Empire City — The Lasker Avenue Merchants' Association float has not been returned to its storage lot since the Founders' Week parade of the thirtieth of August, and has been sighted twice.
On both occasions it was moving south at a steady four miles an hour. On both occasions it was unattended.
The float is fourteen feet long, built on a flatbed trailer, and depicts the founding of the city in papier-mâché. It has no engine. It has never had an engine. It is towed.
Lasker Avenue is flat. The Department of Buildings surveyed it in 1997 and again, at this newspaper's request, on Friday. It remains flat.
The Waving
The float carries a figure representing the city's first harbourmaster, whose right arm is mounted on a hinge so that it may be waved by a member of the association walking alongside and pulling a cord.
The cord was recovered from the storage lot on the first of September. It is in the association's possession and has been photographed, this being the second photograph the Times has successfully obtained this week.
Both sightings report the arm waving.
“I would not want to make more of that than is there,” said association president Dorothea Villaseñor-Pike. “It is a hinge. Hinges move. There was a wind on the ninth.”
There was no wind on the ninth. The Times has checked its own weather box, which for the ninth of September recorded conditions as “still, and pleasant for the time of year.”
The Position of the Police
The Empire City Police Department has declined to open a file, on the grounds that the float has not been reported stolen by anyone with standing to report it. The association's insurance covers the float only while it is stationary.
A sergeant at the Lasker Avenue precinct, who asked not to be named and then gave his name twice, described the float's movements as “a parade of one” and said that so long as it kept to four miles an hour and stayed off the sidewalk the department had no view.
Residents wishing to report a sighting are asked by the association to note the time, the direction, and whether the arm was in motion.
The association has asked that they not follow it.