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Trouble’s brewing in Staten Island this St. Patrick’s Day.
A borough coffee shop is closing its doors early Sunday to avoid the “next-level” insanity that hordes of boozed-up teenagers wrought at last year’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
Beans & Leaves owner Megan Coppola doesn’t want to chance another year of hammered teens who were sick on her floor, broke her toilet, and brawled in the entranceway of her West Brighton shop.
“It was wild. It was next level,” Coppola told The Post ahead of the annual parade.
“It got to the point where I was like, ‘I can’t do this.’ It’s not a matter of making the money. It’s a matter of your coming into my store — a family environment –, and you’re trashing my place.”
Coppola made the hard decision last week when organizers announced the parade would proceed despite the historic levels of now dumped on the borough.
The annual Irish fete has always been lush with liquor and underage drinking, but the mayhem spiraled out of control last year.
Kids were hammered hours before the parade’s 12 p.m. start time — and multiple even spewed their guts across her coffee shop floor, Coppola said.
The hoodlums clogged her toilet and even continued climbing over chairs Coppola had positioned to block access to the bathroom, she said.
“There was a fight in the threshold of my store. These two girls went at it. One of them went into my front window. I don’t know how she didn’t break it,” Coppola recalled. Her decision to shutter was first reported by the Staten Island Advance.
“A cop’s radio was stolen and thrown on the street because they tried to step in and break it up, and then they get attacked!”
The situation got so serious that Coppola decided to shut the shop down early and lock the doors — inviting only friends and young kids to hunker down inside to escape the rampage occurring outside the doors.
“I was literally plucking the kids off the street and having them come into the store. I was feeding them, and I was giving them drinks, and I was just like, ‘Stay here!’” said Coppola.
Numerous kids were put in cuffs at last year’s parade, and some were given treatment by EMS, but no arrests were made, according to the NYPD.
Pictures of cops emptying out confiscated BORGS — a homemade “blackout rage gallon” cocktail popular with Gen Z — also went viral last year.
Parade organizers and community stakeholders have been brainstorming for months to curb a repeat of last year’s chaos, and District Attorney Michael McMahon launched a social media campaign this month, warning kids that they would be arrested this year if they succumbed to “beer pressure.”
A survey conducted by a civic group last year showed that underage drinking at the parade was a top concern for the neighborhood — with one person reporting that a kid defecated in front of a house.
Some locals were wary that any real punishments would be handed out to the teens, saying that the underage drinking culture on Staten Island was normalized and even encouraged by parents.
“Parents were dropping kids off for these giant drinking parties, like some really wild things that you would think ‘why is this happening?” said one West Brighton dad, who asked to remain anonymous.
“There’s like a parade of parents dropping their kids off with alcohol.”
The insanity ruined the experience for the general community and is deterring many from attending this year out of caution.
“All of us had these horrible experiences with underage drinking. It got really out of hand last year,” The parent continued.
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