The Incident, Staten Island Style

In Staten Island, where temperatures reached 104 degrees yesterday, a group of toughs took out their frustrations on the local populace:

Tempers boiled over yesterday along with the mercury — it hit 104 degrees in the borough on the third day of summer’s first heat wave — as a rowdy crowd pushed a peace officer into a public pool in Mariners Harbor and then attacked a baseball player on a field nearby.

The trouble started at about 5:30 p.m., as about 50 young people descended on the Grandview Playground mini-pool, located at Grandview Avenue and Continental Place, not far from the Mariners Harbor Houses. The youths were in street clothes and were too old for the mini-pool, said Warner Johnston, a Parks Department spokesman.

A Parks Enforcement Patrol officer confronted the rambunctious bunch, only to find herself being pushed into the pool, police said.

Apart from getting wet, the officer was uninjured, Johnston noted.

About 15 minutes later, the same group disrupted a men’s sandlot baseball game between the Tigers and Danny Boy’s Tavern that was getting under way on a field nearby.

The right fielder was doused with a pot full of water thrown by a teen-ager, who then hit the player with the empty pot, according to witnesses. The player was banged up but didn’t go to a hospital, they said.

The game was promptly canceled.

A massive water fight then ensued at the intersection of Continental Place and Brabant Avenue, with folks filling buckets, pots, pans and their hands from an illegally opened fire hydrant.

Cops quickly swarmed the area to disperse the group and firefighters were called in to shut off the hydrant.

Phew . . . Now That’s Hot!

It was so hot that we couldn’t help but read about it the following day:

On a day when the mercury climbed to 95 at Central Park and 99 at LaGuardia Airport, city dwellers dealt with blackouts in some spots, stalled subways and canceled flights.

“Where I live I can’t go to the pool because it’s so packed,” said lower East Sider Jennifer Osorio, 30, who trekked all the way to Harlem to take a dip.

There were so many swimmers at the pool at Tompkins Square Park on Avenue A that lifeguards were rotating them in and out of the water every 20 minutes.

And at Coney Island yesterday, bathers griped about all the trash strewn on the beach after a weekend that saw 1.7 million people flock to Brooklyn’s sandy cool spot.

“I picked up two hypodermic needles,” said Carol O’Donnell of Brooklyn, who took her 8-year-old granddaughter, Kara, to the famed beach.

City officials said the mess was due to five of the 23 giant beachcomber machines breaking down.

Residents and business owners staying inside under air conditioners consumed 12,869 megawatts of power, the second-highest figure in city history.

The power drain sparked a blackout at LaGuardia Airport, prompting Delta and American Airlines to cancel flights between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.

The 1, 2, 3, V and W trains were either stalled or diverted because of lost signal power between 9:16 a.m. and 10:59 a.m.

The city Emergency Medical Service saw heat-related calls spike from a normal of two a day to 42 yesterday.

In Astoria, Queens, 470 Con Edison customers were left in the dark, and 3,500 more were without juice in Westchester.

As manhole covers exploded and power lines caught fire, Michael Hardy of Astoria sat in his car with the air conditioning on. “I can’t get air conditioning inside my apartment,” he explained.

Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler In A Leather Bar

The only thing funnier would have been if this had happened at an underwear party:

A man apparently too drunk to hear the bartender announce last call passed out at a fenced-in rooftop Chelsea bar early yesterday — only to wake up hours later to find he was trapped.

“Help!” he cried from atop The Eagle Bar, a leather bar at 554 W. 28th St. “Help! I’m stuck!”

A parking attendant heard Louis Rosano, 39, of the Bronx, yelling for help but didn’t immediately react.

“I went to lunch and came back,” said Rigo Rodrigo, 29, the attendant. “He was still up there.”

Rodrigo said he called 911, and cops arrived at the bar within minutes. Members of the NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit climbed a ladder to the roof of the three-story building, cut through the fence and ushered Rosano to safety about 1:30 p.m. [*]

“You know they’re supposed to check the club at closing,” the bleary-eyed man said after the rescue. “Well, the idiots didn’t.”

Cops questioned Rosano and released him, though the incident was still under investigation late yesterday.

“It was a slow night,” he said. “I was having a good night. I probably did pass out.”

*I’m guessing — hoping, really! — that this is a typo!

Postenfreude

The Daily News is engaging in Postenfreude* again:

A Post vendor was caught yesterday tossing bundles of free promotional copies of the sad tab into Brooklyn trash cans.

“It might have been me, it might not have been me,” said vendor John Adams, 26, after a reporter watched him trash more than a hundred copies in three Fulton Mall trash cans.

The Crown Heights man said he was having difficulties giving away the rag.

He said he couldn’t leave his Jay St. spot until he’d given away all of the promotional copies, which featured an advertisement on the cover.

“It’s hard,” said Adams, who has been hawking the Post for three weeks. “People don’t want anything even for free.”

In March, at least 10,000 Posts were dumped into two Brooklyn recycling centers in a move that drew the attention ofnewspaper circulation authorities.

*Loosely defined as taking pleasure when the Post embarrasses itself. The inter-tabloid equivalent: “Newsenfreude”.

See also: Daily News vs. The Post; Tabloid Wars.

Blue Pants, Santa Claus And Deuce

At the risk of going all Ken Burns gooey, it is safe to say that stickball is more than just a game — it is democracy itself:

Five longtime stickball players from the Bronx joined the likes of New York City greats Joe Torre, Willie Randolph, Rusty Torres, Arturo Lopez and Joe Pepitone when they were inducted this week into the Stickball Hall of Fame.

Before the athletes named above starred on baseball fields in the big leagues, these ballplayers took to the asphalt in their youth for games like “Box Ball,” “Throw it up, one swing” and “pitch it in, one bounce.” With a Spaldeen in hand and a stickball bat (sometimes their mother’s broom handle), many other kids across the city and in the Bronx first learned the concept of baseball from its urbanized counterpart.

Martin “Marty” Rogers, Fr. Frank Skelly, Patrick “Patsy” Viverito, Paul “Pauly” Saryian and the late Felix “Lenny” Santiago are five Bronxites who spent a good part of their youths playing stickball. And this week they were inducted into the Stickball Hall of Fame during its seventh annual ceremony on Friday, July 7 at the Museum of the City of New York. Their names will now be added to a plaque in the museum.

. . .

Rogers and Skelly are two alumni from Immaculate Conception School on 150th Street. Skelly, class of 1960 and now a Catholic priest, played stickball in “the Alley” on Brook Avenue near 149th Street and has served as pastor at St. Cecilia’s Church in El Barrio and at Immaculate Conception. Today he is director of the San Alfonso Retreat House in New Jersey.

Skelly reminisced: “Our firescape was one flight up and offered grandstand seats for all the block activity. But ‘going down’ and being part of it all was always more fun. The teenagers were known as the Alley Boys and wore monikers like Joey Brooklyn, Blue Pants, Santa Claus and Deuce. They seemed to have a God given right to the use of the fields of play. Very little equipment was needed for any of these games of stickball, and so it was an equal playing field where skills was the criterion for success.”

In the early 1960s, Santiago was part of a team called the Young Neptunes, from Forest Avenue and 156th Street. Before his passing, he played in the New York Emperors Stickball League in the Bronx.

[Emph. added so lazy Ken Burns only has to skim the good parts.]

See also: streetplay.com’s Stickball pages . . . stickball events are held throughout the year (that just went on the to-do list).