After the Post shamed the Parks Department into resupplying Coney Island's toilet paper coffers, the Daily News seems to have had the same effect when it reported on Monday that kids were "risking their lives" by diving off the Steeplechase Pier at Coney Island. Reporter Michael Daly details the pier's transformation from a dock of impunity to "a border crossing in cold-war Berlin" in the span of a single day. "A dozen uniformed sentries and an emergency vehicle" were on site to keep the pier off-limits to everyone but fisherman. One 47-year-old man whose efforts to relax on the pier were rebuffed, said he remembered diving off the pier when he was 12, "the same summer he was introduced to the ways of love." Great, give them another reason to dive off the pier.
Steeplechase Pier is famous for a successful $100 million lawsuit filed against the city after two brothers jumped and broke their necks in 1992. The pair later had their award reduced to $25 million. Divers stress that the water is around 20-feet-deep and plenty safe for diving.
Daly says that the cash-strapped Parks Department should have put "an officer or maybe to to keep kids from diving," instead of the massive throng of greenshirts that seemed hellbent on preventing folks from catching a breeze. At 2 p.m., the officers opened up the "bottleneck" of beachgoers to everyone who had a shirt on, but "who knows what was happening in the rest of Brooklyn the Parks officers would have been covering." Too bad the Parks Department doesn't seem to have noticed our piece on the drainage issues at the Washington Square Park dog run. In the meantime, stay tuned for our forthcoming story: "Why Isn't Free Beer Being Distributed In City Parks?"
