Precedent Undone: Pedestrians Not Vehicles

To update our lead story from yesterday, the two men ticketed for literally standing in a “No Standing” zone have had their summonses summarily dismissed:

Two men slapped with $50 tickets for simply standing in a fire zone in a city park were let off the hook yesterday shortly after Mayor Bloomberg scoffed at the silly summonses.

“It boggles the mind,” the mayor said, laughing as he responded to a Daily News story yesterday about the tickets given out to the pedestrians Sunday at Hudson River Park.

“I’ll talk to the Parks Department,” he added. “Let’s say the matter is under investigation.”

A short time after the mayor spoke, the Parks Department – which initially defended the tickets – said the fines had been dismissed.

And the toughest job in the world today — although not as tough as the one he faced yesterday — is being the person who has to back down from such idiocy:

Parks officials said Tuesday that the signs didn’t refer to cars – as is commonly the case around the city. Yesterday, they did a sharp reversal.

“The section of Hudson River Park where the incident occurred is designed for public use, and the summonses were issued inappropriately,” said Parks spokesman Warner Johnston. “The initial report that the ‘No Standing’ signs were for pedestrians was incorrect.”

Glad we got that one straightened out!

No Standing . . . Literally, “No Standing”

Two men were ticketed Sunday for stopping in a “No Standing” zone. Problem is, they were pedestrians:

Two men who had just disembarked from a thank-you cruise for gay pride volunteers were stunned when they were slapped with $50 tickets for “no stopping or standing” in a fire zone.

They weren’t in a car.

“It’s so ridiculous that it’s hilarious,” said a perplexed Jason Eng, 25, of Manhattan who received the summons Sunday evening at Hudson River Park.

“I can’t believe this actually happened,” the software programmer said. “There’s no reason I should get a ticket. … We were walking to the subway.”

Dennis Spafford, 27, an organizer with the Manhattan-based nonprofit group Heritage of Pride, and Eng, a volunteer for the organization, had just spent the day celebrating with fellow volunteers on the weekly Sea Tea gay party cruise aboard the Queen of Hearts riverboat.

Eng and Spafford were among the last to leave as they said goodbye to other volunteers at Pier 40 in the West Village.

About 10:30 p.m., the pair began walking north through the river-hugging park, which is open until 1 a.m., toward the Christopher St. subway station, they said.

Eng said he and Spafford stopped walking and stood near a gated Port Authority vent in the park, where they talked for a few minutes.

Two signs on the gate read: “No stopping or standing – Fire Zone.”

Suddenly, a Parks Department patrol car pulled up behind them. “What are you guys doing here?” one of the two officers asked, Eng said, so he and Spafford decided they should resume walking.

Then the Parks officer on the passenger side got out of the car and screamed, “Don’t you dare walk away from us!” Eng said.

Eng said he and Spafford questioned why they were being stopped and the officer who yelled at them said, “I can arrest you.”

The men handed over their IDs to the park cops, and both were given tickets for “failure to comply with signs,” a $50 offense, Eng said.

You think your job is bad? Try being the spokesperson who has to defend this:

Parks Department spokesman Warner Johnston said the sign is aimed at keeping parkgoers away from “certain areas of parks that are service areas that we prefer the public not loiter at.”

He insisted, “It doesn’t refer to cars.”

But Eng and Spafford said the sign looks like it’s meant to keep people from parking by the gate.

“It’s totally a road sign,” Stafford said. “If it were for pedestrians, it would say, ‘No loitering.'”

What can you say? At least they weren’t towed.

Just What We Needed

The news that a super-double strength baby stroller may have saved a child from last week’s building collapse on the Upper West Side is being spun as reason to spend $600 on a stroller:

It is impossible to say with certainty that the Mountain Buggy Urban Double Stroller – which costs roughly half the monthly rent of a small Brooklyn apartment – actually saved Abigail Lurensky, 7 months old, as a Manhattan building collapsed around her on Thursday.

But it didn’t hurt.

As word spread yesterday of the stroller’s role in protecting Abigail, the building collapse added even more cachet to the carriage, the $600-plus Hummer of the Sidewalk S.U.V. set. With their maneuverability and inflatable tires providing a smooth ride over potholes, cobblestones and sandy sidewalks, the Urban Double strollers are popular with the affluent, especially those with beach houses.

Albee Baby Carriage, the city’s largest dealer of Mountain Buggy strollers, which is six blocks from the site of the collapse on Broadway at 100th Street on the Upper West Side, expects a 500-stroller shipment in August to sell out within weeks. Even before its presumed heroic role, the stroller was quite popular, said Frank DeMato, the store’s manager in charge of Internet sales.

Still, Molly Smith Simon, a lawyer from Brooklyn who had just bought a $110 stroller from Albee, is skeptical. She doubts she needs such an industrial-strength stroller for either Eamon, 9 months, or Una, 4.

“I looked at the stroller that saved the baby’s life,” she said, “but I don’t think it’s that likely that I’m going to get stuck under a collapsing building.”

Lede Buried Like A Pile Driver

The real crazy thing about the New York City school teacher who called in sick so he could perform as a professional wrestler isn’t that he’s a wrestler or whatever but rather that he could have used personal days instead! I swear:

Kaye resigned from his teaching job in April after investigators approached him. He said he had not been aware that he could have used personal days to get time off to wrestle.

So rather than using personal days (to wrestle!), the teacher called in sick and got busted the hard way:

City school investigators laid the smackdown yesterday on a Queens high school teacher who allegedly called in sick while he was donning tights for World Wrestling Entertainment.

At Benjamin Cardozo High School in Queens, Matthew Kaye had a reputation as an agreeable social studies teacher.

But he led a secret life as pro wrestler Matt Striker – a greased-up macho man known for ring moves he called “the overdrive” and the “lung-blower,” investigators said. Several of Kaye’s students suspected as much.

“I swear I saw him on WWE Smackdown last week wrestling Kurt Angle,” a student wrote on the Web site www.ratemyteacher.com last March. “I know it was him.”

Special Schools Investigator Richard Condon said he wants the 6-foot-tall, 241-pound instructor to pay back all the money he got while he was supposedly out sick.

Condon’s investigators learned about Kaye’s alter ego from the teacher’s own Web site, www.thisisstriker.com, authorities said.

According to the site, Kaye made his professional wrestling debut in 2000 in the USA Pro Wrestling league. He used the name Hydro and fought as part of a tag team called Los Lunatics. The Web site lists and describes many of his performances – making it easy for investigators to match the days he should have been in school.

Personal days! To wrestle!

Great Moments in Failure

Major beverage company attempts to raise the world’s largest popsicle in Union Square, ice chunk melts in summer sun and leaks into the street, objective fails:

Under the noontime sun of New York’s first day of summer, [Beverage Company], the soft drink maker, answered the question of whether a 171/2-ton Popsicle can be made to stand upright in Union Square.

It cannot.

In a brave attempt to surpass a Guinness record – “The World’s Largest Popsicle” – [Beverage Company] mixed and froze a gargantuan icy doppelganger of its new kiwi-strawberry flavored [Beverage Company] on Ice. Then the frozen treat was hauled by freezer truck from Edison, N.J., and raised with an enormous crane in Manhattan.

Alas, like James Arness in the 1951 alien thriller “The Thing From Another World,” the giant [Word Combining Beverage Company Name and “Popsicle”] began to melt. Soon pedestrians were fleeing in not-quite terror, fire trucks were converging and the police were closing off streets to contain the publicity stunt gone wrong.

[Beverage Company] officials first started to worry when the pink liquid began to flow onto East 17th Street. They feared cyclists and automobiles would slip in the ooze.

Ice sculpture specialists who were helping [Beverage Company] with the publicity event also wondered whether the [Word Combining Beverage Company Name and “Popsicle”] was beginning to become hollow in the middle and would topple when set upright.

[Beverage Company] officials then decided to stop the [Word Combining Beverage Company Name and “Popsicle”]-raising at a crowd-disappointing 25-degree angle. The mushy giant block was then trucked away and a television-sized ice sculpture in the shape of the [Beverage Company] logo took its place.