful refuge where migrants, many from West Africa, can rest, socialize, and commune in the spare moments when they’re not rushing to deliver your $18 salad wrap.

It was a funny, if unsurprising, feeling this summer—reading about the apparent feud between the police, the deliveristas, the neighbors, and, as the Post reported, the real estate brokers who bemoaned the “unsightly scene” that was an “immediate turn-off for prospective renters”—and then walking down the street, which bore almost no resemblance to the tabloid reality.

In everyday life, there is no feud, no scourge, no upset. Maybe there’s an eye roll from a local as they leave their apartment one morning and see an errant piece of garbage. Maybe the guys on the curb get a bit noisy during lunch. Maybe there’s a ticket here and there.

When the Post posted the article to Instagram, the incensed commenters quickly chose sides in the feud.

But on most days, you can’t find this war on 11th Street. The men don’t stare, hiss, or intimidate. They don’t wave or chat with you, either. I can’t pretend to imagine the life of a migrant delivery worker, but my best guess is that they have better things to do than invite unwanted attention when they’re just trying to decompress, eat, and hang out with their friends.

Everyone is so quick to call the East Village “dead” and lament its sameness. Well, here’s something different. And if you live here, cheer up—chances are, you’re gonna get your takeout speedy quick.