Time Was, You Could Walk Half A Mile And Get A Train Ride For Free

The MTA is installing a fare box at the Tompkinsville stop of the Staten Island Railway*:

The free ride is coming to an end at the Tompkinsville Station of the Staten Island Railway.

The borough’s train line will be adding a new fare collection system at Tompkinsville, where many riders get off and walk to the nearby St. George Ferry Terminal, to save $2 on the fare, which currently is charged only at St. George.

Railway President John Gaul announced yesterday that construction is expected to begin this summer. A small entrance will be built on a platform to be constructed from the pedestrian bridge where Bay Street meets Victory Boulevard. Inside the unstaffed station, low turnstiles will be monitored by closed-circuit television. MetroCard vending machines will flank the turnstiles, he said.

When they’re up and running late next year, the new turnstiles are expected to add $550,000 a year to Railway coffers — money that is now lost when folks make the hike to and from the boat.

The new entrance is part of a $6.4 million pilot project to explore bringing fare collection back to at least some other stations along the 14-mile line.

“There’s a lot of interest in expanding fare collection, but it’s easier said than done, because our stations weren’t designed with that in mind,” Gaul said.

The fare was eliminated — except for St. George — in 1997 as part of the “One City, One Fare” program, when MetroCards replaced conductors checking tickets.

Since then, Railway riders have complained that the clientele onboard has become more unsavory, with criminals using the trains as a convenient getaway, particularly at night.

*Staten Island Railway Pub Crawls imperiled.

Cementing The Future

Economy down, negativism up:

Waterfront projects — some real, some imagined — were the highlight of yesterday’s Staten Island Economic Development Corp. exhibition and conference at the Hilton Garden Inn, where there was talk about building 1,000 units of housing and an IMAX theater next to the St. George Ferry terminal and an outlet mall on the South Shore waterfront.

But what Staten Island is most likely to get by year’s end is a $35 million cement terminal next to the Bayonne Bridge in Elm Park and a small business park on Richmond Terrace in Port Richmond. Both are expected to break ground within the next few months.

Some Try Prozac . . .

. . . others push around a three-foot-tall crucifix in a granny cart:

She was depressed and needed Jesus, so she took Him home with her.

That was Dawn Piccolo’s explanation for her theft of a 3-foot wooden crucifix from St. Adalbert’s R.C. Church in Elm Park.

Ms. Piccolo, 37, of Elm Park was shipped off to jail yesterday following her guilty plea earlier this month to a count of fourth-degree grand larceny stemming from the theft of the crucifix.

Dressed in a black sweater and gray cargo pants, her blond hair piled atop her head, Ms. Piccolo did not speak when Justice Leonard P. Rienzi sentenced her to one year behind bars under the plea deal.

She’d been more forthcoming — and apologetic — following her arrest at her Morningstar Road home in March.

In a statement penned for police, Ms. Piccolo admitted suffering from anxiety and depression.

She denied “ever” using any illegal drugs, but said the medications prescribed to combat her depression “makes me turn into something I don’t want to be.”

“I am in need of help for my faults,” Ms. Piccolo wrote.

“I was in need of Christ. . . . Christ is the only thing that keeps me sane.”

The Rev. Eugene Carella of St. Adalbert’s noticed Ms. Piccolo when she showed up at the church on the morning of March 11. Discovering the theft of the crucifix, a staple at St. Adalbert’s for more than 40 years, he gave a description of the woman to police.

Cops canvassed the neighborhood, and three days later, a city Sanitation worker phoned Father Carella with word that a woman had been spotted with the crucifix in a pushcart.

The worker and Father Carella identified Ms. Piccolo through photos police took of the woman.

A detective returned the crucifix to the church in time for its Good Friday veneration, although the left arm was missing. It hasn’t been recovered.

As for Ms. Piccolo, “I hope one day to give Him my all,” she told cops.

And the church hopes that one day Ms. Piccolo will give all of Him back.

Because If They Can Spend $3 Billion On A Water Filtration Plant . . .

Let’s see — drag racing at a high rate of speed, being ejected from the back seat . . . so what were those concrete bollards doing there anyway? You tell me:

A drag race on a Charleston service road led to the crash that killed an Annadale teenager, prosecutors contend.

But the father of the victim, Michelle Arout, is seeking to spread the blame to the city and a number of its agencies.

John Arout maintains that two concrete-filled steel stanchions, or bollards, guarding a fire hydrant at the crash site negated the hydrant’s built-in “breakaway” design feature and figured in his daughter’s death.

The 2003 Honda in which Miss Arout was riding collided at a high rate of speed with a Ford Mustang, then slammed into one or both bollards and split in two.

The 17-year-old was ejected from the back seat and suffered fatal injuries in the July 23 crash on Veterans Road West near Bricktown Centre.

Arout, who is administrator of his daughter’s estate, seeks unspecified monetary damages in the civil action, recently filed in state Supreme Court, St. George.

Named as defendants are the city and its Environmental Protection, Transportation and Fire departments. . . .

Great Pizza . . . And Now Throwing Stars, Too

The elusive Ninja Burglar turns out to be up to three Albanians:

The NYPD has quietly closed the book on Staten Island’s so-called Ninja Burglar case, after authorities started deportation proceedings against at least one Albanian man they believe to be connected to the string of break-ins, police sources told the Advance.

About a week and a half ago, the police department dismantled the investigative team hunting for the serial burglar, those sources said.

“The investigation is dormant, with no new leads,” Paul Browne, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for public information, confirmed to the Advance yesterday afternoon. “Investigators believe that an individual suspected [but with insufficient evidence to make an arrest] of being the burglar is among three Albanian nationals currently facing deportation because of their illegal status in the United States.”

Browne did not name the three Albanian nationals.

The Advance broke the story on its Web site, silive.com, yesterday afternoon.

Police had linked the “Ninja Burglar” — who received the nickname from the media after a Dongan Hills man reported fighting off a nunchuk-wielding intruder in a ninja costume last September — to 19 separate break-ins, mainly in the Todt Hill and Grymes Hill neighborhoods, between May 2007 and January of this year.

Multiple law-enforcement sources close to the investigation told the Advance that investigators were first clued into a possible Albanian connection to the burglary pattern last fall, when they learned that several Albanian men from the same area in neighboring Macedonia had formed a loosely knit crew to commit burglaries.

In some instances, they would wait for the other members of their Albanian community to go out to cultural events, then strike their vacant homes, the sources said.

. . .

. . . [S]ources said, two other members of the group were believed responsible for several of the break-ins in the Ninja Burglar case, but were never charged.

With their forensic and investigative leads exhausted, police contacted federal immigration officials, who started deportation proceedings against several members of the group last month, according to police sources.