The Times investigates the abstract driftwood formations that have been cropping up along the Hudson River near the Upper West Side:

Among the many mysteries of the universe - Stonehenge, black holes, alien corn mazes - the driftwood sculptures along the Hudson River in Manhattan have to qualify among the most intriguing, at least to the many bikers, joggers, fishermen and picnickers who pass them every day.

Since at least the spring, someone has been gathering branches worn smooth and silvery by the river, and assembling them into abstract designs. Some incorporate delicately balanced stones; some are tied with found rope. Some are small, others 6 to 8 feet tall. They are anchored among the boulders that line the river from about West 115th Street north almost to the Fairway supermarket at 132nd Street.

Most regulars have no doubt this is art. Yet one Friday in early July, Parks Department cleanup crews uprooted every one of the sculptures and tossed them on the sidewalk to be carted away, as if they were trash.

Over the last three weeks, new driftwood sculptures have slowly risen, taking the place of the old ones.

The strangest part is that nobody seems to know the identity of the artist.

Sad to say, but these pieces are in some ways more interesting than a lot of public art in the city.

But lest you call the B2 article “fluff,” know that writer Anemona Hartocollis seems to have gone to some lengths to figure out the artist’s identity:

It seems possible that the artist lives a double life, artist by night and, say, tennis pro by day.

This loosely describes an apparently homeless man who rides his bike every morning from Upper Manhattan to the Trump development at 72nd Street, where he proceeds to hit a few tennis balls, with considerable skill, on the courts under the West Side Highway.

It was afternoon, well after tennis time, and he was perched on a rock at the latitude of 120th Street, staring pensively at the river, at an intimate distance from a driftwood sculpture resembling a scarecrow. Was he the artist, someone asked. The tennis player looked startled for a moment, then shook his head and said, in an East European accent, “Maintain the law.”

The plot thickens . . . and apologies to ESPN’s Dan Patrick for the silly post title.

As trustafarians artificially inflate prices across the city, regular working-class joes are forced to pilfer household goods from their parents, as reported by the Times’ Style Section:

A generation ago, adult children visiting their parents’ homes might have left with a Tupperware container of lasagna. Today, many of them stealthily make off with toiletries, groceries, sometimes clothing and even furniture. It is an apparently widespread practice, born of a sense of entitlement among young adults - and usually amusedly tolerated by parents - that gives new meaning to the phrase “home shopping.” Like most adults, the pilferers have set up their own households, but they seem not to have given up the expectation that their parents should provide for them in certain ways. They loot their parents’ houses to cut costs, or because they would rather not pay for incidentals. Or because they want things with sentimental value.

Sometimes the children ask if they can take things. Often they do not.

. . .

Stephen Kunken, 34, an actor in New York who is an admitted “pillager” of his parents’ possessions, said he rationalized that his parents had too much stuff and that he was both “trimming the fat” and “liberating” things. “I thought: ‘These poor things. These are never going to get used. I’m going to liberate them and bring them into the city,’ ” he said.

Through the years Mr. Kunken has taken briefcases, a slide projector, an electric toothbrush, razors, blank tapes, paper towels, soap and bottles of wine.

His parents did not know their wine was missing until he served it to them at a party at his Brooklyn apartment. “We had our own wine that he stole,” his mother, Ginny Kunken, said. “It was very nice that he invited us.”

His parents are accustomed to finding things missing. “What have they taken?” said her husband, Fred Kunken, a dentist from Upper Brookville, N.Y., referring to Stephen and his 37-year-old brother, Jeffrey. “What haven’t they taken? They’ve taken just about every bit of my clothing, from my underwear and socks to –”

“Bathing suits,” his wife interjected, laughing.

“All of a sudden my razors disappear,” Dr. Kunken said. “Shaving cream disappears. It’s gotten to the point that if I see them coming, and if it’s something I just got that I want to wear, I hide it.”

To be sure, it’s quite possible that the subjects’ professions have something to do with it. Age, Sex, Profession and Neighborhood of interviewees in article follows:

• F, 24, Fashion Model, Manhattan
• M, 34, Actor, Brooklyn
• F, 26, Musician, Brooklyn
• F, 31, Actress, [No Neighborhood Mentioned]
• F, 24, “campus recruiter for a financial institution,” [No Neighborhood Mentioned]

You see where we’re going with this . . .

Is there any end in sight? Researchers are optimistic:

The phrase “emerging adulthood” does imply that these sticky fingers will eventually become independent. Is there a specific age by which one should finally accept the responsibility of paying one’s way? Psychologists and economists point to the early or mid-30’s.

“By the early 30’s the assistance that kids are receiving from their parents dissipates strongly,” said Robert F. Schoeni, an associate professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “The kids are establishing their careers, they’re getting better-paid jobs, getting married.”

Ms. [Nicole] Atkins, who has decorated her Brooklyn apartment with shot glasses, candles, Mexican marionettes and boxing gloves from her parents’ house in Neptune, N.J., says she will cease her home shopping once she gets married and has a family.

“If I had kids and a husband, and I was still taking stuff from my parents,” she said, “that would be really lame.”

The Times does a post-mortem on Sunday’s tour bus terror scare, noting in particular that the problem with keeping an eye out for dark-skinned men with backpacks is that there are an awful lot of dark-skinned men with backpacks in New York:

According to the police, the Gray Line supervisor told the captain that the five men had aroused the concerns of a Gray Line ticket agent at the Waldorf-Astoria, where the men had boarded bus 320. The ticket agent, the police said, had told the supervisor that the men had purchased their tickets in advance; that they carried backpacks; and that they wore something else - perhaps fanny packs - that caused bulges to appear around their waists.

Bonus: Perhaps the British tourists were confused when police told them their “fanny packs” were suspicious?

The Village Voice examines the last great New York taboo topic — Trustafarians:

Sex with strangers. Drug abuse. Mental illness. Among educated twentysomethings reared in the therapy culture, every personal scandal is fair game at the dinner table. Except for one: coming from money.

“Please don’t tell anyone about my trust fund, I really don’t want that information being passed around,” one young New Yorker e-mailed me. “Oh, so I’m the bad guy?” another heir asked warily.

It may sound strange that in the most affluent society in the world, in the richest city in the world, Richie Riches would be ashamed of their inherited fortunes. After all, President Bush repealed the estate tax just for them, the luckiest 2 percent of the population!

But America still sees itself as an egalitarian society, and wealth is still a loaded issue. Those who bear the dreaded “trustafarian” tag say they have problems with guilt, embarrassment, and most importantly, figuring out what to do with their lives.

All of which sets up the devastating conclusion: getting a job helps one “get direction” in life. Say it ain’t so!

A group of five Sikh tourists deemed suspicious by a bus driver were escorted off the double-decker tour bus they were sightseeing in and forced to kneel handcuffed on Broadway while police determined they were, in fact, just tourists:

The five British tourists left town yesterday to continue their U.S. trip, and one said the Sunday incident didn’t spoil their time in the city.

“These things happen, don’t they?” said the man, who gave his name as Jas, 39. “We have no hard feelings. It certainly made our trip different, but didn’t ruin it at all.”

The tourists were all members of the Sikh religion who grew up together in Birmingham, England. Jas said he planned to return to New York in December to celebrate his 40th birthday. “I’m definitely coming back,” he said.

Meanwhile — surprise, surprise — crime on the subway has gone down since police have begun randomly searching riders’ bags:

Subway crime has plummeted 23% so far this month, compared with same time period last year, officials said yesterday. That’s helped bring the year-to-date felony increase, which was 18% at the end of March, down to about 2%. The NYPD has flooded the subways since the July 7 transit blasts in London, and began random bag searches last week.

“The criminals are staying away,” MTA board member Barry Feinstein said after a Metropolitan Transportation Authority committee meeting. “They are in more danger than they ever were of being caught and being prosecuted.”

Bonus: Sikh Terrorism fact sheet

Slate’s Explainer column attempts to uncover whether randomly searching subway riders’ bags is legal. It seems to hinge on whether the searches fulfill a “special need” such as public safety.

Even though Amtrak sometimes makes you want to scream, “I’d much rather pay for 15 minutes of war in Iraq than take care of your $1.5 billion operating budget deficit,” there is a right way and a wrong way to express your dissatisfaction with its service. Yesterday offered an example of the wrong way:

A man who falsely claimed to have a bomb in his bag prompted the authorities to evacuate Pennsylvania Station for more than an hour yesterday, causing delays for travelers across the Northeast and punctuating a tiresome week of increased security in New York City’s subway stations.

During a dispute with an Amtrak ticket agent, the man, whom the police identified as Raul Claudio, 43, of the Bronx, placed a bag on a ticket counter and said a bomb was inside, the police said. The threat was unsubstantiated, but caused personnel including National Guardsmen in military fatigues to clear the station just after noon.

By way of advice, gentlemen, women do not find it appealing when you lose it in front of Amtrak employees — and trust me, I’ve been there:

“When we were in line, he said he had a bomb in the bag,” said a woman who had accompanied Mr. Claudio to the station who would identify herself only as Milagros, 46. She said that Mr. Claudio, who was pulling a suitcase on wheels, had become upset when the ticket agent could not retrieve his reservation.

. . .

At the Amtrak ticket counter yesterday, Mr. Claudio threw a sandwich in a bag against a wall and left the line after the agent could not find his reservation, “and then he got more mad,” said Milagros, who said she was his former girlfriend.

After he entered a different line, he was taken aside for questioning by the police. She said that she did not hear him make a threat to a ticket agent, but that people in the line may have heard his earlier remark to her about a bomb in his bag, though she knew he was not serious. “His mouth always gets him into trouble,” she said. [Emphasis added]

The 24-hour-a-day MTA pays clerks to sit in stations that don’t provide service all night. Daily News notes outrage:

The TA spends more than $100,000 a year to keep people in booths around the clock at the 145th St. and 148th St. stations on the No. 3 line - even though the last train leaves 148th at 11 p.m. on weekdays.

The first train doesn’t pull out until after 5 a.m. the next day.

Yet unharried clerks sit in their cubicles during those quiet hours, as well as on the weekend, when trains run even less often.

That’s 45 hours a week per station when clerks can sell you a MetroCard - but you can’t catch a train.

“It’s very quiet, and that’s how I like it,” a clerk at the 148th St. station said just past midnight one recent morning. “I get paid by the hour, not by commission, and somebody has to mind the store.”

The top rate for a token booth clerk is $22 an hour.

And for that investigative touch, the News stayed up all night monitoring the scene:

A night spent in the station revealed a few interesting characters in predawn New York. It also was a battle against boredom that the clerk had mastered. He mixes a small amount of paperwork with listening to the radio, reading newspapers and talking to other clerks on the telephone.

. . .

12:35: The last No. 3 train to Harlem pulls into the station about 10 minutes late. Seven riders get off. They pass two men on a bench on the otherwise vacant platform.

One man is hopelessly drunk, his head cocked so far back that if his eyes were open, he would be staring at the ceiling.

The other is Alexander Martin, who takes out a Styrofoam container of fast food and proceeds to have an early-morning snack in the sweltering heat.

1:00: Martin shuffles up the stairs from the platform and pushes through a turnstile and stops with a look of total confusion. A subway car cleaner just told him the next southbound train wasn’t pulling out until 5:03 a.m.

Martin, meanwhile, explains that he fell asleep on a train and missed his stop.

1:25: Martin is still outside waiting for a shuttle bus. “And for this they want to raise the fare,” he said. “The gotta be out of their rabbit-a– mind!”

New York Magazine’s Real Estate section reports on the Corcoranization of post-Contact yet still “bodega-heavy” Prospect-Lefferts Gardens:

For years, Manhattan expats have been creeping around the edges of Prospect Park, from the Slope into Kensington and Prospect Heights. Now the eastern edge of the park—Prospect–Lefferts Gardens, a neighborhood few of them had probably heard of till recently—is fair game. “It’s become a destination for Manhattanites,” agrees Aguayo & Huebener associate broker and local resident Mark Dicus. Corcoran’s Joy Weiner, [new resident Jason Oliver] Nixon’s longtime agent, says she has sold six properties there in the past few years, all to former Manhattanites.

. . .

Brokers say the friendly vibe and handsome houses make up for some of Prospect–Lefferts Gardens’ shortcomings: Graffiti mars storefronts on the bodega-heavy thoroughfares of Flatbush and Rogers Avenues, and the schools aren’t the best. Still, says Weiner, “sophisticated buyers are willing to go to undeveloped neighborhoods for the architecture.” Besides, with developers circling abandoned warehouses on Empire Boulevard and constructing residential buildings such as the one slated for Hawthorne Street, yet another Brooklyn-neighborhood makeover can’t be too far off. “I’ll be bringing lots of my tastemaking friends to Lefferts Gardens,” says Nixon. “It’ll be the next best thing.”

All of which begs the question: Where aren’t displaced Manhattanites moving to?

As authorities worry about suiciders in the subways, meteorologists are becoming increasingly concerned about the prospect of devastating hurricanes as well:

It turns out that the region’s emergency managers aren’t only worrying about terrorism these days. The big topic of discussion at the Melville, Long Island, Hilton was hurricanes. And the strong consensus is that the metropolitan region is due for a big one. Overdue, in fact.

The 1938 Long Island Express, a borderline category-4 hurricane that plowed into West Hampton, causing widespread death and devastation across New York, New Jersey and New England, was the last major hurricane to hit the region. Statistically speaking, “a storm of that magnitude may repeat every 70 to 80 years or so,” [Director of Watch Command at New York City's Office of Emergency Management Mike] Lee says. “So, do the math. Whether it happens this year, next year, or in five years, it’s going to happen.” And with this year’s hurricane season forecasted to be even busier and more dangerous than last year’s record-setter, “It’s just a matter of time,” Lee says.

As to which areas will be hardest hit, it’s basically everywhere:

To get a sense of the damage that storm surge can do to New York City, call 311 and ask them to send you a full-color copy of the New York City Hurricane Evacuation Map. It is a truly mind-boggling document. If a storm like the Long Island Express makes a direct hit on the city, everything below Broome Street will be inundated, some parts under as much as 20 and 30 feet of water. Chelsea and Greenwich Village are completely flooded, with the Hudson spilling over all the way to 7th Avenue. Likewise, the East River and East Village become one, with ocean water surging all the way to 1st Avenue. If you haven’t evacuated before the storm, forget it. During the storm, Manhattan’s east- and west-side highways vanish. Tunnels and bridges become unusable.

The outer boroughs also get hit hard. Opposed to that new Ikea being built on the waterfront in Red Hook? Don’t worry. There’s a decent chance it won’t be there after a moderate-size hurricane. Residents of Williamsburg-Greenpoint should seek out a male and female of each species and get in their arks. In a kind of one-two-punch effect, a major hurricane will push ocean water down from the Long Island Sound into the Upper East Side, South Bronx and northern Queens, flooding those areas severely. Vast stretches of southern Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island will be devastated. The map shows Atlantic Ocean storm surge reaching as far inland as Flatbush, just south of Prospect Park, with 31.3 feet of water atop Howard Beach.

Makes some nitwit in a bomb vest seem rather innocuous, no?

New York City Police have begun random searches of large bags and packages on the subway in response to the apparent (botched?) followup attacks in London. The response has been mixed:

City straphangers became the first transit riders in the nation yesterday to be subjected to random police searches, after a new round of explosions rattled London.

The searches, which began at a few stations yesterday but are expected to spread throughout the region today, quickly drew the ire of civil libertarians, while riders and security experts seemed split on whether the move would ward off would-be terrorists.

“If it keeps us safe, that’s fine by me,” said Heather Falco, 23, waiting for a No. 5 train home to the Bronx. “You don’t want the same thing happening here that happened in London.”

. . .

“Between the terrorists and the police, I am being doubly attacked,” said Luis Arias, 34, a Bronx carpenter of Peruvian descent who got searched yesterday. “It’s discriminatory.”

The Daily News adds more rider response, including this:

“Not everyone wants to blow up the station,” said Michelle Johnson, 37, of Freeport, L.I. “Don’t judge everyone.”

Meanwhile, the Times notes the murky legal issues the city will be taking on.

And, just so you know, if the cops search your bags and find anything illegal that isn’t related to terrorism, you’re still busted.

To update our lead story from yesterday, the two men ticketed for literally standing in a “No Standing” zone have had their summonses summarily dismissed:

Two men slapped with $50 tickets for simply standing in a fire zone in a city park were let off the hook yesterday shortly after Mayor Bloomberg scoffed at the silly summonses.

“It boggles the mind,” the mayor said, laughing as he responded to a Daily News story yesterday about the tickets given out to the pedestrians Sunday at Hudson River Park.

“I’ll talk to the Parks Department,” he added. “Let’s say the matter is under investigation.”

A short time after the mayor spoke, the Parks Department - which initially defended the tickets - said the fines had been dismissed.

And the toughest job in the world today — although not as tough as the one he faced yesterday — is being the person who has to back down from such idiocy:

Parks officials said Tuesday that the signs didn’t refer to cars - as is commonly the case around the city. Yesterday, they did a sharp reversal.

“The section of Hudson River Park where the incident occurred is designed for public use, and the summonses were issued inappropriately,” said Parks spokesman Warner Johnston. “The initial report that the ‘No Standing’ signs were for pedestrians was incorrect.”

Glad we got that one straightened out!

Two men were ticketed Sunday for stopping in a “No Standing” zone. Problem is, they were pedestrians:

Two men who had just disembarked from a thank-you cruise for gay pride volunteers were stunned when they were slapped with $50 tickets for “no stopping or standing” in a fire zone.

They weren’t in a car.

“It’s so ridiculous that it’s hilarious,” said a perplexed Jason Eng, 25, of Manhattan who received the summons Sunday evening at Hudson River Park.

“I can’t believe this actually happened,” the software programmer said. “There’s no reason I should get a ticket. … We were walking to the subway.”

Dennis Spafford, 27, an organizer with the Manhattan-based nonprofit group Heritage of Pride, and Eng, a volunteer for the organization, had just spent the day celebrating with fellow volunteers on the weekly Sea Tea gay party cruise aboard the Queen of Hearts riverboat.

Eng and Spafford were among the last to leave as they said goodbye to other volunteers at Pier 40 in the West Village.

About 10:30 p.m., the pair began walking north through the river-hugging park, which is open until 1 a.m., toward the Christopher St. subway station, they said.

Eng said he and Spafford stopped walking and stood near a gated Port Authority vent in the park, where they talked for a few minutes.

Two signs on the gate read: “No stopping or standing - Fire Zone.”

Suddenly, a Parks Department patrol car pulled up behind them. “What are you guys doing here?” one of the two officers asked, Eng said, so he and Spafford decided they should resume walking.

Then the Parks officer on the passenger side got out of the car and screamed, “Don’t you dare walk away from us!” Eng said.

Eng said he and Spafford questioned why they were being stopped and the officer who yelled at them said, “I can arrest you.”

The men handed over their IDs to the park cops, and both were given tickets for “failure to comply with signs,” a $50 offense, Eng said.

You think your job is bad? Try being the spokesperson who has to defend this:

Parks Department spokesman Warner Johnston said the sign is aimed at keeping parkgoers away from “certain areas of parks that are service areas that we prefer the public not loiter at.”

He insisted, “It doesn’t refer to cars.”

But Eng and Spafford said the sign looks like it’s meant to keep people from parking by the gate.

“It’s totally a road sign,” Stafford said. “If it were for pedestrians, it would say, ‘No loitering.’”

What can you say? At least they weren’t towed.

Small victories: Adam Gopnik manages to write seriously about terrorism in this week’s New Yorker without mentioning gourmet foodstuffs! No, really!

. . . so take off all your clothes:

The possibility of rain today may ease the pain of the oppressive spell of hot, muggy, sticky weather that saw yesterday’s temperatures hit 90 but made it feel like it was over 100 degrees.

Then again, it may not.

“You want to take all your clothes off,” said Hesham Gamal of Queens, a hot dog vendor working a nine-hour shift yesterday outside Madison Square Garden.

Then there’s this:

Vicky Jeudy, a 24-year-old aspiring actress from Queens, said, “I feel like I’m in Arizona this week.”

Doesn’t she understand that’s a dry heat?!

Meanwhile, the Times — in its own inimitable style — develops a literary angle, of sorts:

Women trudged by wearing see-through shirts, some men no shirts at all. The basketball courts were left to the ghosts, and the sunlit sidewalks were wet as the sea.

Yesterday morning defied science, at least the kind learned in nursery rhymes. Out came the sun and dried up nothing. The itsy-bitsy spiders were denied a second chance at the waterspouts. It was humid, that was all, but people found other ways to say it.

“The first word that comes to mind is brutal,” said Greg Oire Ganter, 33, a photographer from the Lower East Side. “It’s disgusting. It’s sluggish. It’s gross.”

Then comes the grand unifying theory . . . oh, the grand unifying theory:

A common theory holds that hot weather is more tolerable than cold. This fails to account for something meteorologists never refer to.

Call it the Grumpy Factor, a phenomenon tied to humidity. In a nursery-rhyme-science sort of a way, the Grumpy Factor explains how unpleasantness can shuffle across the city, lighting tempers and darkening moods.

“Especially if you have heavy coats,” said Linda Sadiker, 44, petting one of the five dogs she was walking in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Ms. Sadiker allowed that she was a little jealous of her charges, who were massed around her on a stoop, not straining at their leashes but just standing and panting.

“Most of these go to refrigerators they call apartments, while I’m out here,” Ms. Sadiker said. “Nice to be a dog in Park Slope.”

Not to mention a healthy dose of Class War! No time now, though, it’s too hot. Must. Make. More. Literary:

The streets were alive with carting and pouring and lifting, all the things that go undone when no one does them. On Fifth Avenue a worker climbed a ladder above a storefront; half a block away Con Ed workers climbed a ladder the other direction. Life went on, angrily.

Can’t make much more literary . . . too hot . . . must find whale!

The news that a super-double strength baby stroller may have saved a child from last week’s building collapse on the Upper West Side is being spun as reason to spend $600 on a stroller:

It is impossible to say with certainty that the Mountain Buggy Urban Double Stroller - which costs roughly half the monthly rent of a small Brooklyn apartment - actually saved Abigail Lurensky, 7 months old, as a Manhattan building collapsed around her on Thursday.

But it didn’t hurt.

As word spread yesterday of the stroller’s role in protecting Abigail, the building collapse added even more cachet to the carriage, the $600-plus Hummer of the Sidewalk S.U.V. set. With their maneuverability and inflatable tires providing a smooth ride over potholes, cobblestones and sandy sidewalks, the Urban Double strollers are popular with the affluent, especially those with beach houses.

Albee Baby Carriage, the city’s largest dealer of Mountain Buggy strollers, which is six blocks from the site of the collapse on Broadway at 100th Street on the Upper West Side, expects a 500-stroller shipment in August to sell out within weeks. Even before its presumed heroic role, the stroller was quite popular, said Frank DeMato, the store’s manager in charge of Internet sales.

Still, Molly Smith Simon, a lawyer from Brooklyn who had just bought a $110 stroller from Albee, is skeptical. She doubts she needs such an industrial-strength stroller for either Eamon, 9 months, or Una, 4.

“I looked at the stroller that saved the baby’s life,” she said, “but I don’t think it’s that likely that I’m going to get stuck under a collapsing building.”

Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s functional repeal of the 21st Amendment, Governor Pataki signed into law a bill to allow out-of-state wineries to ship wine directly to New York consumers (hereafter referred to as “connoisseurs and sippers”):

Gov. Pataki signed a new law yesterday that relaxes restrictions on wine shipments, prompting New York’s connoisseurs and sippers to raise their glasses in approval.

Since Prohibition, the state had barred wine shipments from out of state to private citizens in New York. That ban is toast as of Aug. 12, when a new law goes into effect that allows New Yorkers to receive up to 36 cases of wine - or 432 bottles - per year from wineries in or outside New York.

The Times investigates how firehouses are being emasculated, their poles ignominiously and unceremoniously removed. Impossible to escape juvenile humor:

Of all the tools associated with the dangerous but sometimes romantic world of firefighting, few capture the spirit of the job quite like the shiny firehouse pole, that simple brass delivery system that relies on little more than gravity to get a fireman to his truck a few seconds faster.

In New York City’s firehouses, veterans have a deep affection, even a zealous sense of protection, for their poles.

Heh. “Pole.”

But now, the department has begun shrinking their number sharply as it builds new firehouses and remodels old ones to bring them up to current building codes. In many cases, ventilation systems have been installed where the poles and their surrounding holes used to be.

The trend is no different around the country, as cities build one-story firehouses and update older firehouses. “It certainly is without any question that firehouse poles are becoming, with each new firehouse, a thing of the past,” said Harold A. Schaitberger, the general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters. “The new firehouse or station would be built with stairways and no poles.”

It is an ignominious slide into obscurity for a century-old tool that has served a fire company perhaps as many as a dozen times a night. As the first daring step before any derring-do, the pole, with its 20-foot-or-so plunge, became a striking emblem of firefighting like the walrus mustache and the Dalmatian.

And while other tools like wooden ladders and horse-drawn engines have been updated and improved over the decades, the pole, true to form, remains the fastest way down.

A new firehouse in the Rockaways in Queens was built without any poles at all. A vast firehouse on Staten Island opened in the spring with a single cast aluminum pole tucked into a corner. (On a recent visit, firefighters, momentarily forgetting it was there, said they did not have one.)

Firehouses under renovation in Brooklyn and Manhattan have had many of their poles removed. And the fire academy stopped teaching new recruits to slide down poles some years ago.

You mean to tell me it took nearly four years for folks to figure out that Hizzoner’s phone number is listed? What perfect timing:

Got a beef with the city? Want the boss’ attention? Just call Mayor Mike - at home.

“I called at 10:15 and somebody said, ‘Hi. Hello.’ And I said, ‘That sounds like Mayor Bloomberg,’” said Sheila Powsner, recounting her Monday night call to Bloomberg’s upper East Side townhouse.

“I said, ‘Mayor Bloomberg, I’m sorry to be calling you at such a late hour, but I have a problem with my aunt,’” said Powsner, a Brooklyn teacher.

Bloomberg, who is seeking reelection this fall, mentioned the call at a news conference yesterday. “I appreciate if you don’t call me late at night - I can’t really do anything then. But in an emergency, I work for the people, and that’s part of the job,” the mayor said.

Of course, this amazing bit of pre-election fluff wouldn’t have been possible without the Daily News:

Powsner called the mayor on behalf of her 94-year-old aunt, Dottie Wollner, whose housing plight was chronicled in the Daily News last week.

Wollner, who has lived in Williams Plaza in Williamsburg since 1963, switched apartments several years ago to tend to her sister, Minnie. Although Minnie died, Wollner - who also has health problems - wants to stay in Minnie’s apartment.

The Housing Authority asked Wollner to vacate her sister’s apartment by July 16. Now the mayor has asked housing officials to let Wollner stay. The vacate order has been suspended while the agency looks into the matter.

“I’m very grateful that The News was the first to help us,” Wollner said, adding that it was “amazing to have a mayor that you can get through to. He has a lot of … compassion.”

Reporters could not immediately ascertain whether the heartening story would be used in the Mayor’s upcoming campaign.

In fairness, the Times notes that the Mayor has periodically revealed that he’s “in the book”:

For Mr. Bloomberg, whose immense wealth and status have left him open to accusations that he is out of touch with average New Yorkers, doing things like maintaining a listed phone number and taking the subway to City Hall most mornings provides a patina of common-man appeal. And he does not hesitate to draw attention to them.

Two sides of the same clause governing rent stabilization laws — specifically, that a tenant must use the property as his or her primary residence.

In one example, the landlord of a 15-apartment, 11,600 square-foot building on East 3rd Street seeks to evict all residents and turn it into his primary residence — on the face of it laughable but seemingly within the letter of the law:

Nearly two years ago, Alistair and Catherine Economakis became the owners of a six-story tenement building at 47-49 East Third Street, between First and Second Avenues, in the East Village. The building has 15 apartments, with tenants paying rents of $500 to $950 a month.

Within weeks, the Economakises began notifying tenants that their leases would not be renewed, even though the apartments were rent stabilized, because the couple planned to live in the building with their infant son and take over all 11,600 square feet.

The notices said the new owners planned to renovate the building, which has a total of 60 rooms, to create five bedrooms, six bathrooms, a den, a playroom, a gym, a library, a study area, a dining room, a kitchen and a living room.

Under the law, landlords have the right to terminate the leases of rent-stabilized tenants if they plan to use the space for themselves. They must notify the tenants at least four months before their leases expire.

Meanwhile, in today’s Daily News, a man is accused of not living in his $104-a-month studio in the Windmere Building on West 57th Street. The problem is he’s not living anywhere else — he’s allegedly homeless:

A Manhattan judge has evicted a “homeless man” who waged a legal battle to keep his $104-a-month apartment despite refusing to live there.

Michael Tsitsires was ordered to give up the studio flat in the dilapidated Windemere, a historic building on W. 57th St. at Ninth Ave., after a trial in which his own shrink said he was claustrophobic and “hated” his apartment.

“This court is not condemning [Tsitsires] to a life of homelessness,” said Civil Court Judge Gerald Lebovits, in a ruling published yesterday. “Whether by choice or circumstance, [he] is already homeless.”

Building owner, Toa Construction, first sued to evict Tsitsires in 2000 under laws that prohibit tenants from remaining in rent-stabilized apartments not used as their primary residence.

According to court papers, Tsitsires had “abandoned the apartment to live on the streets, in the park, on stoops and at his friends’ homes.” He also applied for public housing, claiming he was homeless.

But he claimed he was still occupying the apartment because he stored his belongings, received his mail and let his girlfriend shower there.

The judge said you have to actually sleep in the apartment.

You might be thinking, “I could live in any Manhattan hovel for $104 a month — what gives!?” In this case the Windmere perhaps isn’t worth the bother:

It’s not clear when Tsitsires originally moved into the Windemere, once a fashionable Manhattan address.

When it opened in 1881, it was only the second rental apartment building in the city and wealthy tenants occupied its spacious apartments.

Later, it evolved into an SRO and became notorious in the 1980s when its former managers were arrested for harassing tenants by moving in prostitutes, kicking in doors and ransacking rooms.

Neither Tsitsires nor his lawyer could be reached for comment yesterday. Tenants said just a half dozen residents remain in the eight-story building.

“After they terrorized us, Michael changed. He didn’t trust anybody and basically he became separated from all of the other tenants,” said Dennis Neville, 50, who has lived there for 31 years. [emphasis added]

Say what you want about the East Village landlords — their unlikely real estate gymnastics seem preferable to kicking in doors!

The Daily News profiles the ex-police officer whose message board site apparently led to his dismissal from the Department (smuggling a fake pipe bomb into City Hall probably didn’t help either — even if it was to call attention to lax security!).

The website . . . is great! I had no idea what those guys standing around the subway were thinking about. For kicks, check out Hizzoner’s Ass Palming thread . . . stanky!

Not so much a Sunday Styles article that makes you want to flee New York but rather just feel much pity for it: a first-person account of the world of competitive air guitar.

This may be the most disturbing thing you’ll read in a very long time:

I know the glory of dressing up and fanatically playing an invisible instrument in front of a crowd is not something that everyone immediately grasps. When I tell people I’ve spent more than two years as a competitive air guitarist, they often look at me bewildered, like a dog tilting its head at an unfamiliar command. Or they just laugh at me.

In the aftermath of the London terror attacks the Times interviews New York City mass transit riders to gauge how safe they feel. In short, they don’t feel very safe, they’re fatalistic about that and they have some amusing empirical observations that back up these gut feelings:

Kathy Reul, 44, a health care worker from Queens, confided to a reporter: “I drink a beer every day on the subway. I don’t have it in a cup. I have not seen a police officer on a subway train in a long time. If I can get away with having a beer, I can get away with having a bomb.”

The Times’ Jim Rutenberg takes a look behind the scenes at the city’s failed bid to lure the 2012 Olympics while Clyde Haberman gets a cheap and easy column from Singapore’s draconian laws:

All right, New York couldn’t snag the 2012 Olympics, but the venture does not have to be a total loss. There is a lot that the city can learn from this experience.

For one thing, in his pursuit of the Games, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg spent days in Singapore, where London’s triumph over New York and other rivals was announced yesterday.

Mr. Bloomberg is a proven quick study. He has also shown himself to be willing, even eager at times, to crack down on activities that offend him, like illegal parking and smoking in bars or restaurants. In this regard, Singapore had much to offer as a model, if the mayor paid attention.

Restrict smoking? That’s a snap. Many cities do that. But Singapore blazed a special trail long ago under its autocratic leader, Lee Kuan Yew, by famously banning chewing gum.

That prohibition has often been mocked as an example of a nanny state on steroids. Even Singapore finally decided to lighten up a little, softening the rules last year to permit the sale of certain kinds of gum, though only in pharmacies and only if those brands have “medicinal” or “dental” value.

Go ahead and laugh. But if the mayor seeks a distraction from his Olympics defeat by looking for something new to ban, he could do worse than to follow Singaporean tradition by hounding gum chewers as he did smokers.

Those countless black blotches on New York sidewalks? They’re awful, and they do not get there by themselves. Thousands of pedestrians spit out their gum. Then thousands of feet grind the ugly mess into the pavement. Singapore shows that there is another way to go.

Slate’s Jack Shafer commits to print (or pixel, as the case may be) what we’ve long assumed to be true about New York journalists in a piece from last week about the Times’ recent Class Matters series:

Journalists are notoriously sensitive to matters of class and status, especially a New York journalist with a $125,000 salary that might make him an object of envy to a reporter living in Lansing, Mich., but that stigmatizes him as a knuckle-dragging proletarian on his home turf. Rising housing prices, high taxes, pressures to enroll children in private schools and dress fashionably, et al., contribute to a permanent state of status anxiety in many New York-based Times and Journal reporters and editors. Financial journalists in New York have their noses rubbed into their relative pauperhood on a daily—sometimes hourly—basis by the lawyers, hedge-fund traders, business executives, and investment bankers they report on. If they’re blue about class in America, you can’t blame them.

Specifically, I’ve often wondered who exactly the audience is for some Times stories — the real obnoxious ones, the ones that by all rights the 92.5 percent of the rest of us (journalists included!) shouldn’t really understand. And sometimes you get to thinking that 92.5 percent of us (journalists included!) are just millions of court jesters sitting around this big castle with that funny Indian name — those rivers are the moat!

NB: Credit where due.

The New Yorker’s Ben McGrath sheds some light on the mysterious office of Public Advocate by profiling some of the nine candidates running for office:

“It’s a misunderstood, maligned office that actually has huge potential, because there are already tens of thousands of public advocates,” Andrew Rasiej, a first-time candidate, said the other day, explaining his aim to “connect” New York’s countless well-intentioned citizens — busybodies, to some. The city teems with them: the old woman in your apartment building who’s always slipping notices under your door; the movie-theatre “shusher”; the guy in the drugstore who makes sure the other shoppers know that there’s only one line; Bernie Goetz. Actually, Goetz, the infamous subway gunman turned vegetarian crusader, is running for advocate himself — he’s the one who wants to institute the pay cut. Goetz’s platform includes some truly inspired ideas (he’s for midday power naps), some strangely banal ones (he’d like to see a “tall building” constructed somewhere “around Sixtieth Street”), and some that remind you why he can’t possibly win (he believes that “N.Y.C. should relax more on security”).

Having always wondered exactly what the Public Advocate did, I’m pleased to see that it’s basically exactly what I expected: Office of City “Shusher”.

Bonus Points: Bernie Goetz for Public Advocate Official Site

The auto body shops in the Iron Triangle of Willets Point will live to see another day — New York has lost to Paris and the eventual winner, London, in voting to determine the 2012 Olympics host city:

In Singapore today, the city’s Olympic bid delegation - a group of about 300 people - watched the vote tally on a giant projector screen in a wing of the Ritz Carlton hotel. Guests sipped wine and nibbled on dumplings, spicy fish sausages and croissant-wrapped shrimp in what was a generally giddy atmosphere stoked by the perception that the team’s presentation was a show stopper. But when the losing results came in however, the room fell into a prolonged, stunned silence, according to people who were there.

Mmm . . . shrimp!

Reports indicate that the Q&A period during final presentations bordered on “tense,” even political in tone:

The question-and-answer portion had a tense moment when an I.O.C. member from Syria, Samih Moudallal, pointedly asked [Deputy Mayor Daniel] Doctoroff, “Would the athletes and the officials of these countries on the terrorist list, will they be allowed to enter the United States of America?” He went on to reference what he said were problems Syria had obtaining a visa for one of its Paralympic athletes during the 1996 Games in Atlanta.

And where New York’s delegation gently evoked the memory of the Sept. 11 attacks during its presentation, other countries were just as heartfelt:

Paris had begun its presentation with a note of humility, a nod to the criticism that its past two bids were too arrogant and turned off an organization that prefers to be wooed.

. . .

President Chirac, who did not attend the presentation for the last Paris bid, in 2001, made the most emotional appeal. He emphasized his long relationship with many I.O.C. members and talked about the French people’s desire to host the Games. “I shall vouch for this,” he said in French. “You can put your trust in France. You can trust the French. You can trust us.”

On the other hand, Madrid (whose presentation was the “least professional, relying on still photos with type superimposed for most of its visuals, as opposed to higher-quality video used by the other bids”) chose to emphasize the positive:

“Madrid will be a fiesta,” [Madrid Mayor Alberto] Ruiz-Gallardon said. “We have been celebrating the Olympic spirit for 50 years now.”

The 2012 Olympics will take place in London in 2012. Mmm . . . shrimp!

The Times examines the effect of ten years of zero tolerance on illegal fireworks in the city:

Interviews and observations in six neighborhoods found that many people were brazenly flouting the fireworks laws. While Harlem and Park Slope were relatively quiet, fireworks could be seen and heard in neighborhoods in Queens and Manhattan, especially after dark.

In Washington Heights, on a corner of 171st Street near Broadway, a group of young men, women and children kept an eye out for the police as they set off a large display. As smoke filled the air, a police car rolled, lights flashing. Minutes later, more officers arrived to clear the block, but even as they worked, other explosions sounded in the distance.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said before the holiday weekend that they would continue to enforce a zero-tolerance policy for any illegal fireworks.

. . .

Residents interviewed across the city, for the most part, agreed that the Fourth of July was much quieter than it was before the city stepped up enforcement, but many said they noticed more explosions this year then in recent years.

The crackdown began in 1995, when Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani created a task force to combat unlawful fireworks and ordered the arrest of anyone caught with anything illegal, even sparklers. In 1996, the police seized 20,000 cases of fireworks worth an estimated $43 million.

The epicenter of the fight that year was in Ozone Park, where about 250 police officers set out to stop an annual block party given by John J. Gotti Jr., the head of the Gambino crime family.

This year, 1,115 cases of fireworks have been seized, a number that the police pointed to as a sign of success. They said that in the past 10 years the number of injuries from fireworks dropped by 86 percent, to 8 last year from 56 in 1995. They said the number of fires caused by fireworks on the Fourth of July had also fallen, to 203 last year from 1,063 in 1994.

Which is to say that Macy’s or no, New Yorkers still seem to love celebrating the birth of the nation by reenacting the sights and sounds of urban combat on neighborhood streets:

“It’s like a turkey at Thanksgiving,” said Joey, 16. He was hanging out on the streets of Maspeth, Queens, with a group of friends, waiting for the cover of night to begin the festivities with a boom.

Joey and his friends chipped in to buy about $1,000 worth of fireworks. Before the sun went down, they set off some of the smaller firecrackers, holding the big guns in reserve. Tucked away, they had the following illegal arsenal: “firecracker mats,” which are strings of 1,000 firecrackers whose crackling explosions last 10 minutes at a time; M-80’s, which were developed by the military to simulate gunfire; Blockbusters, which have the explosive power of half a stick of dynamite; and Pineapples, which combine two Blockbusters for a jaw-rattling explosion.

They also had what are called mortars, essentially metal tubes used to launch larger fireworks, the kind that explode into a rainbow of colors in the sky.

“It’s cool to blow stuff up,” said Jonathan, 16. Like others who were setting off illegal fireworks and were interviewed, he would not give his last name.

The Daily News reports on a scam related to emergency housing:

The city paid $182,000 for emergency housing - for people who were dead, according to a report released yesterday.

The cash was part of $2.1 million in housing payments that city Controller William Thompson’s office calls “questionable.”

The real crazy thing about the New York City school teacher who called in sick so he could perform as a professional wrestler isn’t that he’s a wrestler or whatever but rather that he could have used personal days instead! I swear:

Kaye resigned from his teaching job in April after investigators approached him. He said he had not been aware that he could have used personal days to get time off to wrestle.

So rather than using personal days (to wrestle!), the teacher called in sick and got busted the hard way:

City school investigators laid the smackdown yesterday on a Queens high school teacher who allegedly called in sick while he was donning tights for World Wrestling Entertainment.

At Benjamin Cardozo High School in Queens, Matthew Kaye had a reputation as an agreeable social studies teacher.

But he led a secret life as pro wrestler Matt Striker - a greased-up macho man known for ring moves he called “the overdrive” and the “lung-blower,” investigators said. Several of Kaye’s students suspected as much.

“I swear I saw him on WWE Smackdown last week wrestling Kurt Angle,” a student wrote on the Web site www.ratemyteacher.com last March. “I know it was him.”

Special Schools Investigator Richard Condon said he wants the 6-foot-tall, 241-pound instructor to pay back all the money he got while he was supposedly out sick.

Condon’s investigators learned about Kaye’s alter ego from the teacher’s own Web site, www.thisisstriker.com, authorities said.

According to the site, Kaye made his professional wrestling debut in 2000 in the USA Pro Wrestling league. He used the name Hydro and fought as part of a tag team called Los Lunatics. The Web site lists and describes many of his performances - making it easy for investigators to match the days he should have been in school.

Personal days! To wrestle!