Father’s Day Cookout . . . On The FDR!

New Yorkers do the darndest things:

About 40 old friends stopped in at the annual Father’s Day cookout outside the Wagner Houses in East Harlem, but many thousands more people passed through. You did, too, if you were northbound on the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive during daylight hours yesterday, and if you used the exit for the Willis Avenue Bridge, you could have reached out and snatched a hot dog off a grill.

The cooks leaned against the concrete barrier separating them from speedy highway traffic a few feet away. Cars passed in a constant, droning blur. A bedraggled homeless man slept beneath a tree nearby, and another shuffled through the party collecting empty cans. A black fence blocked a section of the East River waterfront where the sidewalk had collapsed.

Only a New Yorker, and only an optimistic one at that, would look at the spot and think “cookout,” but Raymond Bryant, 34, an aspiring rapper whose stage name is Buck Smooth, pushed hot dogs around the grill and seemed amazed at his fortune.

“This is a good spot,” he said, dousing the coals — and if a breeze had just kicked up, probably a car or two — with lighter fluid. “It’s the best kept secret in Harlem.”

. . .

The legality of the celebration, and of others nearby, was unclear yesterday. Inquiries to the Parks Department Web site and calls to transportation and police officials were inconclusive, in part, perhaps, because of a deliberate vagueness in the description of the locations visited for this article, so as to not risk spoiling the parties. Suffice it to say that drinking cognac and beer in a public area violates open container laws, and the rest seems open to interpretation.