The New York (football) Giants are feeling like “second-class citizens” again as plans for a giant entertainment complex next to the Meadowlands begin to take shape. The complex is called Xanadu:

The New York Giants have gone to court to try to block their neighbor, the planned $1.3 billion Meadowlands Xanadu family entertainment and retail complex, from operating on game days, on the grounds that it would turn a trip to a Giants game from a mere traffic problem into a traffic nightmare.

The fight among the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, which owns the land; the Giants; and the developers of Meadowlands Xanadu appeared to be over last May when the team and the state agreed to a plan for a new privately financed $750 million football stadium on a separate parcel nearby.

But in papers filed in State Superior Court in Bergen County on Aug. 23, just a month before the team is to provide details about the new stadium, its lawyers sued, asking a judge to immediately restrict the operations of Xanadu, now under construction.

According to their court papers, the Giants say their fans’ No. 1 complaint involves getting into and out of the stadium grounds on game days - a feat that involves 24,000 cars and as many as 80,000 fans. With Xanadu, 12,000 cars will be added to the mix, both sides agree.

Some of the cars will be shunted to Xanadu’s garages, affecting those fans’ ability to indulge in that parking lot tradition, tailgate parties.

But lest you think it’s just about parking spaces, know that we’re talking about something more. About respect:

The Giants say they are actually losing parking spaces. But the lawsuit is about more than parking, the team concedes. With details of the new stadium to be worked out, the suit is an attempt by the team to gain leverage in talks with Xanadu’s developers and to strengthen its hand in dealing with the sports and exposition authority. In particular, the team wants court enforcement of a provision in its lease that makes its consent required for any changes in the complex that affect the team’s operations on game days or compete with them.

The issue seems to have become a matter of pride for John Mara, the executive vice president of the Giants. In an interview, Mr. Mara spoke wistfully about the decision his father, Wellington Mara, made in 1971 to move the Giants from Yankee Stadium. There, they were “second-class tenants.” To get the true football stadium he desired, he decided to move his team to what was then a vast marsh and vacant expanse of filled-in dump.

One editorial cartoon at the time depicted the elder Mr. Mara, cloaked like George Washington on a snowy winter night, standing at the prow of a boat, being rowed by football players onto a shore strewn with broken bottles, crushed cans and litter. There was wide speculation, apart from New York-centric chauvinism, that the move to New Jersey would be a disaster for the team.

It was in that atmosphere that the Giants managed to get provisions in their lease that gave them a virtual veto over alterations at the site that might affect their operations. John Mara says those provisions are crystal clear, but Carl J. Goldberg, the chairman of the sports and exposition authority, insists they are not.

. . .

Mr. Mara said the Giants feel they must invoke the provisions to protect their interests. “It was a decision by my family that gave rise to this entire complex,” he said. “And to be honest, we are starting to feel like second-class citizens over here.”

Wah, wah . . .

You do realize that New York is also susceptible to hurricanes, don’t you? It’s actually quite frightening:

Two decades have passed since the last significant hurricane hit New York - Gloria, in September 1985 - but local officials have been preparing for another one for years.

A Category 3 hurricane could bring a 25-foot storm surge crashing over the financial district, Kennedy International Airport, southern Brooklyn and eastern Staten Island; inundate dozens of other low-lying areas; and force the evacuation of 400,000 to 2.4 million residents.

. . .

Michael E. Wyllie, the meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service’s local forecast office, in Upton, on eastern Long Island, said the region was due for a strong hurricane within the next decade, based on a 20- to 30-year hurricane cycle.

“We’re only 10 years into an active, multidecade cycle that will probably last at least another 10 years,” he said. “Most likely we’re going to get hit with something in the next several years, if not this year. Our time is coming. I’m not trying to be an alarmist; I’m trying to be a realist.”

(Dude, the New York Press was freaking us out about this months ago! Well OK, a month ago, but still.)

You know rock music is fossilized when the mayor comes to the aid of CBGB:

CBGB - the punk rock mecca facing eviction from its East Village home - picked up an unlikely booster yesterday in the pinstriped form of Mayor Bloomberg.

Hizzoner, while conceding he has never set foot in the famed club, said the city was hoping either to keep CBGB from getting bounced out of 315 Bowery or find it a new home.

“It’s more than just another club,” Bloomberg said of the dank bar that helped launch Blondie, the Ramones and the Talking Heads.

The only thing more depressing than Labor Day weekend is contemplating the holiday season in August:

Yes, Virginia. A sweaty army of New Yorkers is already toiling to deck the halls.

Retailers are ordering their fixin’s and trimmin’s. Macy’s is racing to complete a construction miracle on 34th Street, preparing for the onslaught of 300,000 visitors to Santaland on its eighth floor in Herald Square. Workers are making way for new displays at North Pole Town Square, including the animated teddy-bear marching band. The one with eight teddy-bear musicians.

Currently, Santa is helper-challenged. “We’re sending out letters to elves who’ve worked in the past,” said Bob Rutan, the director of event operations. He needs 140.

Calling David Sedaris. Anyway, Christmas marches on elsewhere:

Paul Olszewski, whose title is director of windows, is coordinating the efforts of 65 workers to fill said space at Macy’s with “something no one has ever seen before in the city,” he pronounced ominously. Not space aliens or even Parson Brown, he insisted, but that’s about all he would reveal, save that the team started working to fill the 40 windows in February, “and we feel as if we’re behind schedule.”

In the heavy air, there’s a feeling of Christmas at Rockefeller Center, bracing itself for the invasion of 400,000 to 500,000 visitors per day from late November through the first week of January. “It’s fourth quarter here with six minutes left in the game,” said Thomas A. Madden Jr., a managing director of Tishman Speyer Properties, owners of Rockefeller Center.

About the Christmas tree hunt (by helicopter, throughout the metropolitan region): “We’re down to several finalists,” said Mr. Madden, who refused to say how many, or where. After all, the felling of the lucky pine cannot be breathlessly announced until November.

Rockefeller Center Zamboni tuneup? Check. Gourmet magazine Christmas cookie photo shoot? Check. Satin-lined, zipper-front Santa Claus suits? Check! And on and on and on it goes until the dreary winter months fall upon us . . .

Greenmarkets are either great resources for supermarket- and fresh food-starved neighborhoods or the quickest way to be parted with $30 or $40 outside of Atlantic City (or both!). Now we have to worry that vendors aren’t just going to Costco and selling a bunch of wholesale junk. Bastards! The Times’ City section does its part to continue the whispering campaign:

The city’s greenmarkets have lately brimmed with August’s familiar bounty. At 54 markets, tables are piled high with bulbous eggplant, luscious blackberries, and at least a dozen precious varieties of heirloom tomato. But behind the selling booths, a rumor persists at a low din among farmers that some in their ranks sell items they neither grew nor produced themselves, in violation of the strict “producer-only” rules put in place by the city Greenmarket program.

At the market at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza last week, Tammy Osczepinski of S. & S. O. Produce Farms in Goshen, N.Y., said that such hearsay was typical among greenmarket sellers.

“I’ve heard these rumors floating around for years,” she said with a shrug while bagging a head of escarole for a customer. “But this is a grow-your-own market, and that’s how it should be.”

. . .

. . . Rachel Faber Machacha, Greenmarket’s farm inspection coordinator, said it was rare but not unheard of for a farmer to augment his own supply with produce grown by another farmer, or even bought from a wholesale market. During August and September, her busiest months, Ms. Machacha travels from farm to farm verifying that what producers submit to Greenmarket as their annual crop plan is what they are actually growing. If something doesn’t add up, she investigates further.

“We’re slow to accuse, but pretty quick to respond if we hear concerns,” she said. “We thoroughly look at something before we issue a violation.”

Only a handful of violations are issued a year, Mr. Strumolo said. The most recent came a couple of weeks ago, when a mushroom producer who worked at multiple markets was found selling morel mushrooms and suspended for a month. Morels, Mr. Strumolo explained, grow in the New York region only in the early spring, so the producer must have been buying them elsewhere.

Somehow the “Core Club” succeeds in coming off as even more pretentious sounding than Soho House. And the Times is refreshingly merciless in profiling them:

It’s a funny time to start a club in New York. Socially, the city seems as wide open and meritocratic as ever. The influence of old wood-paneled clubs of the Upper East Side, with their aging memberships and lobster nights, is at an ebb, in part because of their remoteness from the powerful and vigorous global nomads who fuel the city’s energy.

But on East 55th Street, a team of construction workers is laboring furiously to put the finishing touches on an ambitious act of social exclusion called the Core Club, set to open its doors, for a few people anyway, in mid-September.

While traditional clubs serve to promote homogeneity and to preserve the social order by keeping new and different people away, the Core Club’s pitch - and as a for-profit corporation, it has a pitch - is that it will serve as a place for a geographically and socially diverse set of wealthy people to gather and meet others of the same disparate tribe. As a result, its membership list resembles a kind of Noah’s ark manifest of overachievers from various professional species - politics (Vernon Jordan); finance (John Schneider, a managing director of Allen & Company); real estate (Aby Rosen, the developer, and Steven Roth, the chairman and chief executive of Vornado Realty Trust); the arts (Marianne Boesky, the gallery owner, and Richard Meier, the architect); entertainment (Ari Emanuel, a partner in the Endeavor Agency, and Andrew Lack, the chief executive of Sony BMG Music); music (Roger Waters and Patty Smyth); sports (Dan Marino and John McEnroe); and so on.

Exactly what such a socially disconnected group of people will talk about and do when they gather at the club - what the club is in general - remains a kind of mystery, one that Jennie Saunders, the president and chief executive of the Core Group, the club’s parent company, seems content to perpetuate. For Ms. Saunders the thing is so ambitious as to be almost indescribable.

“Try to get off the idea of a reimagined private club concept, because it’s so much more than that,” Ms. Saunders said. “Our vision and our goal as an organization is to provide the conditions for transformation.” The club, Ms. Saunders added, would be “a hyper-edited collection of people, art, books and ideas - a compelling collage.”

A reporter confessed he still didn’t understand: “Is it a club or a hotel or a spa, a cult or what?”

“It’s all of those things,” Ms. Saunders said.

So, you ask, What does the privilege of breaking up a fascinating tete-a-tete between, say, Richard Meier and Dan Marino (or Roger Waters and Vernon Jordan!) cost one? Sadly, being put in one’s place by the semi-famous does not come cheap:

At a minimum, the club may appeal to wealthy people who’ve run out of novel ways to spend their money. The first 100 members, among them Millard S. Drexler, the chairman and chief executive of J. Crew, and Terry Semel, a former chairman of Warner Brothers Studios and now the chief executive of Yahoo, paid $100,000 each to get the club going. (If it works out, they’ll be paid back their investment, with interest, over five years.) Two hundred additional members have joined by paying $55,000 entrance fees, refundable should they decide to cancel their memberships.

The affluent have co-opted the stoop party, leading some compatriots to sneer, “How ghetto.” The Sunday Styles section treads carefully:

As Lori Coats dropped into a folding chair near the stoop of her apartment building on West 21st Street, she let out a deep sigh. “This is fabulous,” she said, cradling her 18-month-old baby, Cate, in one arm and a plastic cup of sangria in her other hand.

Her neighbor Robert Walker nodded agreement as he appraised the picnic table set up with plates of focaccia and pasta salad next to a giant pitcher of homemade sangria. Two neighbors from 10th Avenue maneuvered awkwardly through the crowd perched on the stoop or on chairs. When Mr. Walker heard a favorite disco classic on the iPod hooked up to computer speakers, he said, “That’s my song.”

Long a tradition in Harlem, Brooklyn and working-class neighborhoods throughout New York City, the summer stoop party has been a rarity on streets of $3,000-a-month apartments and single-family brownstones in the heart of Chelsea.

Seriously, crank up your “jam box” and pop open an imported beer — it’s time to let loose:

It is not even necessary to have a stoop proper to have a sidewalk party. Josh Hughes and Brian Ermanski began inviting friends to daily afternoon outdoor parties in NoLIta in the spring, with seating on trash bins and benches. They crank up the Velvet Underground on a jam box and crack open their Negra Modelo beer in paper bags.

“In the middle of all those models and filmmakers and rich women heading off to eat at Cafe Havana, it definitely creates a small scene,” said Mr. Hughes, the author of “Punk Shui: Home Design for Anarchists,” scheduled for publication next year by Three Rivers Press. “But that’s a part of the statement we’re making, that we’re not above it.”

As for the “ghetto” slur — it’s not a question of “whether” but “how”:

Both Mr. Hughes and Ms. Coats said that passers-by at the gatherings on their blocks have sometimes muttered that partying on the street is “ghetto.”

One who passed by and formed that thought, Ron Robinson, a beauty-trend consultant, said it was not meant as a derogatory comment. “Growing up in the outer boroughs,” Mr. Robinson said, “this seems to me like a long-gone pastime which is reoccurring.”

“I miss it,” he added.

So it’s ghetto in a self-hating kind of way — I like it!

In an attempt to preserve that high level of quality one has come to expect from Mister Softee, the company is going on the offensive to root out impostors:

The black sport utility vehicle blended in perfectly with the row of cars parked along a Queens street on Saturday, but behind its tinted windows, three private investigators huddled inside, staking out their suspect.

There were staccato commands, the rapid snapping of long-lens cameras and the recording of license plate numbers in extensive dossiers.

“Is that him?” one investigator murmured. “O.K., now don’t lose him. All right, we got him.”

It was a surveillance job that would lead to car chases through side-street labyrinths. But the chases were all at very low speeds. After all, the target this day was not some elusive spy, desperate fugitive or stealthy adulterer, but rather a lumbering white truck stopping to sell soft-serve ice cream to sugar-crazed children, all while blaring the repetitive Mister Softee jingle.

“We’re lucky,” whispered one investigator named Joe, who, like his colleagues, would give only his first name because in his line of work, he makes a lot of enemies. “It’s a good ice cream day.”

He opened a leather portfolio and began scribbling notes in a packet titled, “Mister Softee Surveillance, Queens Location.”

What, you scoff, does the company care if someone else tries to evoke a Platonic Mister Softee-ness? After all, Mister Softee is synonymous with a down-market mobile ice cream experience. Alas, it’s more complicated than that — the brand is important to the company, and faux Softees go to great lengths to copy the look and feel of the trucks, even going as far as tape recording the theme to replay on their phony Softee vehicles:

Official Mister Softee operators must pay a franchise fee, work in designated areas and serve only Mister Softee ice cream. But Mister Softee officials say hundreds of other operators buy used trucks and slap on a blue and white paint job, create identical or similar menu boards and logos, including the famous cone-head trademark, and bootleg the famous jingle copyrighted to the Mister Softee company.

They wind up effectively posing as Mister Softee, company officials say, while avoiding the fees and standards.

In addition to depriving 10-year-olds of the true taste of Mister Softee, the practice means missed profits for the Mister Softee company and the independent contractors who drive its trucks, said James Conway Jr., 49, vice president of Mister Softee. Mr. Conway says he is determined to track down the entrepreneurs who operate look-alike trucks.

Mr. Conway said that the Mister Softee look, sound, taste and reputation had taken five decades to perfect, adding that the ice cream used on his New York-area trucks is made at a dairy in Long Island City according to a longstanding company formula. Now, he said, opportunistic ice cream vendors are unfairly cashing in on this by deceiving customers into thinking they are buying the real deal.

Parkland be damned, Queens Borough President Helen Marshall is practically tripping over herself to lure the Jets to Queens. That’s the football Jets, not the thousands of airplanes that take off from and land at the borough’s two major airports.

But we digress. Let it be said that quotes like this tend to bite one in the ass. Like, ouch:

Queens Borough President Helen Marshall wants the Jets to come to Queens and she doesn’t mind sacking one of her own parks to make the point.

Mayor Bloomberg said giving up city parkland to build a stadium would be a tough decision; Marshall said no one would miss the swath of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in question.

“I went to the site,” said Marshall, who represented the area around the park during her years in the City Council and the state Assembly. “This is the Fountains of the something or other. It is really now just a big, big pool of stagnant water, with garbage thrown in.”

Marshall was talking about the Fountain of the Planets, a once-grand, 6-acre water display built for the 1964-65 world’s fair.

God, what a bitch! Leave that poor park alone already!

It’s not that pulling a rickshaw is inherently degrading; there are so many degrading jobs out there, and if someone wants to pull one of these mofos for big-ass tips, more power to them. Still, you have to wonder who exactly rides in rickshaws. And as New York Magazine explains we’re talking about the old-school dude-on-foot-pulling-a-cart kind of rickshaw, not those newfangled cycle rickshaws:

Those droopy workhorses on Central Park South have nothing on Jeff Iftekaruddin, a 30-year-old actor, musician, and, now, rickshaw beast of burden. He can drag up to 600 pounds of tourist all over midtown, charging $40 for a twenty-minute ride. Still, he admits, “Some people don’t like the rickshaws. They find what we do degrading.”

Iftekaruddin’s rickshaw is one of five now deployed around Times Square and Central Park by Shanghai Rickshaw. They should not be confused with the pedicab, of which there are around 250 in the city, according to Frank Luo, Shanghai’s co-owner.

. . .

[Luo's] partner, Arty Nichols, who already owns a fleet of horsedrawn carriages and pedicabs, thinks it’s the next big thing: “People don’t come to New York to take a rickshaw ride . . . yet.”

Nichols estimates the pullers — typically immigrants, actors, and athletes — make about $150 for a five-to-six-hour shift, with about two hours of actual pull time. Though Luo admits some get pretty winded, the majority find it’s easier than it looks because the rickshaws are so well balanced. But the appearance of difficulty works in the drivers’ favor. “I think people tip them to death,” says Nichols, “because they really feel these guys are busting their ass.”

After visiting Broad Channel yesterday, the Times (not even the same writer!) gets back on the A train and heads over to Beach 116th Street in Rockaway Park to check in on one of the street’s SROs, a “stubborn survivor of New York’s shifting housing picture”:

If you need a home in a hurry and do not mind salt air and salty neighbors, with $130 and your own roll of toilet paper you can move into the Baxter Hotel in Rockaway Park, a half-block from the Atlantic Ocean.

That is the weekly rent charged by the owner, John Baxter: $130, with no deposit, no security and no questions asked.

Inside the office, a sign directs new residents to “please read all the house rules carefully or ask management to read them to you.” For a $130 check, Mr. Baxter handed a recent visitor the key to Room 27 and said in his Irish brogue, “I hope you’re good at remembering faces,” adding as he walked away, “There’s no mirror in the room.”

His assistant, Sean Reeder, led the way up creaky stairs to a fourth-floor room. Smoking was permitted out the room window. Asked about the house rules, Mr. Reeder said, “Just don’t do anything to make us kick you out.”

“The bathroom’s over there,” he added, pointing to three tiny bathrooms at the end of the hall. Two had stall showers. None had sinks, mirrors or toilet paper. They did provide views of Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic.

The Baxter is one of three single-room-occupancy hotels huddled together against the world on Beach 116th Street, just down from the end of the A subway line. It sits between a closed S.R.O. called the Hotel Lawrence and the Rockaway Park Hotel, a functioning S.R.O. whose residents include young children and a man who wears outfits made from plastic garbage bags.

The description of the rooms is enough to make any Times writer squirm:

The rooms at the Baxter are smaller than some elevators. The one visited recently had a ceiling and walls painted powder blue. There was a bald light bulb in a ceiling fixture, a dresser, a mini-refrigerator, an itchy bed with mismatched sheets and a television equipped with an antenna, not cable.

Air-conditioners are banned at the Baxter because its old electrical system could not support them, but with the door open, a salty breeze sweeps through the room and makes even sweltering days tolerable.

At night, the soundtrack is an overlay of arguments, children chanting, adults making love, a ballgame, talk radio, pop, rap, sitcom laugh-tracks and low-flying jets bound for Kennedy Airport.

Did they really use “adults making love”? There isn’t some particular euphemism in the Times style guide for down-and-out people humping?

The Broad Channel owner of the Call-A-Head porta-potty empire (”We’re #1 at Picking Up #2″) is determined to transform the sleepy Jamaica Bay island into the next Newport, RI:

Charles W. Howard made his fortune in portable toilets, building a business on the island of Broad Channel that is one of the state’s biggest suppliers of porta-potties for construction sites, rock concerts and outdoor weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Now he is turning his entrepreneurial talents to Broad Channel itself. He wants to reshape the plebeian mile-long island in Jamaica Bay in Queens into something closer in splendor to Newport, R.I., or at least to Cape May, N.J., by building shops and other amenities that imitate the splendors of the Gilded Age yet have the fun of Disney World in Florida.

“My goal is to make Broad Channel like America’s great seashore communities,” he said recently. “And the reason I’m doing it here is because I can’t think of a better place to live.”

Mr. Howard’s aspirations and pretensions call to mind wide-eyed visionaries like the Donald:

Call-a-Head’s over $10 million-a-year business has allowed Mr. Howard, the company’s president, to become Broad Channel’s Donald J. Trump, with 20 properties that will eventually include an ornate pharmacy with two cupolas, medical offices for eight doctors and a Venetian cafe on an island that does not have a single drugstore, doctor or sit-down restaurant. He also envisions opening a year-round Christmas store and a hotel to be called Howard’s End Inn, not after the E. M. Forster novel but because “it’s at the end of town and my name is Howard.”

The toilet business has been good to him, giving him the island’s most opulent home, a $1.5 million house that he says was inspired by both Newport mansions and Disney pavilions, a 46-foot yacht moored right alongside, and a Jaguar and two Porsches that help him tool around the island with the swagger of its leading citizen.

. . .

His soon-to-be-opened pharmacy in Broad Channel will have mahogany shelving, but its cathedral ceiling will be light blue and soft pink.

“When you walk in you’ll think about being in an English library, but when you look up it will be like the Bahamas,” he said.

Mr. Howard takes great pleasure in finding catchy names. The pharmacy is called Wharton’s Apothecary because he noticed that names of many great American companies - Wal-Mart, Woolworth’s, Waldbaum’s - start with the outsize letter W. He is calling a deli he is converting into an old-fashioned grocery Hamberry’s, because it will sell meat and fruit. His yacht is named Both Ends, a playful allusion to his main business.

It’s hard not to see the symmetry of the story — man responsible for major stink seeks to beautify God’s creation. Sort of a cross between the Donald and, say, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.:

Then there are the next-door neighbors of Call-a-Head.

“At times the smell is obnoxious,” said John F. McCambridge, 86, a wounded veteran of the Battle of the Bulge who still runs an accounting and insurance office on the main street. “My wife was here for 16 months sick with cancer and I’d be there screaming.”

It’s not just neighbors who have objected. Investigators for the State Department of Environmental Conservation have accused the company of washing potties next to Jamaica Bay’s wetlands, and city inspectors have issued the business 17 summonses since 2000. Last November, Call-a-Head reached an agreement with the Queens district attorney’s office in which the company, without admitting wrongdoing, paid fines of $100,000 and restitution of $10,000 to clear charges of polluting protected wetlands and using unmetered city water.

. . .

Mr. Howard volunteered that his business might be out of place in Beverly Hills. But Broad Channel, he said, is no Beverly Hills.

“Nobody likes portable toilets until they have to run into one,” he said.

Illustrating how deer and bears likely migrated to Manhattan, a raccoon yesterday made the trip on a bus arriving from Montclair, NJ. The raccoon went unnoticed by a bus full of students until the driver something odd walking down the aisle:

A New Jersey raccoon made an improbable journey to the big city yesterday, stowing away on a crowded charter bus unnoticed until all of the passengers had gotten off.

“Oh, man, it scared me,” said Decamp driver Winford Bellamy, 57, who spotted the masked bandit while driving drove down 11th Ave. near W. 51st St.

“I looked in my mirror, and saw him just walking up the aisle to the front of the bus,” Bellamy said.

The 2-foot female raccoon came strolling down the aisle minutes after Bellamy dropped off his 50 passengers, a group of Montclair State University students, at a firehouse on W. 51st St.

Immediately after seeing the raccoon, the shocked driver pulled up alongside a police car.

“Man, I got an animal in this bus,” he told a cop.

The officer instructed Bellamy to turn on 40th St. and get out of the bus.

By the time NYPD Emergency Service Unit officers arrived, the raccoon was clinging to the curtains above the bus’ door.

Officer Brian Glacken, 30, opened the driver-side window and hit the normally nocturnal animal with a tranquilizer dart.

The dazed raccoon was collared moments later.

The raccoon was later killed.

No sooner does Queens make an overture towards the Jets than the team wants, like, all of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park! Real nice, guys:

The Jets, who refused to consider a less lucrative stadium in Queens during their ill-fated five-year quest to build a new home in Manhattan, are now proposing to build an 80,000-seat football stadium where the Fountain of Planets, a remnant of the 1964 World’s Fair, now stands in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

. . .

Many people thought that the team was looking at a ramshackle district of auto shops known as Willets Point, near Shea Stadium and Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. But Queens officials say the Jets fear that it may take until 2009 or 2010 for the city to condemn the property, relocate the 150 businesses that are currently there and clean up the environment. The team, however, wants a new stadium by the end of 2008, when its Meadowlands lease expires.

So the team has come up with the proposal for the Fountain of Planets site.

After tapping out the public relations benefit of having his home phone number listed, Hizzoner announced yesterday that in the future, calls to his home would be routed directly to 311:

As the Daily News exclusively reported yesterday, Bloomberg has hooked up his home phone to the city’s 311 nonemergency hotline because of the large volume of calls flooding his home number.

Bloomberg said the deluge of calls began last month after media reports chronicling how he responded to a constituent call at home. His home number is listed in the white pages.

“What happened was people started from all over the world calling. We were getting 100 calls an hour,” Bloomberg said. “And no matter how much I’d like to help the people of this city, I just couldn’t keep up with answering them and you have to get some sleep.”

“So, what we’re doing is: We forwarded it to 311 and if they can help - which, generally, they can - they will do so,” Bloomberg said. “The most important thing is to make sure that anybody that needs help in this city can get it.”

If the number of calls eventually tapers off, Bloomberg said he hopes to begin picking up the line again.

I only called a couple of times, I swear!

City Council Member and Manhattan Borough President hopeful Eva Moskowitz is on your side, citizen, looking out for your interests and addressing the important issues:

Researchers disagree about the relationship between cell phone use and brain cancer, and many scientific studies find no evidence supporting the link. Still, critics are concerned about radio waves from the phones, and in 1996, the federal government established a limit for the amount of radiation cell phones can emit.

One of the highest-emitting models is the popular Motorola V.120E - which exposes users to 1.59 watts per kilogram out of the maximum allowable 1.6 watts, according to Eva Moskowitz (D-Manhattan).

. . .

“I didn’t want to be alarmist. I just wanted consumers to be educated and to make their own decisions about the possible health risks,” Moskowitz said.

Moskowitz said her list will be available beginning today at www.nyccouncil.info/. Moskowitz also called on phone companies to put SAR listings on the phone as well as the packaging.

Wal-Mart is eyeing a receptive Staten Island as the place to break in to the New York City market. (The Times tries to make it sound like the corporation is encountering NIMBYism, but not according to its own article . . . this could be a done deal!)

Another day, another instance of an over-aggressive landlord trying to bully a tenant out of a fantastically undervalued rent-controlled apartment:

An Upper East Side landlord cleared out his tenant’s $158-a-month rent-controlled apartment - then dragged the 87-year-old man out of the building when he tried to complain, authorities said yesterday.

Dominick Galofaro, 38, of Brooklyn was released on his own recognizance after being arraigned on felony charges yesterday, authorities said.

Retired Chinatown cook Hop Eng found the lock changed on his fourth-floor walkup at 172 E. 89th St. when he returned Saturday from a two-month vacation in Boston.

When he complained to Galofaro, the landlord told him he had taken over the apartment, said Eng’s son, Peter. “The defendant approached the victim, grabbed him by the hand, and forced him down the stairs and out of the building,” said Barbara Thompson, spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

Police arrested Galofaro on Wednesday and let Eng back into his apartment - but all that was left was a calendar, a salt shaker and La-Z-Boy chair.

Eng said, through an interpreter, “99.99% of everything was gone, just missing. “Our memories, clothes, everything. Everything that’s been inside the apartment for 46 years.”

However, never fear, Council Member and Manhattan Borough President hopeful Eva Moskowitz is on the case:

Eng pays just $158.06 for the dilapidated two-bedroom pad, while other tenants pay $1,500 for smaller units. Galofaro bought the building five months ago. Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz was helping Eng find temporary housing yesterday. “This is an outrage,” she said. “This is every tenant’s worst nightmare.”

(Do you sometimes wonder what percentage of renters would take the risk of being thrown out on the streets in exchange for $158-a-month rent? Just asking . . .)

Much has been made of Council Speaker and Mayoral hopeful Gifford Miller’s surly refusal to answer — yes or no — whether he would send his kids to public school. The Times notes that it’s a prickly topic for many upper-income (read: “rich”) New York families:

It is a question that many upper-income parents in New York City wrestle with, and one that can make a politician with young children wince: Will your children be going to public or private school?

On Tuesday night, the issue arose in the mayoral race, with Gifford Miller, the City Council speaker, publicly agonizing over how to answer the question in a yes or no fashion during a debate with three Democratic Party primary rivals. He chose not to answer it, saying he had not decided, and, amid boos from the audience, looked helplessly toward his wife - asking “Pam? Pam?” - when asked to explain where his children would be sent.

Of course, if the prospect of using your children to score cheap political points seems sleazy, you could always find a different way to answer the question. Just fib (read: “lie”) a little:

Another candidate for mayor, Fernando Ferrer, gave a less-than-complete answer about his own daughter’s education during Tuesday’s debate. He said his daughter, Carlina, who is now grown with her own children, graduated from public school. In fact, she attended public schools but graduated from a Catholic high school.

After the Mayor revealed that his phone number was listed, and media outlets everywhere ran with that fact, Hizzoner is receiving more calls than he can handle:

“One reporter put my phone number - my home phone number - on television, and that quickly got it onto the Internet,” said Bloomberg during a town hall meeting in Whitestone, Queens, last night. “And, so, people from around the world started calling. And there was roughly 100 calls an hour 24 hours a day from around the world.”

Hizzoner said the volume has become so great, he needs help answering the line.

“We’ve got a bunch of people answering the phone because I just couldn’t possibly keep up with it,” he said. “No. 1, I needed some sleep. And, No. 2, they were coming in faster than I could direct them.”

There is such thing as “voice mail,” you know . . .

The Village Voice gleefully and snarkily notes that the new New York Times building on 40th Street seems rather restrictive on who or what constitutes an acceptable tenant, kind of strange for a building constructed on land supposedly taken for a “public purpose”:

When The New York Times and Forest City Ratner Companies open their grand new office building on Eighth Avenue, it won’t have a Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, or Nathan’s, because they are specifically forbidden under terms of a land deal with the state. But a Starbucks or Cosi would be just fine.

The lease, which is on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, also bars renting space in the 52-story building for “a school or classroom or juvenile or adult day care or drop-in center.” It forbids “medical uses, including without limitation, hospital, medical, or dental offices, agencies, or clinics.” It gives the New York Times Company “the sole and absolute discretion” to reject United Nations or foreign-government offices, including any “considered controversial” or that are potentially the focus of demonstrations. It bans any “employment agency (other than executive-search firms) or job training center” and auction houses, “provided, however, the foregoing shall not apply to high-end auction houses specializing in art and historical artifacts.” Discount stores are forbidden. And the deal bars “a welfare or social-services office, homeless shelter or homeless assistance center, court or court-related facility.”

In fact, any government office is excluded from the building if it would attract people who arrive “without appointment.”

Lease restrictions that exclude the public may not be unusual in luxury office buildings, but there is an irony in this case. The Pataki administration, acting on behalf of the New York Times Company, condemned the property for a so-called “public purpose.” This is the standard the Fifth Amendment sets for the state to invoke the immense power of eminent domain.

No wonder the Times editorial board came out in favor of Kelo v. New London!

See also: Reason’s “Hail Seizers: The New York Times cheers on the land grabbers”.

A benign Travis Bickle? A less destructive Bernard Goetz? No, it’s a post-traumatically stressed former graffiti artist who has become obsessed with shadows:

On the streets of Brooklyn, stray bursts of color have been dotting the urban landscape, fleeting works of art that are impossible not to notice.

The chalk outlines - often of street fixtures such as fire hydrants, lamps or even buildings - are mysteriously signed “Ellis G. 2006.”

“My art has always been in the street,” said Ellis Gallagher, a former graffiti artist, as he surveyed a just-finished hot pink tracing of a lamppost with traffic box and street signage on the corner of Smith and Dean Sts.

He followed the arc of the street lamp into the street, darting into traffic and squatting barely a foot away from slow-moving cars.

“It’s temporal. And temporary,” the artist said, as cars tread over the pink lines.

Within minutes of completing a piece, the sun has moved the shadows. People can’t tell how much time has passed since the work was finished.

Gallagher’s artistic inspiration, however, sprang from a traumatic event.

Coming home late one night last month, Gallagher spotted a man lurking a block from his house. The man turned up his hood to cover his face, a sign Gallagher knew meant trouble.

As Gallagher fumbled for his keys, he saw the man’s shadow flicker across his front door. The man, wielding a 2-foot machete, demanded money.

Police caught the mugger that same night, but Gallagher was still rattled. He became nervous and jumpy, often reliving the moment when the thief’s shadow merged with his own.

“I became fixated with shadows,” he said.

Now he spends several hours each day and night on his shadow art, stopping only for work or sleep. He prefers late afternoon shadows that extend far down the street.

His work will be on display at Smith Street’s Apartment 138 until September 20, 2005.

Just don’t tell Philadelphians that Williamsburg exiles see their city as one big undervalued slacker heaven:

“We got priced out of Manhattan, and we moved to Brooklyn,” said John Schmersal, 32, of the three-member band Enon; two of them migrated here in January. “Then we got priced out of Brooklyn. Now we’re in Philadelphia.”

On a recent Friday night Mr. Schmersal and his girlfriend, Toko Yasuda, were huddled at the bar at the Khyber, a smoky rock institution in the nightclub-heavy Old City neighborhood, a Colonial area of narrow streets bordering the Delaware River east of City Hall, to see Love as Laughter, a New York City band. “We like going to shows here,” Mr. Schmersal said. “In New York there are so many people, it’s impossible to even get in to see hot bands.”

Much less be in a band. “For years I was willing to sacrifice quality of life for artistic fulfillment - you know, you find a circle of artists and you scrape by,” said Anna Neighbor, a 27-year-old bass player and Williamsburg exile, between sips of Yuengling lager at a bar in the Northern Liberties neighborhood, an artists’ enclave north of City Hall. In January Ms. Neighbor and her husband, Daniel Matz, and Jason McNeely, all members of the indie rock band Windsor for the Derby, decided to leave Brooklyn.

Ms. Neighbor and Mr. Matz discovered Fishtown, a gentrifying blue-collar neighborhood adjacent to Northern Liberties, where, in the last five years, youthful faces with bed head have made their way among the traditionally Irish Catholic residents. They found a three-bedroom row house for $170,000.

“New York is mythologically all about vibrancy and creativity, but it’s hard to work a 40-hour week and come home and be Jackson Pollock,” said Mr. Matz, 32, a guitarist. He said that by living in Philadelphia he could support himself teaching public school and devote the rest of his time to his band.

Thanks to the police department’s random bag searches that apparently are not overlooking other illegal substances, drug deliverymen (otherwise known as “drug runners”) are resorting to expensive cab rides, the costs of which passed on to disgruntled consumers:

“My dealer won’t take the train anymore,” complains Wiley, a 30-year-old marketing executive and avid pot smoker. “He charged me an extra $12 for his cab fare today. It’s ridiculous.” Call it the anti-terror tax. “If the runner’s gotta give a little extra, you’re gonna give a little extra,” says Flower, a grandmother and coke dealer who runs her business from a bar beneath her Lower East Side apartment (and says her clients before the crackdown included a network-news executive). She pauses on her bar stool. “Otherwise, come down here and get it yourself.”

Take a cab from Midtown all the way to the Lower East Side? On a deadline, no less? Forget it!

Las Vegas Casinoist Mark Advent, the one responsible for New York-New York, now plans to develop a retail-office-entertainment complex called the “East Village” just off the Strip:

And so, in true Las Vegas fashion, Mr. Advent has decided to remedy what he sees as the city’s lack of a neighborhood fabric by building one of his own. On the corner of Tropicana Avenue and Paradise Road, on a vacant patch of desert near the airport, will rise East Village, a retail-office-entertainment complex inspired by Manhattan’s strollable streets. The $250 million project is tentatively scheduled to open in 2007.

Playing fast and loose with geographical borders, the development will contain a scale model of the Washington Square arch, a meatpacking district and a diamond district, which, as New Yorkers know, is a good 30 blocks north of the East Village. “It’s not an exact replica,” Mr. Advent explained, adding that the complex was more an homage to great neighborhoods (which explains the part of the development based on Pike Place Market in Seattle). The name, he said, stems from the location, which is one mile east of the Las Vegas strip, and from the fact that “it really is like a little village.”

Crazy! It can’t possibly work! No way! Way:

For his latest project, Mr. Advent is determined to build the kind of richly appointed, idiosyncratic structures found throughout Manhattan. Facades will be brick, and in some cases, detailing will be wrought iron. “Other developers keep saying: ‘Your buildings aren’t square. You’ve got a pie-shaped building. That’s going to cost more,’” Mr. Advent said. “I’m going, yeah, it’s a pie-shaped building. When you go to great cities, they build pie-shaped buildings.”

The New Yorker goes fishing with anglers looking to catch some of the hated snakehead fish apparently invading the trash-filled waters of Flushing Meadow-Corona Park’s Meadow Lake:

But now the snakehead — the northern snakehead, Channa argus, which is native to Asia — has come to New York City, by what conveyance no one knows. Scientists with the state Department of Environmental Conservation recently netted five of them in Meadow Lake, in Flushing, Queens, during a routine survey. The picture in the paper, of two torpedo-shaped carcasses laid out next to measuring tape, called to mind mug shots of criminals you’ve come to root for. It didn’t take long for a fisherman or two to start trying to think like a snakehead.

“I’m gonna bring some earthworms,” Edwin Valentin, a master flytier at Urban Angler, on Fifth Avenue, said last week, after being persuaded to serve as Quint in a Queens-bound party of three. (Gary Ford, of Fort Greene, furniture-maker and saltwater fisherman, was guy No. 3.) Valentin lives in Bushwick and has been plying these metropolitan waters for more than thirty years. His only experience catching snakeheads is on PlayStation.

Alas, in the end no snakeheads were caught. But they did snag a healthy collection of inorganic detritus:

A halfhearted chumming effort (a doughnut, a fish stick) brought forth no surface activity. Valentin and Ford rigged up. “I’ll try a white grub,” Valentin said, tying on a wormy lure. “Here we go.” He cast into the lake, reeled, then cast again. A bend in the rod indicated a strike: garbage bag, the first of many. The line snapped. In this way, perhaps, the snakeheads, without lifting a pectoral fin, could wipe out the entire population of Valentin’s tackle box.

If you feel that New York is an inappropriate place for your garden-variety Newfoundland or Irish Wolfhound, fear not — you can now rent pets, affording one the chance to simply return them before they slobber up the place:

Jared Wasserman’s parents aren’t wild about his current crush. One recent morning as this long-lashed 5-year-old sat tugging on his big toe in the pristine den of his parent’s duplex, he announced he had fallen in love. “I’d like to marry Rudy,” he said.

It is an interesting choice; Rudy is male and can’t talk. He is Jared’s hamster. Jared and Rudy, however, have not moved in together yet. This is because the parents Wasserman like having their home pet-free.

“I’ve never been an animal person,” said Jared’s mother, Marla Wasserman. “I could do without the flies.”

Rudy is part of a small population of pets in New York that can be leased or adopted part-time. He lives in a cage with Jared’s name on it on East 91st Street at the Art Farm in the City, an indoor petting zoo and educational center that is home to 15 kinds of small creatures like millipedes and cockatiels, all of which can be rented yearly for $100 (for a tarantula or a frog) to $300 (for a chinchilla or rabbit, which require more upkeep). In general they live at the Art Farm and make occasional visits to their part-time owners’ homes.

Before you stomp your foot and sigh, “What will they think of next?” know that renting pets helps fight against a particular sort of scenario:

Sean Casey, the owner and founder of Sean Casey Animal Rescue in Brooklyn, has adopted out everything from wallabies to alligators and currently has cats, parakeets, hairless rats and a dozen other types of animals ready for adoption or part-time foster care. He said corn snakes and rat snakes are the ones people ask for the most. Cats and dogs tend to be the animals that are returned the fastest because they require more work and training than people expect.

Mr. Casey said he tries hard to screen out anyone who might take animals for dishonorable reasons, but he cannot always be sure someone is not just taking a puppy for a day or two in order to pick up women in the park. “I’ve turned away people who say they want a snake for a few days so they can freak out their roommates,” he said. “Or one woman asked me for a bird temporarily because she felt her cat was bored and needed something to swat at.”

At certain perfect moments, the Times channels J.D. Salinger. This is one of those moments:

Occasionally, when [Art Farm co-founder] Ms. [Valentina] Van Hise feels especially comfortable with the part-time pet owners, she’ll let them take the animal home for a short stay. Jared and his sister, Alison, who live on the Upper East Side, were allowed to bring Rudy home, at no extra charge.

After struggling to get the cage into a cab and getting home, lots of pictures were taken of Jared, in pajamas, cuddling Rudy on the kitchen floor. Jared even asked his mom if he could have a farmerlike red-checkered shirt and a pair of overalls like the Art Farm caretakers wear. He brought the pictures to school for show and tell, and gave one to his teacher as a gift.

Then two days later Rudy returned to Ms. Van Hise.

“I just kept thinking how they’re part of the rodent family,” Mrs. Wasserman said. “When I brought him back, Valentina said, ‘You’re welcome to keep him longer,’ but I said ‘No, it’s time for him to come back here now.’”

On one of the hottest days in recent memory — with record-breaking heat — mayoral candidates still have to campaign:

A politician’s lot is not an easy one, especially when the temperature hits a record 99 degrees, as it did yesterday in New York City.

It was the hottest day in the city in four years - whine-worthy enough for anyone venturing outside, especially for politicians locked into long hours, numerous campaign speeches and serial pressing of the flesh.

But none of the major Democratic candidates seeking to become the city’s next mayor were complaining about the weather yesterday.

Campaigning in Queens, C. Virginia Fields, the Manhattan borough president, shrugged off the heat and humidity and said, “It’s a real challenge to be out here, but that’s where the voters are.”

It was the hottest Aug. 13 in Central Park since recordkeeping began in 1869, according to the meteorologists at Pennsylvania State University. At La Guardia Airport, the heat unofficially soared into the triple digits, with a recording of 100 degrees. The humidity made the “real feel” temperature peak around 108.

New York hasn’t been this hot since Aug. 9, 2001, when it was 103 degrees. Moreover, yesterday was the sixth straight day of temperatures of 95 degrees or more. That kind of streak hasn’t happened since 1955, when there were seven such days in a row.

If ability to deal with heat is an indicator of front-runner status, Council Speaker Gifford Miller may be in the lead:

Yesterday, Gifford Miller, the City Council speaker, who is running against Ms. Fields and others for the Democratic nomination for mayor, seemed to recall that tradition as he campaigned in Union Square. Dressed in khaki pants and a long-sleeved blue shirt, he did not appear to be detectably damp.

“I actually don’t mind the heat,” Mr. Miller said. “You know, if you want to be mayor, you have to be able to stand the heat.”

At a later stop at the Whitehall swimming pool in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, Mr. Miller campaigned among swimmers in their 60’s and 70’s, some of whom noticed his perspirationless poise.

Erika Firat, lounging in the cabana, said, “After Nixon’s debate with Kennedy, politicians don’t sweat anymore.”

As for the rest, we learn that C. Virginia Fields dislikes long, sweaty hugs on hot days, Anthony Weiner tans unevenly and Fernando Ferrer would like to jump in a wading pool with a cool Rolling Rock.

Wildly Off-Base Prediction: The Times will endorse Gifford Miller for the September primary.

A slow news weekend, the Times visits the Department of Transportation’s sign-making shop in Maspeth, Queens and files this report:

As New York City’s chief traffic engineer, Michael R. Harnett oversees the manufacture and installation of around 70,000 traffic and street signs each year. But don’t ask him about the often-pesky messages that are actually on the signs: “Don’t Honk - $350 Penalty,” “Don’t Block the Box,” and, of course, the ever-present “No Parking Anytime.”

Angry about ticket agents? They work for the Police Department. Want to appeal a parking ticket? Talk to the Finance Department. Please. After all, Mr. Harnett doesn’t write the signs. He just makes them.

There are an estimated 1.3 million traffic and street signs in New York City, one for every six residents, and most are designed and manufactured in the Transportation Department’s central shop, an unassuming brick building in an industrial section of Maspeth, in central Queens.

The shop, which has 37 workers, is the largest municipal sign shop in the United States. A hive of quiet and constant activity, it makes about 70,000 signs a year.

And if you’re interested, you can purchase an honest-to-god, real-life New York City street sign:

Signs typically last about 10 years, but especially harsh weather or bright lights can shorten their life. Besides suffering wear and tear, some signs are knocked over - and even run over - by wayward vehicles. Others are vandalized or defaced. Then there are those that simply disappear.

In the past, signs for Wall Street in Manhattan and Hooker Place in Staten Island have been stolen repeatedly. Other popular targets are John Street in Manhattan and Love Lane in Brooklyn.

The department’s Sign Sales Program was established in 1995, in part, so that souvenir-hunters could acquire signs legally.

Some signs evoke nostalgia, like the replicas of signs for the 1964 World’s Fair, the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field. Others, like Mr. Koch’s comical signs, have been retired from official use. Still others - “No Parking Except Lillian” or “Yield to Mom” - exist only in people’s imaginations.

John Jurgeleit, who manages the sign-sales program, said it had grown to about $300,000 a year. The city does not make a profit on the signs, but the program pays for itself and is not subsidized by the city. A modest size personalized street sign costs about $30.

Bonus: Department of Transportation’s Custom Made Signs Information Page

The Times notices the new walk/don’t walk signs that feature an emaciated, hunched over pedestrian:

Could they have been subliminal harbingers of the city’s slenderizing campaign?

Is it just coincidence that in the summer that New York City went to war against trans fats, a new generation of “Walk/Don’t Walk” icons began appearing around Columbus Circle with a noticeably skinnier walking man and an almost emaciated red hand?

Your typical walking man - a familiar silhouette around town in the five years since the first new light-emitting diode pedestrian signal was installed at 35th Street and Queens Boulevard - is a pretty robust, smooth-shouldered, round-headed fellow who steps off confidently into traffic, as bubbly as a Keith Haring figure.

This new guy, by contrast, seems a bit rickety. There isn’t a curve to his body. His head - is this too cruel to say? - is pentagonal. His arms and legs are mere sticks. Indeed, he looks as though he’s stooped over with a bad back. (Maybe from waiting so long for the light to change.)

About that upraised hand. The one that New Yorkers have grown accustomed to - not that they pay it any mind - is as smooth and solid as a porcelain glove mold. The new hand is so skeletally thin it might be the crypt keeper’s.

But they say you can never be too thin. After all, the skinny man is formed of 45 light-emitting diodes, where the older version tips the scales at 60. The new hand has 64 diodes, the old one 120. So maybe this was an energy conservation step.