Thank God They Didn’t Have Plastic Buckets In The Nineteenth Century

It’s break dancer-backing drummers vs. carriage drivers in a fight over who can be the most annoying midtown obstacle:

In an unquiet city like New York, Fifth Avenue and 59th Street is especially known for its uproar. Double-decker buses rumble past. Taxicabs honk. Tourists mill. Workers refurbish the Plaza Hotel.

All the while, up to 20 horses quietly stand by, waiting to take passengers on carriage rides in Central Park.

On Friday, one of them bolted after it was apparently startled by a loud noise. The horse, a 13-year-old mare named Smoothie, ran nearly a block, and when her carriage became caught on a tree, she collapsed and died.

Witnesses told reporters that somebody walking past and beating a small drum may have been the source of the noise.

James Williams, the drummer who had been playing near Smoothie’s carriage, said yesterday, “We did not do anything malicious, like walk up and hit a drum in a horse’s ear.”

Yesterday Mr. Williams, who plays for tips, found himself facing the kind of attention he did not want. Reporters asked him where he had been playing and how loudly. Horse owners complained about him and the break-dancing group, Two Steps Away, that he accompanied on Friday.

The Horse and Carriage Association of New York said it planned to hold a news conference this afternoon at 59th and Fifth to call on the city to ban street musicians and “overly loud” music in the area. The group said it also would ask the city to provide secure hitching posts for the horses, which are often tethered to trash cans and street lamps.

Your Therapist Will Tell You That We All Register Support In Our Own Way And It’s Important Not To Waste Time Trying To Figure Out Who Registers “More” Or “Less” Support Because Then We’d All Start To Lose Focus Of The Main Thing, Which Is That We Support Stuff In The First Place

I support the strike, but . . .:

Most New Yorkers didn’t even notice yesterday’s taxi strike because the vast majority of drivers chose to hit the streets — and ended up hitting the jackpot.

Several thousand cabbies did engage in a hackout to protest new global-positioning satellite technology being installed in all 13,000 yellow taxis. But the ones who thumbed their noses at the strikers and drove right past the picket line had record paydays — thanks to a combination of less competition and emergency per-person rates imposed by the city.

Drivers told The Post their incomes doubled and, in some cases, even quadrupled. Fred Amoaf, who normally earns a little over $100 a day, said that yesterday, he raked in $400.

“I support the strikers but I already paid for my car,” he said.

Another driver said, “Tuesday, I worked for 12 hours and I only made $200 all day. Today, I started at 5 a.m. and I have $270 already. By 5 p.m., I will make at least $350 — all because of the strike.”

Come On, You Don’t Think I Already Understand The Risk Of Eating Ceviche I Bought In A City Park?

When the story of who killed the Red Hook Ballfields is written it will turn out that we are all guilty:

Honduras Maya, a restaurant owned by one of the vendors that serves Latin American food on weekends at the Red Hook Ball Fields, was closed down by the Health Department this week after an inspection stemming from the city’s crackdown on the vendors.

The shutdown could merely be a taste of what’s to come if the 13 food vendors at the ball fields fail to meet strict health code requirements by this weekend. And the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation may not extend the vendors’ temporary permit — which officially expires after Labor Day — until the soccer season ends in late October, as earlier promised.

. . .

Cesar Fuentes, executive director of the Food Vendors Committee of Red Hook Park, said health inspectors are expected to start issuing fines — or shutting down vendors — this weekend for not meeting requirements like providing hot and cold running water, refrigeration, and preparing food in commercial kitchens rather than at home.

Suany Carcamo, the owner of Honduras Maya, has been operating a Honduran food stand specializing in baleadas at the ball fields for more than a decade. Fuentes said her restaurant was investigated by the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene as a follow-up to a letter she submitted to prove that she was preparing her food for the stand in a city-certified commercial kitchen — her own restaurant.

The Park Slope restaurant received 122 violation points, compared to the citywide average of 14 points, according to the inspection report. Among the 20 violations listed were: missing Choking First Aid, Alcohol and Pregnancy, and Wash Hands signs; evidence of flying insects and mice; toilet facility not maintained and provided with toilet paper; and wiping cloths dirty or not stored in proper sanitizing equipment.

The owners were not available for comment by press time. An employee, when reached by phone, confirmed that the restaurant had been shut down.

But Carcamo could be viewed as one of the lucky vendors. She is one of only two that also owns a restaurant, while many of the others are struggling to find a commercial or community kitchen certified by the Health Department where they can prepare their food.

“The report from my vendors is that it is basically very, very difficult to do,” said Fuentes. After word traveled that Honduras Maya was shut down, “a lot of people were denying vendors the use [of their facilities] out of fear that the Department of Health would enforce harshly.

“Anyone who doesn’t have that letter wouldn’t be allowed to sell,” he said.

(The vendors do nothing to conceal it, we visit there because we want to eat it, we blame the Health Department for being there, but we are all there . . .)

I guess it’s back to those old reliable subway churros for us . . .

Who Causes Reckless Deliverymen? We Are All Guilty!

Things are not all hoo-do-lee-doo Transportation Alternatives and everything as city officials tackle the dark, seemy underbelly of bicycling:

“The cyclists hit people left and right and just keep on going,” the president of the 20th Police Precinct community council on the Upper West Side, Sam Katz, said. Ms. Katz and other leaders are counting on a new law that takes effect Thursday to help address the problem. The law, passed in March, requires restaurant managers to provide their deliverymen with safety equipment such as helmets, bells, and headlights. It also obliges restaurant managers to hang up posters — written in both English and the language spoken by the deliverymen — outlining the rules of the road for cyclists.

Deliverymen on bicycles irk residents on the Upper West Side so much that they are the no. 1 complaint heard by the 20th Precinct there, Lieutenant Biagio Carbone said.

“Every community board meeting, they’ll ask us, ‘How are our bicycle summonses going?'” Lieutenant Carbone, who has worked in the 20th Precinct and the 19th Precinct, on the Upper East Side, said. The abundance of restaurants that deliver in the two precincts makes the areas the worst in the city for reckless cyclists, he said.

. . .

“I explain it to them 1,000 times,” the manager of Bagels and Co. at Amsterdam Avenue and 79th Street, Ronnie Wachsler, said. The deli’s deliverymen receive summonses from the police almost every week for breaking traffic laws, he said.

“Riding on the sidewalks, I agree it’s a problem,” Mr. Wachsler said. “But delivery guys in general, the faster they make a delivery and get back, the faster they make another one. Time is of the essence.”

Because It’s Not Like You Find Packets Of Oyster Crackers At Every Other Seafood Shack Along The Eastern Seaboard Or Anything

An intellectual property suit filed by the owners of Pearl Oyster Bar will test the boundaries of how much you can rip off and then try to accuse others of having ripped off:

Sometimes, Rebecca Charles wishes she were a little less influential.

She was, she asserts, the first chef in New York who took lobster rolls, fried clams and other sturdy utility players of New England seafood cookery and lifted them to all-star status on her menu. Since opening Pearl Oyster Bar in the West Village 10 years ago, she has ruefully watched the arrival of a string of restaurants she considers “knockoffs” of her own.

Yesterday she filed suit in Federal District Court in Manhattan against the latest and, she said, the most brazen of her imitators: Ed McFarland, chef and co-owner of Ed’s Lobster Bar in SoHo and her sous-chef at Pearl for six years.

The suit, which seeks unspecified financial damages from Mr. McFarland and the restaurant itself, charges that Ed’s Lobster Bar copies “each and every element” of Pearl Oyster Bar, including the white marble bar, the gray paint on the wainscoting, the chairs and bar stools with their wheat-straw backs, the packets of oyster crackers placed at each table setting and the dressing on the Caesar salad.

God bless Caesar Cardini. But of course it’s not just about the Caesar:

Ms. Charles’s investment was modest. She built Pearl Oyster Bar for about $120,000 — a cost that in today’s market qualifies as an early-bird special.

She acknowledged that Pearl was itself inspired by another narrow, unassuming place, Swan Oyster Depot in San Francisco. But she said she had spent many months making hundreds of small decisions about her restaurant’s look, feel and menu.

Those decisions made the place her own, she said, and were colored by her history. The paint scheme, for instance, was meant to evoke the seascape along the Maine coast where she spent summers as a girl.

“My restaurant is a personal reflection of me, my experience, my family,” she said. “That restaurant is me.”

White marble bars — OK, everyone has that — but I totally own the Maine seascape!