The Way The Q54 Strays, Now That Atlas Park Is Down The Way . . .

Some claim that overdevelopment is threatening the cultural heritage of old Queens:

Those transit meatheads caused gushers of trouble.

Such is the sentiment in Archie Bunker’s old neighborhood — known outside of the TV world as Glendale — where residents believe a recent water main break was caused by a bus re-routing that put too much stress on the street.

“It’s absolutely the bus routes — it can’t be anything else,” said Dorie Figliola, a member of Community Board 5. “It just can’t withstand [the pressure]. Our old pipes are just going.”

The Q54 bus was re-routed in July so it could stop at the Shops at Atlas Park, a retail complex that opened last year at 80th St. and Cooper Ave.

Atlas Park management hoped the move would attract more customers, and it wants the Q23 and Q45 re-routed so that they also pass by the mall.

But the new route raised concerns about noise, pollution and traffic in a residential area that includes the Cooper Ave. home featured in the opening credits of the hit 1970s sitcom “All in the Family.”

Location Scout: Archie Bunker’s House.

And Here You Assumed Craigslist Was About Finding Menial Jobs, Bait-And-Switch Apartments And Junky Ikea Castoffs . . .

Yeah, I suppose one could reach that conclusion:

During a crime wave in the winter of 1857, Harvey Burdell, a prominent dentist who lived at 31 Bond St. in Greenwich Village, was found in his office strangled and stabbed 15 times.

Suspicion soon fell on his mistress, Emma Cunningham, a 36-year-old widow who Burdell had taken into his home along with her five children.

“She needed a wealthy new husband willing to take on five children,” said Benjamin Feldman, author of “Butchery on Bond Street,” a new book about the case. “And she made a bad choice.”

Burdell, according to Feldman, “took ruthless advantage” of Cunningham\], routinely raping her, impregnating her two times, and twice performing an abortion on her with his hands.

Still, she needed the money and respectability a husband would bring, and so, when Burdell refused to do right by her, she hired an imposter to stand in for him at a wedding ceremony. When this ruse failed, she took to violence.

“I never in my life have heard a story that incorporated so much dysfunction and sociopathic behavior between a man and woman,” Feldman said.

. . .

Comparing the frenzy that trial produced to the O.J. Simpson case 135 years later, Feldman thought it was significant how little had actually changed in the relationship between the sexes in the big city.

“I don’t know if life is all that different today,” he said. “Take a look at Craigslist. The technology is different, but you still see women searching for sugar daddies and all that kind of stuff. The only difference is that in the middle of the 19th century it was OK to do that.”

Happy Birthday, Train!

The A train — 75 years young today:

On Sept. 10, 1932, one minute after midnight, a 7-year-old boy named Billy Reilly dropped a nickel into a turnstile and boarded an A train at 42nd Street. It was a southbound express, and it was Billy’s first ride on an A.

It was the city’s first ride, too — 171,267 passengers rode it that September day in 1932, its first day of operation. The line, then called the Eighth Avenue subway, spanned only 12 miles and 28 stations, from the top of Manhattan to the bottom.

. . .

Today, on the A line’s 75th birthday, transit officials will celebrate with a ceremony at the start of the line at the Inwood/207th Street station. A special train made up of six prewar cars is scheduled to provide service along the line’s original route to the Chambers Street stop in Lower Manhattan.

. . .

The A train’s first registered complaint was apparently made just minutes after it began running, when a man at the Chambers Street station became upset because he had put two nickels into a malfunctioning turnstile.

Since then, the line has gotten mixed reviews from passengers and the Straphangers Campaign, a rider advocacy group. In the group’s latest report card, which ranks the city’s 22 main subway lines from best to worst, the A train was tied for 12th place. The group found, among other things, that the line arrives with below-average regularity.

The A line has been crippled by fires (the January 2005 blaze at the Chambers Street station, for instance) and has seen its share of tragic and bizarre occurrences.

The limbs and torso of a 19-year-old Brooklyn man were found in a blue plastic bag in a tunnel in 2005. Pigeons have been known to step aboard trains at the outdoor Far Rockaway stop and casually step off at the next station. In May 1993, a man posing as a subway motorman took an A train with hundreds of passengers for a three-and-a-half-hour ride. He made 85 stops, and arrived on time at the Ozone Park/Lefferts Boulevard station.

On Saturday afternoon, the line that carried Billy Reilly on its inaugural run — he moved to the front of the crowd at the 42nd Street station when a transportation commissioner learned he was born the day of the new subway’s groundbreaking, March 14, 1925 — carried Dr. Morrow, who sat reading and listening to a Tom Waits song on his iPod.

It carried Ernest Rivera, 28, an unemployed father of three from Brooklyn. It carried Gunther, a Manhattan couple’s white puppy. It carried a middle-aged woman with a tattoo on her chest, a man holding a surfboard and another man who had remembered to wear his A train T-shirt.

And The Most Disappointing Thing About It Was That We Never Got That Glossy Publicity Photo Autographed Before Old Tennessee Kicked It . . .

As St. Vincent’s midtown hospital closes, a lifetime of memories goes with it:

A recent block party to commemorate the closing of St. Vincent’s midtown hospital (until 2003, it was called St. Clare’s), at Fifty-second Street and Ninth Avenue, could have passed for any Labor Day cookout: hamburgers on the grill, beer in Solo cups, Italian ice served from the back of an ambulance. Then you caught a scrap of conversation: “Hey, Mike, remember the jumper at the Carter Hotel who got impaled on the fence? That was your guy, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Mike Rosenblum, a former paramedic who’s now a doctor in Springfield, Massachusetts. “He jumped off a building trying to kill himself, and got harpooned two floors below, like this.” (Rosenblum arched his back.) “So he was hanging off the side of the building, probably looking at beautiful downtown Manhattan and the Empire State Building in the distance. And when we got there he said, ‘You know, when you try to kill yourself you never expect something like this to happen.’ And we were like, ‘You’re right! It is unusual.’ ”

The hospital is itself an anomaly: the city’s first 24/7 paramedic unit, it managed, despite periods of bankruptcy, to see Times Square and Hell’s Kitchen through the heroin and crack epidemics of the seventies, eighties, and nineties. In 1998, Joe Connelly, a St. Clare’s ambulance driver, wrote a book based on his experiences there, called “Bringing Out the Dead,” which Martin Scorsese made into a movie. The hospital is the first of several to be shut down by a task force known as the Berger Commission, which aims to consolidate New York State’s health resources. (Fire Department paramedics will take up the slack.)

“Remember the night we picked up one of the musicians from ‘Saturday Night Live’?” Fred Kavanagh, a heavyset ex-medic who’s now a physician’s assistant, asked. “That was another drug-related one.” “And the one who married the millionaire?” Rosenblum said. “Anna Nicole Smith!” (Her mother was sick.) One partygoer said he knew the paramedics at the scene of Nelson Rockefeller’s death. Other famous patients: Stevie Nicks (slipped in the studio), Barry Manilow (allergic reaction), Henny Youngman (pneumonia), Roger Moore (fainted), Shawn Bradley (basketball injury), Tennessee Williams (swallowed the cap of his pill bottle, fatally), and Ian Schrager — who collapsed in a hotel next to Studio 54 while getting fitted for a tuxedo. “He’d been standing still for a long time, and he was getting hot,” Rosenblum said. Kavanagh added, “He was not too happy to see us.”

Oh, Sure — The Schermerhorns Down On Pearl Street Still Run The Incandescents In The Street Lamps Outside Their Federal Down By The Water . . . Wait, Where’s The Water?

The obvious follow-up question is who these five people are:

Con Ed is no longer AC/DC.

The utility has won state permission to switch off its direct current service, which Thomas Edison powered up in Manhattan 125 years ago yesterday. It now provides DC power to just five customers in Manhattan.

The Public Service Commission order is the last gasp of a century-old war between Edison, a direct-current proponent, and Nikola Tesla, who invented alternating current.