It started with a seemingly mundane act of teenage roughhousing, the police said: A boy ripped a bandanna off the neck of a girl when they crossed paths in a hallway at Nyack Senior High School. The violence, which the police called unusual for Nyack, broke out next to a community garden.
“Now people are going to be wondering about what it is that’s going to happen next,”��”�� said Queen Gulifield.
But the bandanna had the gang colors of the girl’s boyfriend, and the boy who took it belonged to a rival gang, said Detective Lt. Jim Brown of the Orangetown Police Department, which patrols this picturesque village off the western end of the Tappan Zee Bridge.
“That was all it took to set them off,”��”�� he said.
So about 4 p.m. Wednesday, 40 young men and teenagers from both gangs — one based here and the other from nearby Spring Valley — started fighting next to a community garden and only steps from a center for the elderly. They carried knives and baseball bats, a few claw hammers and at least one ax, the police said.
The police tried to disperse the unruly crowd, but the brawling only spilled into a different part of the small downtown area. Soon afterward, officers from four police departments and several teams of Rockland County sheriff’s deputies and State Police troopers converged at the scene.
Mothers ushered their children inside. Store owners locked their doors. A man lay bleeding on the ground from several stab wounds as a police helicopter hovered above. About an hour later, the fighting had ended, but there was a heavy police presence for hours afterward.
Two men were injured in the brawl and treated at a local emergency room, the authorities said. The injured were among the five men, ages 17 to 20, who were arrested on charges of disorderly conduct and menacing, the police said.
It was an afternoon unlike any that people who live and work in this gentrifying village on the Hudson could recall. “This is something that never happens here,”��”�� Danielle Watson said on Thursday from her optometry shop near the corner of South Franklin Street and Depew Avenue, where the melee erupted.
“Does it scare me?”��”�� Ms. Watson asked. “I guess what it does is make me angry. It’s such nonsensical violence, but people got hurt. Our community got hurt by this stupidity.”��”��
Although Nyack is a village of only about 7,000 residents squeezed into less than one square mile, it has several faces. There are wealthy families, most of whom live on the hills that rise from the river’s shore; poor families who live in and around the public housing development downtown; and middle-class families sprinkled in between. It is about two-thirds white and one-third black, and it has one high school where everyone commingles.
Lieutenant Brown described the village as having “a little bit of everything,”��”�� and people who live here like to say it is as diverse as it is close-knit. To them, the brawl on Wednesday was a personal affront, exposing a side of the town that none of them wished had been laid bare.
A yearlong police investigation came to a head in a raid on April 9 when officers burst before dawn into the housing project, a collection of low-slung brick buildings known as Nyack Plaza. The officers arrested 24 people and seized several kilograms of heroin and cocaine, six handguns, ammunition, bulletproof vests and $30,000 in cash.
Queen Gulifield, who was born and raised in Nyack, said she watched the aftermath of the raid and Wednesday’s fight unfold from the coin laundry she manages on South Franklin Street.
“First it was drugs and then it was fighting,”��”�� said Ms. Gulifield, 44. “Now people are going to be wondering about what it is that’s going to happen next.”��”��
Two doors down at Trendsetters, a clothing store, Jason Alcin said he was worried about what the recent events might do to his business, which he opened two months ago.
“I put all that I have in here,”��”�� said Mr. Alcin, 25, who has lived in Nyack most of his life. “But people like to label things and I just hope they won’t label Nyack like it’s some dangerous place. We have our problems. Suburban problems.”��”��
The village has changed much in recent years, with new families moving in from New York City and Westchester County. The pornography shop that used to be on Broadway is gone and so is a taxi stand “where scuzzy men used to hang outside smoking all day,”��”�� said a woman who was trying on sunglasses at Ms. Watson’s store, which opened on a strip that until five years ago was populated mostly by empty storefronts.
Still, some residents complained that there is not much for a teenager to do, other than play at the local parks or play basketball at the Y.M.C.A.
Lieutenant Brown said that detectives have been monitoring gang activity in Nyack for some time and that one of the groups involved in the fight was familiar to them. He said he did not believe they were involved with the drug dealing in Nyack Plaza.
“But what happened was definitely an unusual occurrence,”��”�� he said. “We do have fights occasionally; Nyack has a lot of bars and sometimes people get rowdy on a Friday or Saturday night. But we’re talking about dozens of people fighting in the middle of the afternoon. That’s not normal. Not for Nyack.”��”��
