A newly-renovated park in Paterson, New Jersey, has once again been overrun by druggies, vagrants, prostitutes and trash-dumpers — but one homeless man is fighting back.
Roberto Clemente Park — a 12-acre tract perched in one of the Silk City’s roughest neighborhoods — stood out as a withered symbol of urban decay when Rolando Vazquez first arrived five years ago, he told The Post.
“It was an open drug-use situation when I came,” said Vazquez, 44, a homeless man who sleeps under a rotting gazebo with his pit bull, Luna, and his iguana, Ibeji. “People were doing drugs out in the open, and I’d say, ‘C’mon, not around here! These children, they deserve better!’”
But the addicts would wave him off.
“They’d just yell, ‘Chill out! This is Paterson! Chill out!’” he said.
The city invested in the park — which is just blocks from Eastside High School, where legendary “Lean on Me” principal Joe Clark once roamed the halls — and spent $200,000 in 2021 to install a slew of brand-new playground equipment.
But the drug peddlers, zonked-out addicts and shuffling bums quickly returned, according to The Record. And Vazquez, a lifelong Patersonian and aspiring artist, again had a fight on his hands.
In true New Jersey fashion Vazquez fears no one, locals said.
“He keeps the dealers out of this park,” Mike Johnson, a 47-year-old city man, said last week. “If he sees them, he approaches them — all by himself — and says, ‘Nah, we’re not doing this today. Not here.’
“I really respect him for that,” Johnson continued. “He’s taking his own life in his hands when he does that.”
Meanwhile, Vazquez — a deeply religious man — tirelessly rakes up needles, scoops up garbage and tries to scrub clean his little piece of a troubled city, as he’s done every day for the last five years.
“Ever since I was young, this park has been filthy!” he said. “This park has been the poster child for how dirty Paterson is. Now I’m 44, and I want to talk to people about health and being less impactful, leaving less of a carbon footprint.
“I wake up to clean up for the children every single day,” he continued. “It took me about three years. I had to use a hard rake to get the needles that were embedded, compacted into the dirt.
“But now it’s extremely rare to see a needle. If I do, it’s like, a really, really old one.”
His work has not gone unnoticed, especially by grateful residents.
“Every day, you see him clean the park,” said Abigail Medina, 52, who’s lived in Paterson for the last three decades.
“He starts every morning at 7:00 a.m.,” she continued. “He does a better job than the city.”
When asked why it’s up to him to keep the 111-year-old park clean instead of the city government, Vazquez stood by the workers.
“No, come on!” he said. “I don’t want to say anything bad about the guys who are doing the job here. The city workers, the guys who come to clean the park, they work hard. They’re great guys.”
But even with the local crews and Vazquez, it’s an uphill fight.
Locals told local media they often see addicts sleeping on the playground equipment, leaving their paraphernalia on the ground or bathing themselves in the sprinklers and splash pad that the city installed for the kids.
“I call them ‘the walking dead,’” Paterson resident Ronald Kautz, 72, told The Record as he walked his dog along nearby Market Street. “It used to be real bad. I’ve had my car windows busted out.”
Locals added that after the homeless and addicted take their daily bath, the drains back up with the greasy, gross debris — and the water sits and stagnates, a putrid bog in the center of a concrete forest.
Even Vazquez agrees there’s a problem.
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“Look at it now — and this is after they fixed it!” he said. “It’s a cesspool. You don’t want to have your kids walking in water that’s not draining properly.”
He also wishes the city would have more people come and collect the huge amounts of garbage dumped there — he can barely keep up.
“If they had just brought in bigger, easier-to-use garbage cans and had more [garbage] collecting, this park would have been a lot cleaner,” he said.
Mayor Andre Sayegh said the city does plan to address the issues, specifically through a program called “RealFix,” which gets addicts medications like Suboxone to kill their dependence on illicit opioids.
Although it’s a citywide program, Sayegh said the Bloomberg Philanthropies-funded initiative is trying to pull people out of places like Roberto Clemente.
The city has also built a metal fence around the entire park to “keep out some of the individuals who were going in.”
Sayegh said the Paterson Police Department will start doing weekend foot patrols at several spots throughout the city, including the park.
Taken together, he believes this could make the neighborhood a bit safer in the long term.
“I feel like it’s easy for people to say, ‘Oh, just push the drug users out,’” he said. “But what is your permanent plan or solution? Where are they gonna go? They end up in a park that we invested heavily in.”
He also commended Vazquez.
“Everybody can play a role,” the mayor added. “He’s doing his best … our [Department of Public Works] is in that park as well. But we have issues with people who have bad habits. And until they change, you’re going to have people who flout rules and feel like they can dump garbage anywhere they want.”
For his part, the impromptu park ranger who calls cleaning “his drug,” plans to keep up his daily rounds.
“The last five years of doing this, I’ve had great experiences, every day,” he said.
“If you try to help the world … it’s the most amazing feeling I can get.”
