Historic Houses Saved; Octogenarian Loses Nest Egg

The City Council puts on its cape and tights and fired its special super net at bulldozers ready to take down two historic houses on Staten Island:

The City Council yesterday landmarked a Craftsman-style bungalow on Clove Road in West Brighton and a 19th-century clapboard cottage on Main Street in Tottenville, despite last-minute pleas from both homeowners — one of them an 88-year-old woman — to let their houses alone so they could sell them to developers for the best price.

The Council reaffirmed earlier decisions by the Landmarks Preservation Commission to grant protective historic status to the two houses located at each end of the Island, and Councilmen Andrew Lanza (R-South Shore) and Michael McMahon (D-North Shore) said yesterday they would help the homeowners market their homes through the preservation community, now that selling to developers who wanted to demolish the homes is no longer possible.

. . .

Longtime Main Street homeowner Marie Bedell, 88, also testified at hearings this week and was upset by the news that her 1850s house, considered a rare example of early Tottenville architecture, had been landmarked. The house is listed for sale today for $799,000.

“I’m 88 years old and it’s time for me to go. I want to sell the house and that’s what I told them,” she said. “It’s hard to sell if it’s landmarked.”

He Comes Not To Praise Cable But To Bury Cable

Hey Molinaro — where are we supposed to throw our sneakers once this happens? But you probably weren’t even thinking of that:

On the heels of this summer’s power outages, Borough President James Molinaro wants to revisit an old debate on the placement of Staten Island’s power cables: Above or below.

In a letter to the Staten Island Growth Management Task Force, City Planning Director Amanda Burden and Buildings Commissioner Patricia Lancaster, Molinaro has requested a regulation requiring all new houses in the borough to have underground utility cables.

Doing so, he said, would protect the cables from the elements and also help preserve the charm of neighborhoods by eliminating the “unsightly, clothesline-like mess” of overhead cables.

“I don’t expect this can be done for every new home, but 95 percent of the time you can do it,” Molinaro added. “It’s safe, it’s reliable and it looks better.”

. . .

The gradual shift to an underground system likely would require a massive coordination effort with all of those city agencies, the state Public Service Commission, Consolidated Edison, Verizon and legislation by the City Council. While a state law already mandates the utility companies to install underground cables for multiple-occupancy dwellings and subdivisions of five homes, it does not apply to single-family homes.

Industry experts say the cost — and the Island’s topography — could make such a move prohibitive.

Underground cables can cost up to $1 million per mile, or about 10 times more than their overhead counterparts, according to estimates from Consolidated Edison.

The massive 10-day blackout in Queens, which interrupted service to as many as 100,000 people — was also a glaring reminder of how difficult it can be to diagnose and repair problems with underground cables.

Dog Bites Man

You know what they say — “whoever smelt it . . .”:

A pungent smell wafted through Staten Island yesterday, alarming hundreds of residents and spurring a daylong but fruitless investigation into its source, fire officials said.

The city began receiving complaints about an odor, possibly of gas odor at 9:40 a.m., and the City Department of Environmental Protection dispatched a hazardous materials crew — 24 members in all — in search of the cause of the stench.

They combed the north and south shores of the island and the Staten Island Expressway, noses on full alert.

“There’s no machinery to detect odor — the only way to go about it is to go out there and smell it for yourself,” said Ian Michaels, a department spokesman who added jokingly that he was assigned to odor duty.

The origin of the odor, though, was an elusive one.

This Island . . . Island Of Staten!

I suppose you can be excused for referring to Staten Island as exotic like “Alaska” if you bothered to walk the island’s entire waterfront. Then again, who would want to walk the island’s entire waterfront? No matter:

There is a place in this city where teenagers go crabbing from the old railroad bridge, where people consider themselves residents of a town of half a dozen rather than of a metropolis of eight million, where the waterfront still harbors ancient secrets along with the inevitable clash of development interests.

It’s called Staten Island. It is the fastest growing county in New York State, yet it remains, in pockets, and in its peculiar way, the Alaska of New York City.

That is, a place where nature, however debased, still plays a role in daily life and where there is room to pursue a dream, whether that means amassing a mansion-full of musty antiques or a yard full of cars up on blocks patrolled by roosters, or building an artwork along a quarter mile of beachfront, or simply drinking a beer outside the corner store without having to hide it in a paper bag.

Still, this was a feat, and the mysterious stone cairns at Mt. Loretto (location scout) are explained:

Once around the horn at Tottenville, the waterfront changes from boggy estuary to sandy seaside. This is the South Shore. In 1892, a naturalist, William T. Davis, wrote of it: “Of drift wood there is no end, neither is there of old shoes, mousetraps, brooms and all other household utensils.”

The image still fits, but beneath the cliff in the state park at Mount Loretto, the beachfront has been turned into a miniature sacred city, 150 shoulder-high pyramids of boulders, each capped by a handsome stone turned on end. Douglas Schwartz, a zookeeper at the Staten Island Zoo, has been building the cairns for 10 years, an act of devotion that he likened to “giving flowers to the wife.”

“It’s a concrete, real gesture,” said Mr. Schwartz, 53. “People see this and they think, ‘He must really believe in something.’ They’re not sure what it is, but they know it must be something.”

His work has become well known on the island, if not universally understood. Mr. Schwartz had the mixed pleasure of seeing his art splashed across the front page of The Staten Island Advance beneath the headline “Sophomoric Prank or Cult Activity?”

Actual Headline: “Brotherhood Is Key To Survival For Island’s Black Firefighter”

Rarer than the female cab driver is the African-American firefighter. Rarer still, the African-American firefighter on Staten Island:

Staten Island’s lone black firefighter relishes the ritual that occurs in the kitchen of the firehouse whenever a new recruit, or probie, arrives.

It’s that kind of good-natured “hazing” and other in-house rites that has everything to do with camaraderie and nothing to do with racism, said Bruce Stanley, 52, of Rosebank, the only African-American firefighter permanently assigned to Staten Island.

“Everyone gets a turn about getting their chops broken,” said Stanley, a 22-year FDNY veteran among a paltry 2.9 percent of the department’s roster that includes African-Americans.

“You basically can’t be thin-skinned. If guys didn’t kid around with you, that meant they didn’t care for you.

“And you can’t be isolated in this job. Everything we do is as a group, as a unit. If one looks at someone with disdain because of their race, that very person could be the one to save their life,” said Stanley, who for the past eight years has worked out of Ladder Co. 80, Battalion 20 and Division 8.