Since early spring, a small armada of trucks have populated the corner of Wyckoff Avenue as it passes by Starr Street, before employing into busy Flushing Avenue. About the size and dimension of food trucks, these were advertised with bright green marijuana leaves and comic illustrations of mushrooms. Then, suddenly this week, the trucks were gone.
“16 trucks towed. 1 arrest for active warrant. Lots of product seized,” Sheriff’s office spokeswoman Jacqueline Gold wrote in an email. “Summons issued for illegal parking, no commercial plates, unlicensed business, unlicensed vending.”
The move had taken place all over the city – the next morning, a local NBC News affiliate reported on an “organized sweep to address community complaints, most of which appear to be over parking.” At the corner of 56th Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, a truck called “Uncle Budd” was towed “for allegedly selling edibles” without a business registration, the report read.
It wasn’t the first time the city had pulled these trucks from the streets, an August story in the New York Daily News reports on “Times Square’s largest edible provider” temporarily losing a dozen of its trucks to these seizures, briefly leaving the tourist spot “weed truck-free.”
Over in Bushwick, Paul Del Gesso watched. A freelance videographer who has lived in the neighborhood for the past six years, Gesso mused that “there wasn’t much fanfare” as the trucks were carted away.
“I don’t think that anyone knocked what they were doing, I just think that parking was [an issue] on that street specifically,” said Gesso. “The three [trucks] have become staples in the area and they’ve been there for pretty much all summer. I think everybody knows about them. Nobody really complains. They were kind of known staples of the summer, in those exact spots.”
Spokeswoman Gold, from the Sheriff’s office, had declined to comment on what the office would do with the confiscated goods. The story from the NBC affiliate claimed the trucks were headed to Brooklyn Navy Yard.
In March of last year, state officials in Albany had announced the legalization of marijuana in the state. In fact, according to the city, adults 21 and older are allowed to “possess up to three ounces of cannabis and up to 24 grams of concentrated cannabis for personal use.” The latest sweep from the Sheriff’s office was, as it happens, conducted with supervision of the state’s new office of Cannabis Management.
Licenses to actually sell cannabis have yet to be issued by the city. In a press conference last month, Mayor Eric Adams averred that selling the drug on the streets is “not acceptable.”
Later the next day, Gesso observed that the trucks were back, in fact they were very same ones that had been towed away.
All images taken by Paul Del Gesso.
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