Once every week, radio WOR interviews Mayor Mike Bloomberg live on their phone lines, and Lou Powsner is sure to listen, he is, whenever he is lucky enough to mustered 710 up on the AM radio dial.
Listening attentively in the a.m., repulsed I was with what I was hearing. I impulsively reached out of the bed for the phone thinking, “Maybe I can pin his ears back, on the air, against his plot to redo Coney Island’s battered Boardwalk in cement.” G-d forbid that should happen! And Speak Out, of course, I did.
Ne’er do my old eyes see Bloomberg walking along our main shopping thoroughfares. If he decided to come down from his beloved midtown Manhattan, our millionaire mayor would see and trip over giant pot holes, blatantly un-repaired to trap and strap our shoppers all across our fare city, especially in Brooklyn, on avenues such as Surf, Mermaid and Brighton Beach. Each crossing is a hazard of disrepair.
Instead, his eyes are fixed on our Boardwalk, which has become a bundle of blunders and splinters. But he shies away from fresh wood. Wht’s the matter, Mike, afraid of a few splinters? Yay, he stubbornly prefers cement.
Maybe Mayor Mike Bloomberg never saw the once-great Miracle Mile of Manhattan Beach, the first of our cement beach walks, which was infamously pulverized by storm after storm. No one can see the Esplanade any longer, but there it lies, cracked and jagged, the once proud walkway broken by our city’s Parks Department with not one sign of repair.
On that Saturday Morning, Lou Powser had the pleasure to dare him to leave our city a very bad memoir by brazenly ripping up the cushiony boards, and replacing them with over-heated, cracked cement — just like the one the people of Manhattan Beach are endowed with by the City of New York!
Nay, it should never happen!
Save the proud people of Brooklyn from thy “Plights of Jagged Manhattan Beach! Please g-d! Amen!
This is Lou Powsner.
The words of Lou Powser, BrooklynDaily's 90-plus-year-old columnist, appear twice a month on our website and in the Brooklyn Graphic.
