The late Harry Sommerfield's body is buried in a Brooklyn cemetery - but his tombstone is among the many pieces of rubble illegally dumped in a Brooklyn park.
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Read Part 2: City's Park 'Row'
Hidden deep within a weed-infested, garbage-strewn section of Dreier-Offerman Park in Coney Island, a Post reporter recently uncovered the discarded tombstone of the Manhattan underwear salesman who died 70 years ago.
Geoffrey Croft, president of the watchdog group New York City Park Advocates, said, "I've seen and heard stories about all sorts of things people dump in our parks, but a tombstone? That's a first."
The Bloomberg administration says parks are in better shape than they've been in over 40 years, but a Post investigation published Sunday found many neglected areas of parkland used as hideouts for rampant drug use, prostitution, homeless camps, and even "chop shops" to strip stolen cars.
Illegal dumping, however, is also among the biggest issues facing the parks system. The Post, while inspecting 70 parks over nine months, found many barren areas littered with items like abandoned cars and boats, construction debris, opened steel safes, some Vegas-style slot machines and Sommerfield's tombstone.
Sommerfield was buried two miles away from Dreier-Offerman at Washington Cemetery in Bensonhurst after dying in 1938, two months shy of his 61st birthday.
His desecrated gravestone was spotted near the Bay 44th Street section of the 77-acre park, covered in weeds between a broken police barricade and a rusted box spring.
It calls Sommerfield a "beloved husband and father." It's been replaced at the cemetery with a larger stone within a family plot.
He was an underwear salesman, a lifelong New Yorker and son of German immigrants, according to his death certificate.
Cemetery workers said it's unclear whether the original stone - which apparently has been lying the park since it was replaced at least 30 years ago - was stolen, then dumped, or if a monument maker replacing it decided to save some bucks on trash fees by tossing the original in the park.
Attempts to reach family members who knew Sommerfield were unsuccessful, and cemetery workers said they had no contact information for the family or the maker of the second gravestone.
Dreier-Offerman is also filled with homeless camps and drug addicts, and parts of it include weeds more than 12 feet high. The park is also littered with tires, construction debris and rusted cars with license plates dating back more than 20 years.
Even a creek that runs through the park that is supposed to separate Coney Island from the rest of Brooklyn is waterless and filled with debris and cars.
Despite the blatant blight, the park should be seeing better days ahead. It is slated to undergo a $40 million makeover by 2011, city officials said.
Regarding illegal dumping in parks citywide, Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe said, "you might find an abandoned car in a park that was dumped 15 years ago, but it's quite obvious that the average city park is better than it was 15 years ago and much better than it was 30 years ago."
