I Told You Not To Lean Against The Door!

Next to getting your foot run over by an 18-wheeler while waiting to cross at an intersection, this is probably everyone’s second-worst fear:

A subway train roared underground with some doors open, sources told the Daily News yesterday, describing a frightening ride for the passengers.

The Manhattan-bound A train left the Grant Ave. station in Brooklyn with some doors open late Saturday night and didn’t stop until the first few cars reached the next station, at Euclid Ave., a transit source said.

“The doors were in fact open,” another source said.

The Transit Authority has launched an investigation, said TA spokesman Paul Fleuranges.

“This incident should NOT have happened,” Fleuranges said in a statement. “If it happened as you describe it . . . then there were some very serious violations of our operating rules and procedures. We are all relieved there were no injuries to our customers or crew.”

The train was taken to a TA yard for a battery of tests, and the crew was taken off the rails, Fleuranges said. Both the motorman and conductor were given drug and alcohol tests, a standard investigatory move.

According to the transit source, the conductor told supervisors that he left his cab at the Grant Ave. station to see what was preventing a door, or doors, from closing. As he walked from car to car, the train took off, he said. After some difficulty, the conductor contacted the motorman by intercom and the train was halted.

Bosnia, Iraq And . . . St. George

It boggles the mind to think that no one remembered there was a large mass grave there:

The cars came and went yesterday at the St. George municipal parking lot, where it might have been business as usual were it not for a small group of mostly unnoticed archaeologists unearthing the remains of 19th-century immigrants in one corner of the blacktop.

After digging and patching up parts of the parking lot for months, the team has finally located the spot where an unknown number of dead, most of them thought to be Irish or German immigrants killed by disease, were believed buried in unmarked graves three and four deep in the mid-1800s, before ever getting a crack at life in a new world.

The finding of a concentrated area of undisturbed skeletons is considered crucial to establishing how much of the four-acre parking lot will need to be preserved when the city and state begin construction of a $109 million courthouse there.

The County Clerk’s office on nearby Stuyvesant Place houses most of the borough’s public records, but the parking lot burial ground may offer its own archive: A glimpse into the ill-fated lives of immigrants struck down by typhus and yellow fever and rejected by residents fearful of such devastating diseases.

The small team of archaeologists and the state declined to give details yesterday about how many bones or what kind of skeletons are being unearthed at the lot, in a corner located closest to Hyatt Street and St. Mark’s Place.

Connecticut-based Historical Perspectives is conducting the dig, and a spokeswoman for the State Dormitory Authority said the remains are being treated with the “utmost respect and dignity.”

“They are finding the edges of the burial ground. They are finding human remains,” said Claudia Hutton. “We are not trying to dig up the cemetery, we are trying to determine the edges.”

Carolyn Maloney: Queens Plaza Already “Wonderful”

There’s spin and there’s spin:

“When the Queens Plaza project is finished,” [Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney] promised, “and it should be finished by 2009, the change will be dramatic. This place will look and feel like the exciting, dynamic, wonderful place that it already is.”

And Soon We’ll Start Calling Them “Freeways”

Bad news for those who worry that New York is becoming more and more like LA everyday:

City and state transportation officials are planning to give highway drivers real-time travel information, calculated in part with E-ZPass technology and displayed on a network of roadside message boards in the five boroughs.

Motorists on major thoroughfares like the Belt Parkway and the FDR Drive will get forecasts of how long it will take to go between various points in the city based on the average times of other drivers.

Currently, such level of detail is being displayed only to drivers on the New Jersey approaches to the George Washington Bridge and at two Metropolitan Transportation Authority bridges. The plan is to have real-time travel information displayed along highways in all five boroughs within about three years, a spokeswoman for the city Transportation Department said.

It will begin with a pilot program along the Staten Island Expressway by the end of the year.

We’re desperate, get used to it.

Bring On The Gigantic Tattooed Elephants!

I can’t believe they found a way to make Coney Island classier than it already is but somehow they have:

Architectural renderings obtained by The Post show a grand vision of the famed summer amusement area’s rundown streets being transformed into a glitzy year-round playground and public attraction.

In one image, Stillwell Avenue becomes a fantasy-filled boulevard marked by larger-than-life street furniture, such as a mermaid swimming in a martini glass and a gigantic tattooed elephant.