Bring On The Bad Old Days!

You want the bad old days? We’ll give you the bad old days:

On the same weekend the city Parks Department heralded the opening of beaches, and the South Beach boardwalk went upscale with a new Ben & Jerry’s ice cream shop, an Eltingville woman endured a nightmarish flashback to Gotham’s darker days of waste-littered beaches, when she was stuck by a hypodermic needle while sunbathing on the sand.

Filomena Rago rolled over on the sheet she had spread out on Midland Beach late Sunday afternoon, getting ready to leave because a chill had set into the air.

Before she could reach for a cover-up to slip over her gold bikini, she felt a sharp jab at the back of her left thigh.

“I picked up the sheet and looked down to see what it was; it was a needle with some of the plastic and you could tell it was syringe,” said the 27-year-old legal secretary. “When I saw it I cried.”

. . .

“If it happened to me, of course I’d be worried,” mused Anthony D’Angelo, yesterday afternoon at Midland Beach, as his toddler played in the sand. “But I’m going to keep coming; I think it’s a rare event.”

Nearby, 5-year-old James was digging in sand littered with cigarette butts, washed-up plastic bottles and Styrofoam cups.

“He knows to watch out for needles,” said his grandfather, Luis Romero, motioning toward a spot where he said he recently spotted syringes in the sand. “I know they clean but you’re not going to get everything unless you pick it up by hand.”