July 5, 2003

From Soup to Stickball, the 4th With a Twist

utside Village 247 restaurant on Smith Street in Brooklyn, a bench forms a picture of an American flag with wooden slats for stripes and a metal slab with the bas-relief of 50 stars. Bob Dylan was singing through stereo speakers yesterday that it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, and Hernan Gonzalez, 32, the chef, was preparing to open. He was asked whether the bench was special for the Fourth of July.

"No, just the soup," Mr. Gonzalez said.

Mr. Dylan said, "Don't think twice, it's all right."

After all, it was barely 10 a.m., and celebrations were just getting started. There would be innumerable small ones all over the city, counting gatherings of people, displays of patriotic ornamentation and simple enjoyment of a day without labor. It was all a run-up to the last legal Fourth of July fireworks displays in town, the big extravaganza over the East River in Midtown and south of the Brooklyn Bridge a bit past nightfall.

Tens of thousands of people gathered at various vantage points around the East River last night to watch the fireworks, which began around 9:45.

Shot from barges, the first rockets hurtled up into the black sky and exploded with burst after burst of cascading color. They created a densely layered forest of light over the New York skyline, each charge dying slowly, weeping into crumbling rivers of light.

"They're awesome. I'm blown away," said Eddie Medina, 41, a cabdriver from the Bronx who had brought his family to Long Island City, in Queens, to watch the show.

But even hours before, there was much to see and do. The laundry places were open, and a man on the F train in a shirt that read "Big Willie" was reading the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was getting hot.

Anibal Martinez, 46, was out in a park — really just a slab of asphalt between two buildings on Fifth Street between First and Second Avenues in Manhattan — playing stickball. He had a genuine Spaulding stickball bat and everything.

"Come on, Junior, you're not explosive," Mr. Martinez called from the outfield, keeping up what is typically referred to as the chatter. "Fourth of July. Like a firecracker."

It was a small game, just the stubble-faced, bespectacled Mr. Martinez and two friends.

"A couple of other guys were supposed to show up, but I guess they went to the beach or to barbecue in the suburbs," Mr. Martinez said.

Out on Staten Island, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg followed a teenage fife and drum corps playing "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and a Dixieland band playing "Ain't She Sweet." He was seeking out babies to make silly faces at. Men wore ties that looked like American flags.

Back in Manhattan, the folks who run the Veselka Coffee Shop on Second Avenue were into the spirit of the holiday. They had adorned their sidewalk with red, white and blue balloons and a silver one in the shape of the number 4, big and bold enough to sponsor an episode of "Sesame Street."

In lots of places, it was hard to tell where the patriotic ornamentation was fresh for the holiday. The balloons in front of PC Richard & Son were unwrinkled and filled with helium, but the bunting was dirty and faded. In certain places it was obscured by banners advertising air-conditioners by depicting the Sun itself sweating and cooling its brow with a glass of lemonade that, if drawn to scale, was about 300,000 miles tall.

Nearby, Nicola Hein, 25, was juggling oranges while waiting for friends to join her on a trip to the hot dog eating contest on Coney Island.

"I'm from Europe," Ms. Hein said. "I just think it's weird to have a hot dog eating contest."

She went on her way, after receiving assurances that her European-ness had not, in this particular instance, endowed her with an indefensible or even especially unusual opinion.

One of the participants in the contest — a publicity bonanza for a certain well-known hot doggery — was William Perry, the football player who scored a touchdown in the 1986 Super Bowl and was known by the nom de guerre "The Refrigerator." He proved his days of storing massive amounts of food — if that was the reason for the nickname — to have passed, by dropping out after eating only 4 hot dogs, 40.5 fewer than the "winner."

It was eerily quiet all over the city, not as in years gone by, when you could not drive through certain neighborhoods without being surrounded by peddlers bearing M-80s and blackjacks.

"In terms of fireworks, it's gotten much, much better," Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner, said at a news conference on Thursday.

Mario Bozzolo, 56, and Raymond Land, 64, had mixed feelings about that change. They live on 32nd Street between Broadway and 34th Avenue in Astoria, Queens, a block where nearly every house had an American flag yesterday, where some had as many as four flags and where even a Honda Accord had a flag on its antenna.

"We used to have a lot of fireworks," Mr. Bozzolo said.

"Giuliani said no," Mr. Land said.

"That's O.K.," Mr. Bozzolo said. "Keeps it safe."

Mr. Kelly had assigned more than 4,000 police officers to patrol the streets, and dozens of them sat in a pizza restaurant in the neighborhood of broken sidewalks and well-kept gardens near Eugenio Maria de Hostos Community College in the Bronx. A block away, two teenage boys raced wheelchairs while a girl informed them that they were sick.

Up Walton Avenue, Joshua Bellve, 32, was giving his grill a good scraping for the ribs, sausages, hamburgers and hot dogs that he planned to cook for 20 or 30 relatives, friends and neighbors. He would feed anyone who showed up, he said.

"In the suburbs of the city, everybody has their thing going on, but they don't participate," Mr. Bellve said. "Here the neighbors come over, bring some food or some beer."

Dominoes would be the principal entertainment, he said. "It's not fancy, but we like it."

Down in Washington Square Park, Jason Ruybe, 28, was having trouble selling his red, white and blue balloon sculptures.

Broadway was so empty that you could walk down the whole stretch from Bond Street to Houston Street without stopping once to make way for a woman who had just spotted that pair of shoes.

And on Ludlow Street, Dan Green, 36, of Brooklyn, who was wearing football pads, moon boots, a plastic bosom and a robot mask, was preparing for a parade of some sort. This involved an exhaust tube, a fencing outfit, a rubber jack-o'-lantern and what looked like the roof of a shed attached to a harness.

Lugging all this stuff through the streets, said Mr. Green, who is a member of an art group called Collective Unconscious, is "arduous, hot and uncomfortable, but it's a certain kind of ecstasy."