When friends came to clean out the apartment of Howard O'Brien, the longtime neighborhood bartender who passed away last week, they found his Yale University master's degree diploma still rolled up in its original packaging.
Friends said that was typical for a man who, despite his extensive education and vast accomplishments, chose to spend nearly 25 years behind the bar at Sophie's on East 5th Street, one of the last true local haunts left in the East Village.
"Maybe he took it out to look at it once and then put it back in the tube. That's how nonchalant he was about something like that," said Bob Corton, 57, the founder and former owner of Sophie's, who grew up with O'Brien in Westchester and helped empty his East 3rd Street apartment last week.
"He possessed knowledge that most people don't even come across today."
Fed up with drunken antics on the Lower East Side, a neighborhood business association hopes to get off-duty cops to walk what would essentially be the city's first booze beat.
If approved by the NYPD, the moonlighting crime fighters -- in uniform -- would patrol the beer-soaked lanes between Houston and Delancey streets Thursday nights and on weekends.
They wouldn't be permitted to work inside or at the front doors of the many local gin mills, but they could lasso sidewalk lushes.
"We think having a cop on the beat . . . would really help nightlife establishments be quieter and safer," said Lower East Side Business Improvement District Executive Director Bob Zuckerman.
And barflies voiced concern that the off-duty cops could become the fun police.
"This is a noisy city," music writer Nicole Wasilewicz, 25, said outside Pianos on Ludlow Street. "You come here to make some noise."
