Adults Making Dirty SRO Love

After visiting Broad Channel yesterday, the Times (not even the same writer!) gets back on the A train and heads over to Beach 116th Street in Rockaway Park to check in on one of the street’s SROs, a “stubborn survivor of New York’s shifting housing picture”:

If you need a home in a hurry and do not mind salt air and salty neighbors, with $130 and your own roll of toilet paper you can move into the Baxter Hotel in Rockaway Park, a half-block from the Atlantic Ocean.

That is the weekly rent charged by the owner, John Baxter: $130, with no deposit, no security and no questions asked.

Inside the office, a sign directs new residents to “please read all the house rules carefully or ask management to read them to you.” For a $130 check, Mr. Baxter handed a recent visitor the key to Room 27 and said in his Irish brogue, “I hope you’re good at remembering faces,” adding as he walked away, “There’s no mirror in the room.”

His assistant, Sean Reeder, led the way up creaky stairs to a fourth-floor room. Smoking was permitted out the room window. Asked about the house rules, Mr. Reeder said, “Just don’t do anything to make us kick you out.”

“The bathroom’s over there,” he added, pointing to three tiny bathrooms at the end of the hall. Two had stall showers. None had sinks, mirrors or toilet paper. They did provide views of Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic.

The Baxter is one of three single-room-occupancy hotels huddled together against the world on Beach 116th Street, just down from the end of the A subway line. It sits between a closed S.R.O. called the Hotel Lawrence and the Rockaway Park Hotel, a functioning S.R.O. whose residents include young children and a man who wears outfits made from plastic garbage bags.

The description of the rooms is enough to make any Times writer squirm:

The rooms at the Baxter are smaller than some elevators. The one visited recently had a ceiling and walls painted powder blue. There was a bald light bulb in a ceiling fixture, a dresser, a mini-refrigerator, an itchy bed with mismatched sheets and a television equipped with an antenna, not cable.

Air-conditioners are banned at the Baxter because its old electrical system could not support them, but with the door open, a salty breeze sweeps through the room and makes even sweltering days tolerable.

At night, the soundtrack is an overlay of arguments, children chanting, adults making love, a ballgame, talk radio, pop, rap, sitcom laugh-tracks and low-flying jets bound for Kennedy Airport.

Did they really use “adults making love”? There isn’t some particular euphemism in the Times style guide for down-and-out people humping?

Shinola!

The Broad Channel owner of the Call-A-Head porta-potty empire (“We’re #1 at Picking Up #2”) is determined to transform the sleepy Jamaica Bay island into the next Newport, RI:

Charles W. Howard made his fortune in portable toilets, building a business on the island of Broad Channel that is one of the state’s biggest suppliers of porta-potties for construction sites, rock concerts and outdoor weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Now he is turning his entrepreneurial talents to Broad Channel itself. He wants to reshape the plebeian mile-long island in Jamaica Bay in Queens into something closer in splendor to Newport, R.I., or at least to Cape May, N.J., by building shops and other amenities that imitate the splendors of the Gilded Age yet have the fun of Disney World in Florida.

“My goal is to make Broad Channel like America’s great seashore communities,” he said recently. “And the reason I’m doing it here is because I can’t think of a better place to live.”

Mr. Howard’s aspirations and pretensions call to mind wide-eyed visionaries like the Donald:

Call-a-Head’s over $10 million-a-year business has allowed Mr. Howard, the company’s president, to become Broad Channel’s Donald J. Trump, with 20 properties that will eventually include an ornate pharmacy with two cupolas, medical offices for eight doctors and a Venetian cafe on an island that does not have a single drugstore, doctor or sit-down restaurant. He also envisions opening a year-round Christmas store and a hotel to be called Howard’s End Inn, not after the E. M. Forster novel but because “it’s at the end of town and my name is Howard.”

The toilet business has been good to him, giving him the island’s most opulent home, a $1.5 million house that he says was inspired by both Newport mansions and Disney pavilions, a 46-foot yacht moored right alongside, and a Jaguar and two Porsches that help him tool around the island with the swagger of its leading citizen.

. . .

His soon-to-be-opened pharmacy in Broad Channel will have mahogany shelving, but its cathedral ceiling will be light blue and soft pink.

“When you walk in you’ll think about being in an English library, but when you look up it will be like the Bahamas,” he said.

Mr. Howard takes great pleasure in finding catchy names. The pharmacy is called Wharton’s Apothecary because he noticed that names of many great American companies – Wal-Mart, Woolworth’s, Waldbaum’s – start with the outsize letter W. He is calling a deli he is converting into an old-fashioned grocery Hamberry’s, because it will sell meat and fruit. His yacht is named Both Ends, a playful allusion to his main business.

It’s hard not to see the symmetry of the story — man responsible for major stink seeks to beautify God’s creation. Sort of a cross between the Donald and, say, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.:

Then there are the next-door neighbors of Call-a-Head.

“At times the smell is obnoxious,” said John F. McCambridge, 86, a wounded veteran of the Battle of the Bulge who still runs an accounting and insurance office on the main street. “My wife was here for 16 months sick with cancer and I’d be there screaming.”

It’s not just neighbors who have objected. Investigators for the State Department of Environmental Conservation have accused the company of washing potties next to Jamaica Bay’s wetlands, and city inspectors have issued the business 17 summonses since 2000. Last November, Call-a-Head reached an agreement with the Queens district attorney’s office in which the company, without admitting wrongdoing, paid fines of $100,000 and restitution of $10,000 to clear charges of polluting protected wetlands and using unmetered city water.

. . .

Mr. Howard volunteered that his business might be out of place in Beverly Hills. But Broad Channel, he said, is no Beverly Hills.

“Nobody likes portable toilets until they have to run into one,” he said.

The Improbable Journey

Illustrating how deer and bears likely migrated to Manhattan, a raccoon yesterday made the trip on a bus arriving from Montclair, NJ. The raccoon went unnoticed by a bus full of students until the driver something odd walking down the aisle:

A New Jersey raccoon made an improbable journey to the big city yesterday, stowing away on a crowded charter bus unnoticed until all of the passengers had gotten off.

“Oh, man, it scared me,” said Decamp driver Winford Bellamy, 57, who spotted the masked bandit while driving drove down 11th Ave. near W. 51st St.

“I looked in my mirror, and saw him just walking up the aisle to the front of the bus,” Bellamy said.

The 2-foot female raccoon came strolling down the aisle minutes after Bellamy dropped off his 50 passengers, a group of Montclair State University students, at a firehouse on W. 51st St.

Immediately after seeing the raccoon, the shocked driver pulled up alongside a police car.

“Man, I got an animal in this bus,” he told a cop.

The officer instructed Bellamy to turn on 40th St. and get out of the bus.

By the time NYPD Emergency Service Unit officers arrived, the raccoon was clinging to the curtains above the bus’ door.

Officer Brian Glacken, 30, opened the driver-side window and hit the normally nocturnal animal with a tranquilizer dart.

The dazed raccoon was collared moments later.

The raccoon was later killed.

Give Them (Fourth And) An Inch . . .

No sooner does Queens make an overture towards the Jets than the team wants, like, all of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park! Real nice, guys:

The Jets, who refused to consider a less lucrative stadium in Queens during their ill-fated five-year quest to build a new home in Manhattan, are now proposing to build an 80,000-seat football stadium where the Fountain of Planets, a remnant of the 1964 World’s Fair, now stands in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

. . .

Many people thought that the team was looking at a ramshackle district of auto shops known as Willets Point, near Shea Stadium and Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. But Queens officials say the Jets fear that it may take until 2009 or 2010 for the city to condemn the property, relocate the 150 businesses that are currently there and clean up the environment. The team, however, wants a new stadium by the end of 2008, when its Meadowlands lease expires.

So the team has come up with the proposal for the Fountain of Planets site.

Good While It Lasted

After tapping out the public relations benefit of having his home phone number listed, Hizzoner announced yesterday that in the future, calls to his home would be routed directly to 311:

As the Daily News exclusively reported yesterday, Bloomberg has hooked up his home phone to the city’s 311 nonemergency hotline because of the large volume of calls flooding his home number.

Bloomberg said the deluge of calls began last month after media reports chronicling how he responded to a constituent call at home. His home number is listed in the white pages.

“What happened was people started from all over the world calling. We were getting 100 calls an hour,” Bloomberg said. “And no matter how much I’d like to help the people of this city, I just couldn’t keep up with answering them and you have to get some sleep.”

“So, what we’re doing is: We forwarded it to 311 and if they can help – which, generally, they can – they will do so,” Bloomberg said. “The most important thing is to make sure that anybody that needs help in this city can get it.”

If the number of calls eventually tapers off, Bloomberg said he hopes to begin picking up the line again.

I only called a couple of times, I swear!