Honestly, Who Hasn’t Dreamed Of Ringing In The New Year By Smoking Crack In A Staten Island Cemetery?
Some Staten Islanders take the personification of “Father Time” literally with a New Year’s Eve party at a local cemetery:
Plastic chairs, an empty keg and discarded liquor bottles littered the grounds of Ocean View Cemetery in Oakwood yesterday, the remnants of a New Year’s Eve party held near a crypt close to Amboy Road.
“It was just disgusting,” said Jim Coffey, a 41-year-old computer programmer from Great Kills who went to the cemetery yesterday with his wife to visit her brother’s grave. “You go to visit a person’s grave and you see all this stuff.”
Coffey took photos of what he saw — a dismantled fence, discarded cups, several chairs and a headstone that looked like it was turned into an open bar. He also said he spotted some “glassine envelopes,” the type used to hold drugs. “The most disgusting thing was the bottles lined up on the headstone there.”
No gravestones appeared to be toppled, Coffey said.
Coffey and his wife visited her brother’s headstone at about 3:30 p.m., and were on their way out when they found a broken plastic chair thrown into the middle of the exit road, leading to Amboy. Then they looked around.
“First we saw the headstone had all of those bottles, and then we looked up the hill at the crypt, and the rest of the party was up there,” he said. “Just the audacity of them. They brought plastic lawn furniture. . . . They did it with impunity. They absolutely didn’t expect anyone to happen upon them.”
(Perhaps El Nino is to blame?)
Posted: January 2nd, 2007 | Filed under: Just Horrible, Staten Island