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It broke the heart of the hardest New Yorker.
Even mine.
Just one living soul in this city was slain during the nine days ending Friday, during a bone-chilling cold snap that kept the guns still.
The Gowanus Canal Dolphin.
The marine mammal was a victim of another kind of homicide. The dolphin was killed by acute bureaucratic neglect and incompetence. There was no saving the poor, lost soul.
Rest in peace.
The species is called the common dolphin. But there was nothing common about this gentle creature. The 6-foot miracle floated Friday morning to a spot near Union Street, in the revolting and polluted Brooklyn canal. It’s a 1.8-mile garbage dump stretching from Gowanus Bay to New York Harbor.
Like a long, filthy puddle, the canal is strewn with more than a century’s worth of foulness. Old tires, used syringes, grocery carts.
Pesticides. Metals. Cancer-causing PCBs.
The Gowanus has long been bestowed with the reputation of being the spot where the mob disposes of bodies, which are meant to virtually dissolve in the putrid water.
In the late ’90s, a photographer I know found a corpse floating in the murky canal. Cops told him the dead man was probably killed by a prostitute. Nothing to see here.
And yet the rancid waterway sits between the multimillion-dollar houses of star-choked Park Slope (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Patrick Stewart) and fame-friendly Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens and Boerum Hill (Norah Jones, Michelle Williams). How authorities could allow the Gowanus to exist in its rank condition for a day, let alone 100-plus years, is a made-in-New York mystery. (The thing was built in the mid-19th century, and deteriorated as quickly as people could invent chemicals to dump.)
Maybe the dolphin, sick or hurt, sensed he was in friendly company. No one knows where the animal came from. The age is unknown. The beast was male, said biologists.
A crowd formed for hours as the dolphin, its dorsal fin bleeding, swam in circles, gasping for air. Clinging to life. I’m not what you would call an animal person. But the mesmerizing sight of the dolphin swimming in a nasty realm not known to support amoebas, let alone a magnificent creature, gave me hope.
Rescue workers arrived. People prayed.
Shortly after 5 p.m., a lone man stepped into the ice-cold water, risking infection or disease. He stroked the dolphin, gently. The animal seemed to like it.
The man did what rescue workers would not.
Police and experts from the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research decided against going in the cesspool of a canal. They waited instead for the tide to rise at about 7 p.m., allowing the animal to swim to safety without stressing out, or grossing out, workers.
“We’re concerned about the animal, but we’re concerned about our safety first,” biologist Julika Wocial told The Post.
By 5:30 p.m., the dolphin stopped moving. Just after 6, Wocial said, it had breathed its last.
Yesterday, biologists planned to conduct a necropsy, or animal autopsy, to find out what happened Could the tragedy have been prevented? Maybe not. It took decade upon decade of dumping, paired with official sloth, to make the canal unsafe for rescue workers to enter. The animal was doomed from the start.
In 2010, the federal government declared the canal a Superfund site, angering Mayor Bloomberg, who wanted the city to clean it up.
But nearly three years after the feds took over, nothing.
Just this week, the government got around to holding public hearings about cleaning up the canal, over 10 to 12 years, at a cost to taxpayers of $504 million.
What took so long?
As the morons blathered, a dolphin died.
Rest in peace, big guy.
Sadly, you won’t be the last creature to suffer.
Fat ‘sugar daddy’ is un-site-ly
Even the sugar babies didn’t want him.
Disgusting Manhattan real-estate titan Lakhinder Vohra was banned several months ago from a Web site that caters to well-to-do “sugar daddies’’ who seek broke, young things for “mutually beneficial relationships.’’
“When does a guy like me — aging, losing hair, big belly — meet a girl like this?’’ Vohra told The Post in 2011 as he sloppily slurped at a babe.
But the founder of the site SeekingArrangement.com forced Vohra off for harassing and groping “sugar babies,’’ who seek older men. Vohra, divorced and 47, sneaked back on the site with a new profile and user name, “Daddylovesarmcandy,’’ claiming his net worth was $10 million, said founder Brandon Wade.
Vohra, a broker for high-end real-estate firm Nest Seekers, was arrested and charged last week with throwing a 26-year-old woman he met online face-down on his bed and raping her. The alleged crime occurred inside Vohra’s posh Financial District pad.
He pleaded not guilty and was freed on $10,000 bail.
A neighbor called Vohra “icky and slimy,’’ but said he has lots of women in and out of his apartment.
This case will be hard to prove.
Cash-poor girls, I implore you. Avoid sugar daddies and find new income streams. There’s nothing shameful about waiting tables.
Beyonce risks a second sour note
Will she sing this time?
Beyoncé shamed the president when she lip-synced to a prerecorded track of the National Anthem at President Obama’s inauguration. A rep for the US Marine Corps Band confirmed it.
The million-dollar question is — will noise come out of the singer’s mouth when she performs, live, at the Super Bowl halftime show Sunday in New Orleans? The world is watching, Bey.
Con Edison is cramping our $tyle
Con Edison wants to raise your electricity rates. This time, the utility blames Superstorm Sandy for forcing it to hike bills an average of 3.5 percent next year on folks still steamed about the company’s wretched performance during and after the emergency.
But don’t worry.
Con Ed CFO Robert Hoglund says you can afford one of the most expensive electricity providers in the nation. That’s because New Yorkers live in small spaces, he actually said at a conference last year.
Don’t you feel better now?
What’s love (or tax form 1040-A) got to do with it?
Tina Turner wants you to know she’s doing it for love, not money. The American success story, who endured a brutal marriage to the late Ike Turner, stunned the nation by announcing that she’s moving to renounce her US citizenship and become a citizen of Switzerland. She’s lived in a Zurich suburb since 1995 with her German-born record-producer boyfriend, Erwin Bach.
Of course, at age 73, with American tax hikes in the works, it might not hurt to pay better rates abroad. This country is losing its best and brightest.