Those Poor, Dumb Strays

Who cares like not at all about the $1 billion it will take to build a proposed new police academy? City Island residents:

At the door of his waterfront home on City Island in the Bronx yesterday, Ken Binder said one word when he learned that the police firing range, just across Eastchester Bay, was slated to close.

“Soon?” he asked eagerly.

Well, not exactly. The range is moving to a police compound in the College Point section of Queens that will not be built for several years.

Still, Mr. Binder, a retired interior designer, was ready to begin celebrating the range’s demise.

“I would get down on my hands and knees and kiss the feet of whoever would take it away,” he said, his words punctuated by a volley of deep pops echoing from across the water.

Since 1959, the New York Police Department has used the peninsula in Pelham Bay Park known as Rodman’s Neck for all manner of ballistic and ordnance-related exercises — target practice, training maneuvers, blowing up of unwanted explosives.

And for just about as long, the residents of City Island, a sort of seafarer’s Mayberry largely isolated from the annoyances of big-city life, have cursed the daylong barrage of booms and rat-a-tats. (Except for the detonation of confiscated fireworks around the Fourth of July. “That’s kind of fun,” Mr. Binder said.)

Then again, there are some who seem to be suffering a sort of Stockholm Syndrome:

“For business, it’s bad,” said the woman at the cash register of the City Island Diner, who would not give her name. “We’ll miss them. The cops are good guys, and they come from all over the place.” As for the noise, she said: “It’s like living next to the subway. You get used to it.”

Up the street at JGL Wines and Liquors, the news seemed to disturb the very order of things.

“Holy mackerel!” said the proprietor, who would not give his name.

His friend Yolanda Cirulli, who had fixed him a lunch of penne aglio e olio, did not know what to think. First Ms. Cirulli, a member of the City Island Civic Association, declared victory, recalling her years of battling the noise. But then she thought of the cats and dogs who live on the firing range and whom she cares for.

“There are at least 25 cats there,” she said, “and those policemen, they love the cats. They treat them very well. What’s going to happen to them?”

JGL’s proprietor added: “Let me tell you another bad thing. When there’s trouble here, the cops are here, instantly. And tons of guys. Last year a guy crashed his motorcycle on the corner. In five minutes, there must have been 50 cops.”

Location Scout: City Island.