Boardwalk

Police in Wildwood, N.J., are trying to determine the identity and cause of death of a "probably hours old" baby boy whose frozen body was discovered wrapped in trash bags under a Boardwalk ramp. Police Chief Robert Davenport said house-to-house interviews were being conducted among residents in the vicinity of the Boardwalk and Garfield Avenue, where the baby's body was found by a couple walking on the beach about 3:30 p.m. Saturday. Local schools, health service agencies and hospitals also were being contacted in an effort to gain information about any recent births, Davenport said.

DAY AFTER DAY, Leo the lion sat in a sidecar bolted to a speeding cart, going around and around the Motordrome Wall of Death's rickety planks on the Wildwood boardwalk, the salty ocean air blowing through his thick mane as children squealed with excitement. While Leo captured all that attention, a lesser lion named Tuffy lay caged on the boardwalk by day and beneath it at night. Tuffy never felt the wind whipping though his scroungy mane on the Motordrome's steep wooden walls.

A gas main underneath the Atlantic City Boardwalk burst into flames yesterday, scattering pedestrians and forcing evacuations of nearby buildings, fire officials said. The two-alarm fire broke out about 3:15 p.m. in front of the Ripley's Believe It Or Not Museum near New York Avenue, said Atlantic City Deputy Fire Chief Stanley Baker. Firefighters used a backhoe to pull up the wood planks to reach the source of the fire. They brought it under control in about 90 minutes, while billowing smoke clogged the museum, nearby storefronts and the Atlantic Palace, a high-rise hotel on the Boardwalk, Baker said.

A drunken joyride along the Atlantic City boardwalk on Monday afternoon left John Thompson, 28, of Staten Island, N.Y., in police custody and a 33-year-old man hospitalized, police said. About 12:40 p.m., Atlantic City Police spotted Thompson driving on the boardwalk next to the Trump Plaza casino near Florida Avenue and signaled for him to stop the car. Thompson sped nearly a mile south on the boards until he got off at Providence Avenue, then led police on a chase that ended at the toll plaza for the Atlantic City Expressway.

It was supposed to be a pleasant day trip to Atlantic City. Anne Marie and John Kotlowski of North Arlington, N.J., were going to have lunch, play the slot machines, and just while away a rainy Friday afternoon. "We had just arrived, and we were going over to the Ocean One Mall to get something to eat," John Kotlowski said yesterday. "Then someone said, 'Look out!' and I looked up to see a van racing down the Boardwalk. "It skinned me and hit her. " Anne Marie Kotlowski was struck by the van as it careened down a 35-block stretch of the Atlantic City Boardwalk Friday afternoon.

Atlantic City authorities were trying to determine who drew swastikas and wrote racial slurs and lewd remarks on a pillar near the Boardwalk over the weekend. An officer noticed the graffiti near the Columbia Avenue pavilion during his patrol Monday morning and notified the division that investigates bias crimes, said Detective Sgt. Angelo Maimone. The graffiti, which had been scribbled with a black marker, were removed after authorities photographed the images. Maimone said that it appeared to be an isolated incident, but that information had been forwarded to the Atlantic County Prosecutor's Office and the U.S. Department of Justice for review.

ATLANTIC CITY - Rolling chairs came into vogue in this seaside resort in the coquettish 1880s, when no Boardwalk promenade was complete without a parasol and a spin in one of the stylish contraptions - especially between Easter and Labor Day. The dainty wicker conveyances, pushed by human "operators," are so associated with Atlantic City that they are featured in the 19th-century Shore re-creation at Walt Disney World's Boardwalk Resort....

The motherly tone is somewhere between "Eat your peas" and "Take a jacket. " Lois Stangel's recorded voice, imploring riders to "Watch the tram car, please," has become almost as synonymous with the Wildwood boardwalk experience as the blue-and-yellow sightseer trams themselves. In a few weeks, though, officials here might boastfully ask riders to "watch this tram car, please" as they unveil four spiffy new ones, the first cars added to the fleet in more than 40 years. Besides the requisite publicity and fanfare, though, boardwalk visitors might not even notice anything different about the cars.

If you haven't yet biked the Wildwood boardwalk, put it on your bucket list. Or at least your sand-pail list. The seedy, loud place where you overindulge your senses by night becomes a sleepy land of $1.99 breakfast specials at dawn. Bumping merrily over the boards is a simple, childlike pleasure. And the 4-mile round-trip helps assuage your guilt over last night's fudge and funnel cakes. If you've already been there and done that (enough people do it that traffic jams are common from about 9:30 a.m. until the boardwalk closes to bikers at 11 a.m.)

The widow of a man who was killed Aug. 6 in Atlantic City when a minivan shot up a ramp and crushed him as he sunned himself on a Boardwalk bench sued the motorist yesterday in federal court in Atlantic City. The widow, Phyllis Rando, of the 2000 block of Bay Drive in Northfield City, Atlantic County, contends that Irwin Cowan, 76, who was driving the minivan, was careless and negligent and caused the death of her husband, Anthony Rando, 52. Atlantic City police said Rando was sitting on a metal and wood bench about 1 p.m. when the vehicle roared up the ramp and knocked him through a comfort station's four-inch-thick masonry wall.