As if electrified sidewalks weren’t already bad enough, skirt-wearing pedestrians now must worry about peeping toms working from under the subway grates:

At first, it looked as if it might be a bomb. The truth, it turned out, was not as dangerous but was alarming nevertheless: someone had put a video camera below a street grate on the Upper East Side, apparently placed to look up the skirts of women walking past, the police said.

A passer-by spotted the camera on Tuesday on a shelf above a subway catwalk, about three feet below street level, rigged to a battery pack and pointed straight up on the south side of 88th Street just west of Lexington Avenue. After the passer-by called the police, the bomb squad arrived, and a technician dropped onto the catwalk, among cigarette butts, bottle caps and gum wrappers, to examine a camera connected to a digital video recorder, the police said.

The discovery repulsed women who live or work near the corner.

. . .

“I guess I have to be a little more careful now walking on the street.”

The (diminished but still present) threat of mugging, iPod heists, electrified sidewalks — how much more careful can one possibly be?