Lady Gaga’s dad is leading the charge against unruly migrants living near his Upper West Side home and restaurant — griping they’re flooding the ritzy neighborhood with a constant stream of hookers and other bad behavior.
“If it was like this when my girls were growing up, I wouldn’t be living in New York,” said Joe Germanotta, 66, who is compiling a list of local residents’ concerns to take to lawmakers, the NYPD and homeless services in protest.
Germanotta has lived in The Pythian building on West 70th Street for 35 years — it’s where he raised his two daughters, including the “Born This Way” singer. He also opened up a restaurant in the community in 2012.
About six weeks ago, the city quietly and quickly transformed the Stratford Arms Hotel — a residence hall for the American Musical and Dramatic Academy (AMDA) down the block from Germanotta’s home — into a shelter for hundreds of migrants.
“It was a stealth operation. They were bused in in the middle of the night, like when they flew them into Westchester, they didn’t want anybody to know what was going on,” Germanotta told The Post at his West 68th Street restaurant Joanne Trattoria. “It was all pretty rapid.”
Since the arrival of the migrants, the restaurateur said the quality of life in the area has taken a hit, with impromptu block parties outside the hotel that last into the early morning, prostitution, kids getting catcalled and reckless e-bikes and motor-scooter drivers wreaking havoc on one-way streets.
“There’s now 500 migrants living in that dormitory. That’s when all the mayhem began,” said Germanotta.
Residents from Germanotta’s building — of which he is the board president — and three neighboring addresses have since formed the West 70th Street Association to lobby City Hall for more policing and better supervision of the migrants.
Germanotta claims the chaos has depreciated local property values and said it’s torn at the fabric of a neighborhood that was caught off guard.
“Hookers are coming and going. In the mornings, you see prostitutes coming out of the building,” he said.
“The worst part’s at night. The noise. It starts at about 10 o’clock, and it’ll go until 4 in the morning. Playing music and racing their motocross and motorbikes up and down the streets.”
Germanotta, 66, said girls as young as 14 are getting catcalled and residents verbally abused. Now some people won’t even walk their dogs by areas where migrants have been hanging outside
“I don’t mind having them there. They’re gonna be there for three years. That was the contract, I understand. But at least manage it. Put the proper security in place, have a police presence and a code of conduct,” the popstar’s father said.
“They’re guests in our neighborhood, and they have basically taken over.”
Sidewalks that used to be mostly clean are now filled with trash, he said. He was particularly troubled when he started seeing hypodermic needles.
Germanotta and the West 70th Street Association have met with officials from New York City Health + Hospitals Corporation [HHC].
They want to meet next with Adam’s chief adviser Ingrid Lewis-Martin, and Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine.
He said the group wants to see a written plan — with targets, dates and objectives — outlining how order is going to be restored to the affluent neighborhood.
West Side Councilwoman Gale Brewer, whom Germanotta said has “been extremely helpful,” has already arranged for 24/7 NYPD policing and two separate mass confiscations of unregistered motorized scooters.
“Most of the people in (my) building are owners. They feel that this situation has affected their property values,” Germanotta said. “Give us something back. Give us a tax rebate. They’re spending all this money, OK, give me some.”
‘Just enabling ’em’
If the neighborhood was in such a state when young Lady Gaga was growing up, Germanotta said he would have moved his family out of the Big Apple.
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“Everything flew in out of the blue,” Germanotta said.
“The dormitory students at the school, the American Music and Dance Academy, were given two weeks’ notice that they had to get out, and none of the residents in the neighborhood were given any notice about the migrant shelter,” he said.
He said there’s about 500 migrants packed into 400 rooms large enough for just a bed and refrigerator. They share common bathrooms.
“I think, for the most part, the 500 that are in there are good people,” Germanotta said. “And I think they’re locked into very small rooms and when they get out, they go out at night, and they party.”
When the association asked HHC security to address the issues, they were told that what happens outside of the building is not their responsibility.
As soon as the migrants moved in, e-bikes and scooters suddenly packed the street’s sidewalks, none of which were registered, Germanotta said.
“They were racing up and down the streets in both directions on one-way streets, with no helmets, trying to push each other off the bike.
“[HHC’s] answer was, ‘We’ll build a bike corral.’ You’re just enabling ’em,” he added.
The rowdy migrants ride the bikes during their late-night parties at the parks between Broadway, he said. One building, The Coronado, located at the corner of Broadway and West 70th Street, had to hire its own private security to address the partiers.
HHC “manages 117 facilities throughout New York City… I would have thought that they would have a better handle on what happens when the migrants arrive,” Germanotta said.
He also blamed the AMDA for the recent chaos after selling out their neighbors for a pretty penny.
“The city obviously needs space, all right, so they went to AMDA which owns two facilities — one on (West) 85th Street and one on West 70th Street — which cleaned out both dormitories. They got a fat contract with the city, and they sold out the neighborhood,” he said.
“AMDA is getting very, very rich off this, and they screwed the neighborhood.”
The restaurateur called Mayor Eric Adams’ response to the migrant crisis “a joke.”
“In my opinion, you should have just suspended “sanctuary city” status until we had enough housing and then said, ‘Yeah, OK, you can send some more,’” he said.
“It’s a joke. Why doesn’t he get one of the cruise ships? The cruise ships hold more people, and it’s a more controlled environment,” he continued. “The city is spending a tremendous amount of money that could be spent towards building affordable housing.
“The really sad part is that in the neighborhood, we still have our share of veterans and homeless — but we’re not taking care of our own. They don’t get food every day. It’s really sad. I feel for them.”
The Post has reached out to City Hall for comment on Germanotta’s clams
In the first six months of this year, 66,117 migrants crossed into the US and listed their destination as New York, according to recent data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, which uses data obtained from the Executive Office for Immigration Review.
The mayor said the city has received over 90,000 migrants in total since spring 2022. His office says 57,200 migrants are still in 194 shelters set up by the city as of this week.
