BROKEN NEWS: Streetsblog’s 20th Birthday Street Fair Is Canceled

It pains me to write this — actually, it really really does pain me to write this.

Owing to a catastrophic and perhaps career-ending hockey injury last weekend, I am forced to announce that Streetsblog’s 20th Anniversary street fair — which had been scheduled for June 13 — has been canceled.

It hurts, but with one arm, I can’t do the organizational preparations to ensure that everyone has a great time as we celebrate reclaiming space from the automobile. And by “organization preparations,” I obviously mean getting the refreshments into an icy cooler and then getting that cooler inside a cargo bike and then getting that cargo bike to the party.

I know there will be some haters carping that I am exaggerating the extent of my injury, but I would first remind you that no hockey player wants to ever admit he or she has been injured in any way. A guy once broke his stick slashing me across the wrist, but I went out for my next shift as if nothing happened, even as a lump rose on my arm like out of a Looney Toons cartoon.

If you want to view for yourself the May 23 incident from this year’s Chelsea Challenge tournament, click here. I’m number 14 in yellow hustling against all odds (and against even the accepted definition of “hustling”) to make a play with my team down 1-0. You’ll see me at around :10 trying to get into the offensive zone to intercept a blind pass from one defender to another … and getting tripped into the boards.

You may notice that the sequence ends with me flopped on the ice like a champion bull after the matador has issued the fatal estoque. But I was definitely not taking a dive for a whistle; in fact, I direct you to the X-ray at the top of this page, which is the actual image of the dislocated shoulder.

Doctors eventually did get my humeral head and my glenoid back on speaking terms using techniques that have not advanced dramatically since the 15th century. Days later, however, an MRI showed two additional fractures (a 2.3-centimeter crack along the posterolateral aspect of the humeral head with associated bone marrow edema and a 1-centimeter crack along the anterior inferior aspect of the glenoid), plus some “glenohumeral joint effusion,” an “osseous Bankart lesion with complex circumferential tearing of the labrum,” “a full-thickness partial width tear of the anteriormost fibers of the supraspinatus,” a “grade 1 strain of the deltoid muscle” (which at least reassured me that I have a deltoid muscle), and “mild acromioclavicular joint arthrosis.”

In short, prognosis negative.

So we’re rescheduling for a date to be determined in September (updates will be here) when everyone is back from doing all their summer things and I, hopefully, will be back from eight weeks of excruciating physical therapy and wrangling health care companies.

Meanwhile, the folks who run the open street on 31st Avenue promise to keep calm and carry on.

“We’ll be here, enjoying the summer outdoors with our neighbors, and awaiting the return of Gersh Kuntzman’s shoulder,” said John Surico, one of the many hard-working volunteers who keep the avenue humming with everything but cars.