Brief Homecoming for a Pier 25 Legend By Carl Glassman Poppa Neutrino (aka David Pearlman), the man who built a raft out of scrap on the Tribeca waterfront and sailed it across the Atlantic, returned to Pier 25 last month. It was a brief stay, and one, he says, that was rudely interrupted. Neutrino, 70, along with his family and followers, were well known locally as the residents of homely, hand-built rafts moored off of Pier 25. The “Floating Neutrinos” left Tribeca in 1998 and made international news that year when they sailed one of those rafts across the Atlantic. Since then, the Neutrinos have built new rafts and taken them to six countries, and many disparate points. But when Neutrino returned to Pier 25 recently, it was to live not on a boat but in a big wooden box on wheels.   “I came back here to live on the street and show the homeless that you don’t have to live in cardboard boxes,” said Neutrino, whose life on the water was meant to demonstrate alternative housing for the homeless. Neutrino touted the sturdy construction of his box, saying it was a model for protecting people living on the street. He got to put it to the test on the morning of Oct. 17. According to Neutrino, he was inside the box on Pier 25 when Park Enforcement Patrol officers, the security arm of the city’s Parks Department, shook it violently. “They were like the Gestapo,” said Neutrino. “There was not even the most rudimentary attempt at communication. They just said ‘Come out of that, come out of that’ and started ripping it apart.” Neutrino said he did not come out because the officers would not identify themselves. Instead, he said, they punched a hole in the door and ran a pole through the box. “It was like a sword going into a long magician’s case,” he said. Neutrino called the police from a cell phone inside the box and packed up and left after they arrived. “They don’t want a shanty town here and I understand that,” Neutrino said. The park police are under contract with the Hudson River Park Trust. Alex Dudley, an HRPT vice president who oversees the police, said he doubts Neutrino’s assertion that the police did not identify themselves. “They were uniformed officers with big shiny gold badges,” he said. “I don’t know how you miss the Park Enforcement Patrol.” Squatting in the park, Dudley emphasized, is not allowed. But Bob Townley, director of Manhattan Youth who leases the pier from the state, was not surprised by the incident. He complained that the actions of PEP officers are “arbitrary” and they tend to “converge and make a scene” over minor incidents. “They need to be trained in the law,” he said. Townley’s views appeared to be supported by the actions of a park officer who declared the pier “private property” and off limits without a permit when a Trib reporter arrived to cover the Neutrino incident. The officer threatened to confiscate the reporter’s camera and would not give his name or answer questions. The reporter returned to the pier when Dudley arrived and intervened. Neutrino, however, appears happy to put the ordeal behind him. Reached by cell phone recently, he was heading towards Central Park and “living the best life I’ve lived in the last 30 years.” “I’m just making a statement,” Neutrino said, “that I would rather live in a cart in New York City than live anywhere else in the world.”