GENERATING ILL WILL: The Bernards Inn in Jersey is hanging onto this generator (inset), acquired from the canceled marathon, while others shiver. (
)
While powerless Staten Islanders shivered in freezing-cold houses, a ritzy New Jersey hotel’s patrons were kept toasty with a generator that staff said was shipped there from the canceled New York City Marathon — instead of being kept in the city for storm victims.
“It’s deplorable. It’s wrong,” Leigh Perry, a New Dorp, Staten Island, resident said after being told The Bernards Inn, in Bernardsville, NJ — which rents suites for more than $300 a night — received that generator over the weekend.
Adding insult to injury, the hotel’s power came back on Monday afternoon — but the inn’s owner said he was still holding onto the generator in the event that today’s nor’easter cut power out again.
“They have the means for power right now. Here, people don’t have it at all,” said Perry, 55, whose house was left without electricity by last week’s storm, which destroyed homes just across the street from hers.
The Post revealed late last week that the marathon was hoarding up to 41 generators instead of deploying them to the thousands of victims of Superstorm Sandy who remain without power, such as those in coastal Staten Island, the Rockaways and Brooklyn.
Outrage over the idea of the marathon being held in the still-suffering Big Apple led to its cancellation last Friday.
Hours later, on Friday evening, “an electrician friend” of Bernards Inn owner Harold Imperatore called. “He knew somebody else that had” a generator that could be used to power the hotel, which had been blacked out after the storm, Imperatore said.
The Bernards Inn, whose restaurant sells a dry-aged sirloin for $48, received that generator and resumed booking guests on Saturday afternoon.
The generator belonged to Aggreko — one of four companies that supplied the New York City Marathon’s starting- and finish-line areas with generators.
“Rumor had it” that the generator at the hotel came from a marathon site, said Imperatore.
Imperatore refused to provide the name of his “electrician friend” who arranged for the generator to be shipped.
On Monday night, retired New York City school principal Archie Dong was celebrating his 64th birthday at The Bernards Inn, and the bartender told him the place had been “using a generator from Central Park for the marathon” over the weekend, Dong said.
“I said, ‘What do you mean? Those generators were supposed to go to Staten Island or the Rockaways!’ ” Dong recalled. “I was really pissed off.”
Even hotel guest Marty Brady, 57, yesterday said, “It should have stayed in Staten Island to help the victims, no doubt.
“They should have been in Staten Island or south Jersey, wherever people had an issue — those people needed them a heckuva lot more,” Brady said.
College of Staten Island pre-med student Christina Awada, 18, echoed that sentiment.
“It’s just another thing that’s going wrong with everything that’s being handled,” Awada said. “Our needs are being ignored!”
A spokeswoman for Aggreko had no immediate comment when asked whether the generator that went to The Bernards Inn had been in Central Park or the Staten Island starting line before the marathon was canceled.
Julie Wood, a spokeswoman for Mayor Bloomberg, said the city had asked all four generator-supply companies to rent those generators earmarked for the marathon to the city for storm relief but were rebuffed by all but one.
Wood said the companies, which included Aggreko, told the city the generators either were already spoken for by other customers, were unable to be moved over the weekend, or weren’t suited to the city’s needs.
One of the companies, New York Tent, agreed to let two generators go to a hospital and nursing home in the city.
Additional reporting by Brad Hamilton