At Least They Can’t Blame Robert Moses For The Subways . . .

Free association: With the dollar what it is, and foreclosures what they are, maybe it’s time to put the Irish back in Irishtown:

On Sunday, a little more than 200 people gathered in the Knights of Columbus hall on Beach 90th Street in the Rockaways to dance, have a drink and travel back in time to Irish Town, a cluster of bars and bungalows that served as a summer refuge for Irish New Yorkers until it was razed 50 years ago to make way for high-rise apartments.

To hear the recollections, one would think Irish Town was a piece of heaven in Queens that had dropped out of the sky and nestled along the boardwalk from Beach 116th Street to Rockaways Playland. (Not to be confused with the Irishtown in Woodside, Queens.)

. . .

Like many visitors to Irish Town, George Lang, 67, lived in a railroad apartment on the West Side of Manhattan — his family paid $38 a month — and worked on the waterfront. Mr. Lang, whose father was a tugboat captain, became a longshoreman.

“My relatives were sea people from County Wicklow, and in New York they gravitated to the piers, the waterfront,” he said. “All my friends met their wives down in Irish Town. Back then, all the families seemed to know each other. The mothers would tell each other, ‘If my kid needs a smack, you give it to him.’ You don’t have that today.”

Beers were a nickel, he said, and since the bars, like the Dublin House, Flynn & McLoughlin’s, Gildeas, Leitrim Castle, the Shamrock, O’Gara’s and O’Donnell’s, stocked the same-size glasses, customers could roam from one bar to another to buy discounted refills.

At another table at the Knights of Columbus on Sunday, Patrick McGrath, 80, told of how he grew up, one of 12 children, on a farm in the County Mayo town of Cong, where the movie “The Quiet Man” was filmed. He came to New York as a teenager, and he met his wife, Margaret, in Irish Town.

“If you got arrested for fighting, we had a police captain who was very religious,” Mr. McGrath explained. “He’d take you to Mass the next morning and then let you go without a ticket.”

The Rockaways, which was known as the Irish Riviera, “was a paradise for the Irish,” he said, “but the subway ruined that.”

Sister Peggy Tully and her identical twin, Mary Kelly, both 64, emphasized that Irish Town was not all about drinking. “It was good, clean fun,” she said. “I would see people on the boardwalk saying the rosary.”

Location Scout: The Rockaways.

Shushing The Shushers

And somehow it still comes off as priggish:

In at the Brooklyn Public Library: rock concerts, children playing and singing, adults talking.

Out at the Brooklyn Public Library: getting shushed by librarians.

That’s because recently-appointed Brooklyn Public Library Executive Director Dionne Mack-Harvin views libraries as community centers — places where people are expected to talk to each other, not sit in silence.

Mack-Harvin is so determined to end the shushing that librarians from all 60 branches have been attending training sessions to get the word out about her approach.

“We’ve moved away from what some consider the ‘shushing library’ model of the past, from being a sterile, educational place that’s somewhat elitist,” she said, “to being a community space where everyone walking in the door can find a place for themselves.”

But Do You Really Want To Marry A Guy Who Brings You Into Central Park At Night?

Yet I guess some guys have all the luck:

Seconds after a man popped the question to his sweetheart in Central Park, a gunman sprang from the bushes and robbed the couple but at leat they saved the ring.

Luke Jacunski, 30, had picked a romantic setting to propose to his girlfriend of six months — the gazebo off Strawberry Fields in Central Park.

So at about 8:30 p.m. Saturday, he asked his intended, Mami Nagase, to accompany him on a stroll in the park.

He got down on his knee, and the 24-year-old artist had just accepted — when they were confronted by an armed man.

It clearly wasn’t Cupid — he was carrying a gun, not a bow and arrow.

“He shouted, ‘Give me your money and get down on the ground! Give me your jewelry!'” said Jacunski, a musician.

As the couple complied — the second trip to the ground that night for Jacunski — he managed to slip the silver engagement ring off of his fiancée’s finger.

The move caught the mugger’s eye, and he demanded, “What are you doing?”

Jacunski played dumb and replied, “What are you talking about?” as he slid the band under his arm.

The engagement crasher stuck his silver gun into Jacunski’s stomach and ordered him to roll over, but Jacunski still managed to hide the ring.

After warning the couple, “Don’t look at me! Don’t look at me!” the thug grabbed other jewelry off of Nagase’s fingers, a family-heirloom Rolex watch from her wrist, and $125 from Jacunski, which he had been planning to spend on dinner.

Yet With “Ramone And Groan,” The Daily News May Trump Both The Times And The Post . . .

On the one hand you have “Hey Ho — You Owe!”. On the other we see “Hey! Ho! Let’s Sue!” Now care to guess which is the Post and which is the Times?

A Sheet Gets Hotter

With the foundation set, and the hourly rates are next:

There are no heralded restaurants or strobe-lit nightclubs nearby. The area has no tourist attractions. Finding a yellow cab would be akin to spotting a U.F.O.

Still, a hotel is in the final stage of construction in a remote stretch of Hunts Point, wedged between the Sheridan Expressway and the Bronx River. Neighbors of the four-story, butter yellow building, which will have at least 60 rooms, include a body repair shop, a boiler repair outfit and a junkyard.

But rather than hailing the hotel as an economic boon to the gritty industrial area, community leaders wish it would simply go away.

“Who in their right mind is going to come from Oklahoma and stay in a location like that?” demanded Francisco Gonzalez, the district manager of Community Board 9. “It’s a deleterious location.”

Central among local concerns, said Albert Alvarez, chief of staff to City Councilman Joel Rivera of the Bronx, is that “this hotel, opening up in an area that’s pretty much desolate, is going to be a haven of prostitution and drugs.”