New York City appears set to receive a “Black Lives Matter” street mural outside Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan, according to a statement from Mayor Bill de Blasio’s (D) office.
“The president is a disgrace to the values we cherish in New York City. He can’t run or deny the reality we are facing, and any time he wants to set foot in the place he claims is his hometown, he should be reminded Black Lives Matter,” Julia Arredondo, the mayor’s spokeswoman, said Wednesday, the New York Daily News reported.
The statement will be painted along Fifth Avenue between 56th and 57th streets in front of President Trump’s notable Manhattan building sometime before July 4.
The new mural is one of seven that will be added throughout the city’s five boroughs. Two more are also planned for Manhattan – along Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard in Harlem and on Centre Street in lower Manhattan, the New York Post reported.
The mayor announced earlier this month that the phrase would be painted throughout the city to bring awareness to the Black Lives Matter movement, racial injustice and police brutality highlighted by the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man who died in police custody last month.
On June 9, a BLM mural was painted on Lark St. in Albany, N.Y.
De Blasio’s plan to paint the city in support of Black Lives Matter comes amid the city’s battle with record reports of illegal fireworks and gun violence, with 53 shooting incidents from June 15 through Sunday, marking a single-week record since the mayor took office, the Post reported.
The mayor said efforts were underway to stop the distributors of illegal fireworks and called the recent shooting reports a “troubling trend” but denied the city was headed toward any crime rates akin to the 1990s.
“We’re not going back to the bad old days when there was so much violence in this city,” the mayor said.
The Hill has reached out to the office of the mayor for more details about the murals but has not immediately heard back.
*story by The Hill