And In One Fell Swoop Became . . . A Walking Ironic T-Shirt!

From Colonial Williamsburg to . . . Colonial Williamsburg:

It is hereby noted that a cooper — a maker of wooden buckets, tubs, butter churns, and, above all, barrels — came to town a few weeks ago from Williamsburg, Virginia, for purposes of “cross-promotion,” a distinctly modern concept that is nevertheless familiar to Williamsburg’s Colonial citizenry. To honor the upcoming quadrennial celebration of the nearby Jamestown colony, the one-and-thirty-year-old cooper was installed beneath a tent at the South Street Seaport for several days, along with some of his compatriots, to entertain people with knowledge of practices and places obsolete.

. . .

Feeling a pang of homesickness, he doffed his waistcoat and cravat, packed his barrels into a rented van, and, after some brief confusion getting out of downtown Manhattan, drove across the river to a different Williamsburg. (Same name, different namesake: Brooklyn’s Williamsburg was named for Jonathan Williams, who surveyed the area; Virginia’s was named for King William III.)

The cooper and his wife found a parking spot on Havemeyer Street and stopped at a bagel shop for lunch. The cooper looked up and pointed at a wooden water tower on a rooftop. “That’s cooperage!” he said. “I think they’re beautiful. I suppose to the average New Yorker they’re an eyesore. Kind of archaic.”

. . .

On Bedford Street, the cooper and his wife went into an apothecary. He surveyed the soap aisle; his wife bought a pack of Spree. Back on the street, they passed a branch of American Apparel and a few coffeehouses, but there was nary a wigmaker or a silversmith in sight.

. . .

The next stop was Mugs Ale House, which, lo and behold, had a decorative barrel in its back room. The cooper offered a critique. Pointing to one stave, he said, “This part here is pretty ugly. You see how the grain is really twisty?”

This Car Is Riot Proof

Like the Lone Ranger needs Tonto — or was it Silver? — a man needs a trusted automobile:

Harry Ettling, like many people who own classic cars, cherishes his ride — but in reverse.

The Inwood resident has let his 1982 Honda Civic, bought brand new, sink into such an extreme state of rot that it has become a legend in the neighborhood where the Arkansas native has lived for 20 years.

“People actually recognize me in other sections of town because of the car,” he says. “The reactions range from laughter to anger to kindred spirits giving me the thumbs up, and everything in between.”

The car continues to run perfectly well despite 170,000 miles on its odometer, and taking as much punishment as New York can dish out.

“One thing that happened immediately after I bought it is it got totaled along with three other parked cars on Fort Washington Ave.,” the 56-year-old jazz guitarist says. “The frame was bent, but I had a shop straighten it out and it was fine to drive.”

A 1992 riot in Washington Heights resulted in further damage. “I came out to find the car upside down in the middle of Dyckman St. A bunch of teenagers were about to strip it but I shouted, ‘Hey, don’t! It’s mine!’ They turned congenial, and a half a dozen Dominican good Samaritans helped me turn it right side up again; $1,500 later, I was back on the road.”

Recently, two of its tires were slashed along with the tires of other cars parked near Ettling’s Seaman Ave. home, costing him $200.

But his insurance bill is a phenomenally low $800 a year and he usually spends no more than $500 a year on maintenance, which includes changing the oil and whatever else the car needs to pass inspection, though this year nothing needed to be fixed.

Bassist and neighbor Steve Alcott, 55, occasionally occupies the Civic’s passenger seat.

“When the car got turned upside down, that was really the beginning of Harry’s car as we know it today,” he says. “The guys in this neighborhood are really into their cars, and can’t believe someone would drive something that looks like that. But it’s a great car — it’ll get you where you’re going. And junk is in the eye of the beholder.”

He Was Likely On His Way To The Met

The coyote on the loose in Central Park has been caught:

A coyote’s romp in Central Park ended yesterday with a tranquilizer dart and a nap, but only after a messy breakfast (hold the feathers), a dip in a chilly pond and a sprint past a skating rink-turned-movie set.

There was also a final chase that had all the elements of a Road Runner cartoon, with the added spectacle of television news helicopters hovering overhead, trailing the coyote and the out-of-breath posse of police officers, park officials and reporters trailing it.

. . .

Where Hal came from remained a mystery. [Parks commissioner Adrian] Benepe said that he had probably been driven out of Westchester County. Older coyotes do that to young males at this time of the year, wildlife specialists said.

He speculated that Hal had made it down to the Bronx and trotted into Manhattan across a railroad bridge at Spuyten Duyvil — “the narrowest, safest crossing,” he said.

But Mr. Benepe said it was also possible that Hal had dog paddled his way through the water beneath the railroad bridge. From there, he said, Hal probably meandered down the West Side to 72nd Street, where Riverside Park ends. And then, Mr. Benepe said, he turned left.

That was news to people in the neighborhood. “I see a lot of things pass this way,” said Ralph Mascolo, a doorman at an apartment building on 72nd Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, “but never a coyote.”

The coyote then interrupted a Robin Williams film shoot at Wollman Rink:

The search was called off Tuesday night. When it resumed early yesterday, a crew working on a movie called “August Rush” was busy at the Wollman Rink, just across a path from the Hallett sanctuary. Suzanne Kelly, from the film’s wardrobe crew, saw Hal “going after this lady’s dog.” A small dog, a Westie, she said.

Hal “looked hungry, I thought,” she said. “That’s what I was worried about.”

The posse chasing Hal cornered him by the Heckscher Ballfields, but he got away again. Hal retreated to the sanctuary, where a pile of feathers suggested that he had made a meal of a bird, probably a pigeon, Mr. Benepe said. After a quick swim across the sanctuary’s duck pond, he sprinted past the rink, where an actress in a wig was doing figure eights.

After catching the coyote, the plan is to return him to a more suitable environment:

Mr. Benepe said the plan was for a wildlife rehabilitator to take Hal out of the city and, after some rest and relaxation, release him in a more coyote-friendly habitat.

That’s “a more coyote-friendly habitat” as in “Fairfield County, Connecticut suburbs” where they are used to such sightings . . . suckas!

Now That’s Better

After a false start, pro-amnesty Irish immigrants have found a snappier slogan:

Not long after the pubs shut their doors for the night, the Bronx’s Little Ireland sprang back to life yesterday. Hundreds of the city’s newest wave of illegal Irish immigrants — students and carpenters, waitresses and nannies — descended on Woodlawn’s main strip, bundled against the cold and cracking jokes as they waited in the dark to board buses headed for Washington.

A few hours later, as the Senate Judiciary Committee began its second day of crafting an immigration bill, the busloads from the Bronx joined nearly 2,000 other Irish from across the country, canvassing the halls of Congress in T-shirts emblazoned with “Legalize the Irish.”

Is He Homeless Or Just Belgian?

More followup on the City’s annual homeless census:

A man with a white cart happens to be rolling it east along the south side of 45th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues at a little before 1 a.m. on the last day of February. Group G is on the same path at the same time, but moving slower, so he catches up to Suzanne Wagner and Moreen Sinclair, and they ask him the big question.

Meanwhile, a tourist with a goatee enters the block from the northwest, so Jo Anne Bennett stops him and asks the same thing. “Yes,” the tourist says, pointing down the street to his hotel. Bennett tells him why she’s asking. “Oh, sorry,” he says, “No, I do quite well.”

But the man with the white cart isn’t doing so well. So when asked, “Tonight, do you have some place that you consider to be your home or the place where you live?” he says, “No.” And voilà: New York City’s fourth annual census of the street homeless had found one.

. . .

The team turns right on 47th as it starts to flurry. Two Belgian tourists say they aren’t homeless but point to a sleeping guy who is. There’s no one at all on 48th Street, nor on 49th, where the search ends. It’s 1:32. In the 55 minutes it takes for Group G to walk its route, the women encounter 38 people.

And more background about the decoys we read about last week:

One of the “shadow count” bases is on 107th between Broadway and Amsterdam, where the teams of $100-a-night decoys are still trickling in at around 2:30 a.m. Some really go all-out with the wardrobe: The prize for best effort goes to a girl with untied work boots and a yellow caution tape as a belt. There’s an element of cat and mouse to the decoy game: An e-mail from the Homeless Services “command center” says that census takers were able to pick out decoys by the plastic bags they all seemed to carry or wear.