Happy Birthday, Bridge!

In a simpler time, thousands stampeded to get over to Bayonne:

When the Bayonne Bridge opened 75 years ago today, people on both sides of the graceful new span over the Kill van Kull were so eager to be the first across that they nearly created a stampede.

One daring couple actually tried to cross via the catwalk above one of the arches and was escorted away by a waiting police officer, who then let them go.

To officially open the bridge, Bayonne Mayor Lucius Donohoe drove across in his 1928 Rolls Royce.

He was followed that day by 17,018 other vehicles and 6,933 pedestrians.

. . .

Fast forward three quarters of a century and the span “still has the novelty that it had the day it opened up,” said Bayonne Bridge Manager Jerry DelTufo.

Sightseers seek out the vistas from its walkways.

“It’s still a destination,” he said yesterday at an anniversary celebration in Bayonne’s Collins Park.

. . .

During yesterday’s festivities, Bayonne Mayor Joseph V. Doria Jr. pointed to the immigrant roots on both sides of the bridge. To demonstrate the city’s Dutch heritage, 75 red, white, and blue tulip bulbs will be planted in Collins Park.

“Walls keep us apart,” he said, “but bridges bring us together.”

Location Scout: Bayonne Bridge.

Shh . . . Don’t Let Bill O’Reilly Hear About This

The War on Christmas continues:

Santa Claus has been bumped.

Instead of having pride of place in the center of the Staten Island Mall, the Jolly Old Elf has been relegated to the JCPenney wing — separating him from the holiday congestion near the Christmas tree and train ride.

St. Nick also is being nudged out by two new kiosks installed in center court: Vonage, the online discount telephone company, and the Piercing Pagoda, which also has a kiosk in the Macy’s wing.

It’s a question of space, Mall general manager James Easley insists.

“Center court is always so crowded with . . . [long lines waiting] for Santa and the train. Moving Santa and his chair will allow us to accommodate a lot more people by spreading things out,” he said.

. . .

“These three things — the Christmas tree, the train and Santa — should be together,” said Patricia Leahy of Greenridge, mother of 3-year-old Christopher. “There is plenty of room in center court for a tree, Santa and the trains. I can’t figure out how Mall management thinks there is more room by JCPenney.”

At least Santa will be there, said Ms. Leahy, who e-mailed the Advance last week to check on what turned out to be a false report that Santa Claus would skip his appearance at the Mall in New Springville this year.

But she was skeptical about his new spot: “I personally think it is a way of de-Christmasing Christmas.”

I Really Wish You Wouldn’t Have Told Me That

The question is which local markets they are referring to:

A Staten Island woman has been charged with illegally importing the heads, limbs and torsos of wild African animals — including a monkey’s arm and the hoof of an antelope — to peddle to local markets.

Mamie Manneh, 38, was arrested earlier this year after a JFK customs official found hacked-up animal heads and haunches in a shipment from Guinea. The contraband animal parts were stashed in a shipment of smoked fish.

A search of Manneh’s home revealed more limbs — including a monkey’s arm — in her garage, authorities said.

Manneh was charged with importing unauthorized goods and pleaded not guilty to the charges in April. She appeared last week before Brooklyn federal Judge Raymond Dearie to request time for her lawyer to get her medical records in order.

(Rejected post title: “Monkey Business.”)

All Politics Is Disturbingly, Frustratingly Local

As the rest of the country votes on weighty topics like energy policy, stem-cell research and, say, “Bush’s failed war in Iraq,” the key issue in the 13th Congressional District turns out to be . . . a two-way toll:

Three words changed the face of this year’s congressional campaign on Staten Island: Two-way toll.

In August, Democrat Stephen Harrison floated the idea of eliminating the one-way toll on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge for residents of the 13th Congressional District, utilizing a high-speed toll collection system and spreading the levy to both sides of the span for everyone else.

His opponent, Republican Rep. Vito Fossella, pounced hard, deploring the two-way toll of yore that was scuttled through federal legislation in the 1980s to reduce traffic jams. The issue, he says, shows Harrison is out of touch with Island residents.

Harrison, an attorney from Brooklyn, refused to back off, insisting that new technology could cut traffic, pollution and freeloaders traveling in only one direction. He said that Fossella’s portrayal of his two-way toll plan without caveats — he wouldn’t do it without elimination of the toll for district residents, he says — is a distortion.

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.”