Fall Back

So much for the electorate looking to the economy as a measure of the ruling party, and so much for the Dems finding their spines. That party lost its best and brightest when Paul Wellstone’s plane went down. Wellstone held some positions with which I disagreed (on abortion, for one), but he had the distinction of never having become a made man in the political arena. What a loss.

So the voters here in New York and nationwide shuffled their feet, moving a little bit this way and little bit that way; the Dems, mostly concerned with spin control, spun their wheels; and the Republicans spent enough money to buy themselves a slim majority in the Senate, the House, and Congress. My prediction: Watch Dubya and Co. try to use this unexpected advantage to pack every court, from the Supreme Court on down, with arch-conservatives whose benighted rulings will haunt this country for a century and more. Don’t say I didn’t warn you when your train gets lost.

•

Speaking of lost: It was a dark and stormy night. Purely by accident, and mostly to stay out of the wet, on the evening of October 16 I wandered into a special City Council hearing at 126 Stuyvesant Place in St. George, called by Council Michael McMahon, sponsored by the Council’s Transportation Committee, and devoted to the question of increasing ferry service to and from the island. McMahon and two other Council members have introduced legislation that would require the NYC Department of Transportation to provide free ferry service every 30 minutes on a 24/7, 365-days-a-year basis.

Definitely an idea whose time has come, given the fact that the island has become (in terms of population) the fastest-growing borough in the city — and an especially important proposal at a moment when Mayor Bloomberg (who, trust me, has never had to run for a ferry in his life, nor to wait 59 minutes among the homeless of South Ferry after missing a boat at 12:30 at night) has begun to float the deeply dumb ideas of reinstituting the ferry fare and privatizing late-night ferry service.

An organization called The Ferry Riders Committee had staged a demonstration in support of the 24/7 legislation on the steps of Borough Hall during rush hour earlier that evening, of which I was entirely unaware when I happened to glance into the hearing room as they began to set up. And, though a chilling rain had reduced the number of participants in that event, the hearing room filled almost to capacity by 6:30, when McMahon called the meeting to order.

By then, on an impromptu basis, I’d signed up as one of several dozen people willing to testify on behalf of the 24/7 proposal. While a Department of Transportation representative read a prepared statement rejecting the proposal and refused to answer any questions about the D.O.T.’s facts, figures, and position on this, I quickly scribbled a draft of my thoughts, which, delivered before the Transportation Committee an hour later and placed on the public record, went something like this:

“My name is Allan Coleman. I’m a freelance writer, teacher, and lecturer. Under the pen name A. D. Coleman, I write the ‘Island Living’ column for the Star Reporter newspaper chain. I’m here tonight as a private citizen and a long-time Island resident.

“Over the past 35 years of my residency on Staten Island, the Department of Transportation has proven itself clearly and consistently incompetent to coordinate the dependable schedule of the Staten Island Ferry with the wildly erratic departure and arrival times of buses and trains at the ferry terminals on both the Manhattan and Staten Island sides of this crucial transportation link. Notably, the D.O.T. refuses to take any responsibility for this.

“During those three and a half decades, this failure of the D.O.T. has proved itself the single greatest problem that choosing to live on Staten Island presents in both my professional and personal spheres. It also represents the factor hardest to overcome in persuading people I know to visit Staten Island for socializing and cultural events, and of course in convincing them to consider living here.

“Since I moved to Staten Island in 1967, I have cumulatively spent literally months of my life sitting and waiting — late at night, early in the mornings, and on weekends — in the unspeakably ugly and badly managed terminals of the Staten Island Ferry. This represents an incalculable loss of both personal and professional time.

“One obvious solution to a number of the concerns raised by the D.O.T. spokesperson earlier would be to commission and purchase two ferries one class smaller than the current smallest ones, to make the night runs as economical as possible.”

For more information on this proposal and the Ferry Riders Committee, contact its chairperson, Theo Dorian, via email, or by phone at 917-903-9576; or c/o the St. George Civic Association, POB 987, Staten Island, NY 10301. You can reach Councilman McMahon’s office at 718-556-3730 to weigh in on this issue.

•

To my astonishment, at the beginning of the second week of November I still have raspberries ripening and tomatoes on the vine. The tomatoes surprise me in another way as well. This summer, I reconfigured my garden with new plantings and begun to harvest a bumper crop of basil and tomatoes.The latter have turned out to be cherry tomatoes, which isn’t what I planted; I put in beefsteaks, or so I thought. As it became patently clear that these little globes would not get much larger than gumballs, I assumed I’d misread the label on the seedlings I’d bought — until I read an account in the New York Times “Lifestyles” section by a woman who’d had exactly the same experience.

Somebody at the seedling hothouse obviously messed up, though on what scale I can’t say. Do we have disappointed beefsteak-tomato lovers contemplating admittedly pretty but vastly smaller versions of this fruit all across the tri-state area? And did this error involve merely the mislabelling of these cherry tomatoes, or were batches actually switched — so that we also have an equal number of gardeners staring in awe at bumper crops of the biggest damn cherry tomatoes they ever saw?