In Mark Lotto’s story about the latest Brooklyn boosterism, this nugget about how Peter Braunstein’s dad knows what he knows:

It’s not Whitechapel during Jack the Ripper, but ever since the former Women’s Wear Daily reporter allegedly assaulted a woman in her Chelsea home on Halloween night, Peter Braunstein, or his unlucky doppelgänger, or some mass-hysterical hallucination, has been spotted sipping lattes and annoying dry cleaners all over Cobble Hill. Every day the police dragnet continues, and every day drags nothing up.

But Alberto Braunstein, the suspect’s dad, knows that Peter wasn’t the suspicious coffee drinker or the irate dry-cleaner customer. His son, Mr. Braunstein assured the Daily News, wouldn’t be caught dead outside Manhattan. “I have never known my son to even go to Brooklyn,” said Mr. Braunstein. “So I was stunned.”

Forget the massive manhunt. Is Peter Braunstein the last freelancer in New York who thinks he’s too good for Brooklyn?

Then again, there is that counter-intuitive thinking: I’ll just hide out in Brooklyn — no one would expect it!

The price of unused air rights for buildings has reached a new high:

The price of air has gone up in Manhattan.

It’s now $430 a square foot.

Two New York City developers have agreed to pay a record-setting amount for “air rights” so they can build a 35-story apartment tower with views of Central Park from the high floors.

The brothers William L. and Arthur W. Zeckendorf are set to pay $430 per square foot — more than twice the going rate — for unused air rights over Christ Church and the Grolier Club at Park Avenue and East 60th Street. Christ Church will collect more than $30 million; Grolier will get about $7 million.

Air rights allow developers to build taller by buying the space over low-scale buildings and transferring it (on paper, if not in reality) to spaces over adjacent buildings. Although such transfers occur elsewhere in the country, the prices do not run as high as they do in Manhattan, which, after all, is an island and generally provides developers with one option: up.

The rights will be transferred to a site west of the Grolier Club on East 60th Street, where the Zeckendorfs and their partners own three tenements that are to be demolished.

If it all goes as planned, the developers will be able to build a taller tower than the zoning ordinarily allows.

Not only did Christ Church sell its air rights, but it apparently sold its address as well:

In a separate deal with Christ Church, the tower will also have a coveted Park Avenue address, despite its location on 60th Street.

All of which leads one to wonder just what else you can sell . . .

See also: Christ Church United Methodist.

As official results are tallied, it turns out that Bloomberg’s victory actually wasn’t the widest margin ever for a Republican. That, and Fernando Ferrer’s unsportsmanlike whining, may unfortunately sabtoage Bloomberg’s “place in history” bona fides. In fact, I think Ferrer is doing it on purpose:

Mr. Ferrer, who does not place blame on himself at any point in the El Diario interview, said the news media did not sufficiently cover the issues he had raised in the campaign. Reporters, he said, “will always assert that there was nothing persuasive to report.” He added, “Aren’t hunger and housing persuasive issues?”

He also suggested that he might have been taken more seriously and could have closed in on Mr. Bloomberg if the polls had not forecast an inevitable runaway victory by the mayor. Some newspapers used opinion polls to predict a Bloomberg blowout, with The New York Post declaring “It’s Over” in a headline three days before the election. Polls suggested that the mayor would win by up to 38 percentage points.

“Historic blunders were committed, but they’ll never be held responsible for the harm that they did to me with the public and the fund-raising,” Mr. Ferrer said.

No matter how many times you read about Compensation Day (that’s close to but different from Evacuation Day, which for New Yorkers falls on November 25), when Wall Street year-end bonuses are doled out, it never ceases to amaze me just how much money these fuckers get paid. The bonus pool at Goldman Sachs this year is estimated to be as much as $11 billion — for an average of $500,000 per employee.

This year, New York Magazine takes it one further, explaining the pecking order of bonuses and how every year some at Goldman Sachs actually feel shafted by their package:

In Goldman’s offices around the globe, but especially inside the gilded walls of 85 Broad Street, the annual bonus dance is about to reach its climax. On the day they’re told their numbers, those who are richly rewarded will do their best to contain the feeling that comes along with being $2 million, $10 million, or even $40 million richer. And what of those who get the shaft? “They try to be professional,” says the former EMD [executive managing director]. “Although you can see from their trembling lips or the intensity of their stare that they’re disappointed. They’ll go out to their station, slam a few things down, grab their coat, and walk out. Some of them won’t come back for several days.” At which point, it will nearly be 2006, with the meter running on next year’s bonus.

Look, if you’ve somehow found yourself in a position in life where you’ve made billions speculating on crude oil, then you’re probably worth a $40 million bonus — what’s really impressive here is the money they cough up for just showing up (even if “showing up” means working until 3 or 4 in the morning most nights):

Goldman also pays its supporting cast handsomely. Bankers whose jobs consist merely of pitching the capabilities of other people at the firm can make as much as your average NFL starter. “The amazing thing about Goldman,” says a hedge-fund executive who does business with the firm, “it’s not that a few talented people make $20 million — it’s all the mediocre talents that make over $1 million.”

Amid misplaced concern that its mall-like atmosphere would not catch on in Manhattan, New York Magazine reports that the new Time Warner Center is establishing itself as a convenient cruising spot:

It seems gay men might be picking up more than just Cole Haan loafers at the Time Warner Center—especially in the third-floor restroom. Ryan Haase, who works nearby, recently detected an “air of ill repute” when he saw several men at the urinals. “They all turned and looked at me almost in unison,” he says. “I went to wash my hands. No one had moved.” A shopboy says rumors of the rendezvous spot have circulated for about a year — colleagues reported “uncomfortable sounds coming from the stalls” — and a blogger called spriteboy pinpointed it as “a cruising spot,” adding, “Ohhh nobody even needs to know the scandal my eyes witnessed today.” A former restaurant employee says, “It was a known thing. The security guard would tell me stories about it.”

Artists standing tall with the workers against the gentrification of the Gowanus Canal:

Even without variances, landlords are finding illegal tenants to live in their lofts or seeking out artists and artisans to work in the lofts, trends that often presage eventual conversion to residences. Two years ago, a group of artists bought a box factory at 543 Union Street for $3.1 million and legally converted it into 16 studios. Twelve artists live in a former factory building at 280 Nevins Street that was legally converted in 1986.

One of those is Margaret Maugenest, who moved from SoHo in 1984. Now that she is in Gowanus, she wants to make sure the neighborhood stays the way it is.

“SoHo was an interesting neighborhood,” she said. “You had the trucks and the rag industry. You had the artists, who are workers also because that’s what we are. Now you have a neighborhood that doesn’t have much character.” [Emphasis added]

The Times follows up on the bedbug scourge, reported last spring in the New Yorker (Bug Off Pest Control Center proprietor Andy Linares is perfecting his soundbites!), and finds that it has only gotten worse:

They’re the scourge of hobo encampments and hot-sheet motels. To impressionable children everywhere, they’re a snippet of nursery rhyme, an abstract foe lurking beneath the covers that emerges when mommy shuts the door at night.

But bedbugs on Park Avenue? Ask the horrified matron who recently found her duplex teeming with the blood-sucking beasts. Or the tenants of a co-op on Riverside Drive who spent $200,000 earlier this month to purge their building of the pesky little thugs. The Helmsley Park Lane was sued two years ago by a welt-covered guest who blamed the hotel for harboring the critters. The suit was quietly settled last year.

And bedbugs, stealthy and fast-moving nocturnal creatures that were all but eradicated by DDT after World War II, have recently been found in hospital maternity wards, private schools and even a plastic surgeon’s waiting room.

Bedbugs are back and spreading through New York City like a swarm of locusts on a lush field of wheat.

To make matters worse, there’s nothing we can do to stop them:

“It’s becoming an epidemic,” said Jeffrey Eisenberg, the owner of Pest Away Exterminating, an Upper West Side business that receives about 125 bedbug calls a week, compared with just a handful five years ago. “People are being tortured, and so am I. I spend half my day talking to hysterical people about bedbugs.”

Last year the city logged 377 bedbug violations, up from just 2 in 2002 and 16 in 2003. Since July, there have been 449. “It’s definitely a fast-emerging problem,” said Carol Abrams, spokeswoman for the city housing agency.

In the bedbug resurgence, entomologists and exterminators blame increased immigration from the developing world, the advent of cheap international travel and the recent banning of powerful pesticides. Other culprits include the recycled mattress industry and those thrifty New Yorkers who revel in the discovery of a free sofa on the sidewalk.

And that new mattress delivered from a reputable department store, which kindly hauled away your old one? It may have spent all day in a truck wedged against an old mattress collected from a customer with a bedbug problem.

Once introduced into a home, bedbugs can crawl into adjoining apartments or hitch a ride to another part of town in the cuff of a pant leg.

And now the Times adds a twist — we can now blame bedbugs for more of society’s ills, including licentiousness:

Kellianne Scanlan, 30, a hairstylist who lives in Washington Heights, has been living like a nomad since last month, when she spotted a bedbug on her pillow, and then whole families ensconced in the frame of her platform bed. Despite the visit of an exterminator, the problem has not been vanquished, and every last item of clothing is sealed in plastic bags and piled up on the living room floor.

“My life has become all about bedbugs,” she said as an exterminator arrived last week.

. . .

“The psychological damage is probably the worst thing about it. I mean, how long will it be before I can sleep soundly and not worry about some creature sucking my blood?”

Still, for Ms. Scanlan, there has been a silver lining. The night after she discovered the bugs, she went out drinking, intent on avoiding her own bed. That evening she met a man at a bar, and, contrary to her usual instincts, accompanied him to his apartment.

As much as it pains me to say it, only in Queens is a paved-over front lawn considered a major selling point:

When Christina Groza moved from an older building in Astoria, Queens, into a recently built one in College Point, the new home had a major selling point. Unlike the modest front lawn of her Astoria home, the original lawn outside the new building had been paved over with concrete.

That suited Ms. Groza just fine. Parking is scarce in the area, and although she loves nature as much as the next person, she also likes a guaranteed spot near her front door at the end of the day.

“Anyone who says they’d rather have a lawn than concrete never tried parking a car around here,” said Ms. Groza, 48, who cleans office buildings in Manhattan.

“If you’re looking for a lawn, you should move to Long Island or New Jersey.”

But the phenomenon seems to go beyond practicality into the realm of aesthetics:

The grassy front lawn, once a staple of the American dream, is steadily being usurped by the pave-over. Many homeowners, opting for grayer pastures, are pouring concrete over their patches of green.

Often the reason is practical - to make room for additional parking, or to create a low-maintenance home without lawnmowers or landscapers.

But the trend against turf also represents an aesthetic shift, a decision that grass has lost its class, and that a tastefully paved yard, front and back, is much more elegant.

“Not everyone wants that beautiful green front yard anymore,” said Martha Lucia Marin, a sales agent with listings mostly in northern Queens.

“A lot of people are saying the house looks more elegant with nice brickwork instead of grass. It’s also an economical decision. You can park in front of your door, and you don’t have to take care of a lawn. It saves work and makes for a low-maintenance home.”

But it’s not until they start actively fearing nature that this all gets to be a little too freaky, a little too weird and a little too puritannical:

Jack Casaro, 31, a technology systems executive, recently completed a major reconstruction, turning a modest house on a 40-by-100-foot plot in Whitestone into a brick fortress of a domicile. Now he is spending $25,000 to pave the property in brick.

Mr. Casaro stopped short of paving the entire front yard, as his next-door neighbor has done. He is keeping two small patches of grass out front.

“I want to keep a little grass, but a full lawn is too much maintenance,” he said. “The grass absorbs the rain, and when the water table gets full, it seeps into the basement. Now, with the brick pitched the right way, the rain runs right off.”

His mother, Angela Casaro, stepped outside to voice her preference for brick over grass.

“Lawns have ticks and disease and worms and stuff,” she said. “This way, it’s safe and sterile. It’s a cleaner area for the children to play. I love nature and I love grass, but I don’t want my family exposed to disease.”

To all you all who throw your shit on the subway tracks, Hey, Moron, Give A Fuckin’ Hoot, Why Don’t You? (boom — instant T-shirt idea!):

The Transit Authority has identified the dirtiest subway stations in the city, where enough trash to fill more than 6,500 large bags of garbage has been collected off the trackbeds so far this year.

TA cleaners carrying 55-gallon bags pick litter by hand from the trackbeds at busy stations once or twice a week - yet within days, debris once again litters the rails, officials say.

“There’s no way you can stay on top of it,” said William Johnson, a veteran cleaner assigned to the 125th St. and Lexington Ave. station, which has the dubious distinction of consistently being the city’s most trash-filled station.

And it’s getting worse: From January through September, transit workers hauled 37,000 bags of rubbish from station tracks systemwide - a nearly 32% increase over the same period last year, the TA said.

. . .

The garbage is more than an eyesore. It’s also fuel for fires sparked by trains. Those blazes force firefighters to descend into a potentially dangerous environment. Underground fires can require the evacuation of riders and regularly result in delayed service. And trash attracts the sturdy breed of rats that make the underground warren their home and dart out of the darkness between trains to feed on the refuse.

And leave it to the transit workers union and them Straphanger whiners to blame the MTA on this one when we all know that the problem is with your stanky asses — you who throw wrappers, cans, cups and bags onto the tracks:

Critics charge that the TA has unwisely trimmed the workforce assigned to cleaning platforms over the last several years, and has been slow to deploy more workers to remove debris from tracks. Still, critics and straphangers concede that there are too many litterbugs - rude riders who toss empty coffee cups, newspapers, fast-food wrappers and other refuse aside without regard for their fellow travelers.

Law-abiding subway riders called upon those who are less civil to do the right thing. “We all use it, so we should take care of it,” Roberto Rios, 18, of the Bronx, said at the 125th St. and Lexington Ave. station. “If we didn’t throw garbage to the floor, it wouldn’t be a problem. People should be more considerate.”

So about those holiday bargains the MTA doled out like Santa Claus (announced just before a crucial vote on a $2.9 billion transportation bond), of course people are taking advantage of the deal:

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has begun handing out commuter train passes as holiday gifts, and the festive response from some recipients has been: “Hmmm. I wonder how much I could get for this.”

Distribution of the passes, good for 10 rides during off-peak hours on the Metro-North Railroad or the Long Island Rail Road, began this week. They were sent out at no additional charge to buyers of December monthly passes, and already some of them have popped up for sale on the Internet, heralding a nascent black market.

“Leave it to New Yorkers to figure out how to make money from something that’s free,” said Mitchell H. Pally, an authority board member from Long Island.

The tickets, which can be used between any two stations on either rail system, have no face value but would normally sell for $36 to $123.

. . .

The authority is giving regular riders on Metro-North and the Long Island one free pass each, which is good for 10 trips during the middle of the day and late at night before March 1.

Those passes are transferable because the authority intended for its customers to give them to family members or friends. The admonition “not for resale” is stamped in the middle of each pass, and those words are clearly legible on one of the postings on eBay that seek to resell a Metro-North pass.

That pass, which went up for auction on Monday, had reached a price of $24.50 (plus $1 for postage) when the bidding closed last night. It drew 15 bids, starting at $15. Another pass was offered for a minimum bid of $19.99.

. . .

Mr. Pally, who voted against the holiday bonuses because he thought they were inappropriate and provided a better reward to subway riders than to suburban commuters, laughed like Santa Claus when told of the resale efforts.

“The hope is that somebody will use them; otherwise we will have gone through this whole thing for nothing,” he said. “From the M.T.A.’s perspective, it really doesn’t matter as long as somebody uses it and somebody benefits from it.”

After that warning in the Times about the lack of balloon handling training, some wayward M&Ms careened into a lightpole, causing a lamp to fall to the ground, injuring a child:

A giant balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, swinging out of control in sudden bursts of wind, struck a light pole in Times Square yesterday, injuring two spectators and scaring scores of others in a replay of a 1997 accident that had prompted changes in the handling of the balloons.

The M&M balloon, 515 pounds of polyurethane filled with 13,335 cubic feet of helium, began to tip erratically as it entered Times Square about 11:40 a.m., witnesses said, before it hit the light pole near 43rd Street and was punctured. As the balloon collapsed, it pulled off a light fixture, which crashed to the ground amid a crowd of spectators.

Police and emergency workers descended on the scene, and the victims - a 26-year-old woman who was using a wheelchair, and her 11-year-old sister - were taken to Bellevue Hospital Center, where they were treated for cuts and bruises.

. . .

Several volunteers said yesterday that their training had been adequate but not stringent.

Anne Kelly, 57, of Mountain Lakes, N.J., a first-time volunteer who helped handle the Jojo’s Circus balloon, said she had missed two voluntary training sessions at the Meadowlands but had read instructions on balloon handling provided by Macy’s and had listened to directions from other handlers, a captain and a pilot. “I didn’t feel unprepared,” she said.

I don’t think they’re gloating, “I told you so,” but then again, ten reporters contributed to the Times piece, compared with seven for the Post’s article and four for the Daily News’ article . . .

Meanwhile, the Times notes that if you were watching the NBC telecast of the parade yesterday, you wouldn’t have known anything was amiss, leading to allegations of a coverup at NBC:

NBC did not interrupt its broadcast of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade yesterday to bring viewers the news that an M&M balloon had crashed into a light pole, injuring two sisters.

In fact, when the time came in the tightly scripted three-hour program for the M&Ms’ appearance, NBC weaved in tape of the balloon crossing the finish line at last year’s parade - even as the damaged balloon itself was being dragged from the accident scene. At 11:47 a.m., as an 11-year-old girl and her 26-year-old sister were being treated for injuries, the parade’s on-air announcers - Katie Couric, Matt Lauer and Al Roker - kept up their light-hearted repartee from Herald Square, where the parade ends.

“Will these classic candymen get out of this delicious dilemma?” Mr. Roker asked, referring not to the accident but to the premise of the attraction, a red M&M’s attempt to save his yellow counterpart, who had been blown from the basket of a hot-air balloon.

Ten minutes later, the upbeat broadcast ended without mention of the accident in Times Square. CNN carried a flash about the accident at 11:51, while the parade telecast was still going on. NBC’s cable news network, MSNBC, followed two minutes later. And WNBC, the New York affiliate, carried the news at 12:30 p.m.

But Cameron Blanchard, a spokeswoman for NBC’s entertainment division, which broadcast the parade, said that the anchors did not deviate much from the script because it was not clear at the time what had happened. “We had been alerted that there had been an incident,” she said. “But no further details had been conveyed to us.”

When the balloon failed to arrive at Herald Square at the appointed time, she said, “we rolled with some previously recorded footage.”

That said, the situation made for a jarring confluence of scripted and unscripted reality.

At 11:47 a.m., about 7 minutes after the accident, the screen image faded from live coverage of a high school marching band from Kennesaw, Ga., to last year’s tape of the M&M balloon. Ms. Couric, advising the audience that it was now looking at old tape, riffed on the balloon’s concept of M&M’s in distress.

“Now, because of today’s windy conditions,” Ms. Couric told viewers, “these characters are on video, and if we told you they were not in a panic, we’d be full of hot air.”

Mr. Lauer, Ms. Couric’s co-anchor on the “Today” show, chimed in: “You may be thinking ‘color us clueless’ as they flirt with trouble, with Yellow hanging on by a thread and Red struggling to keep his best buddy from flying off into the blue.”

Mr. Roker then spoke his lines: “Will these classic candymen get out of this delicious dilemma? Hard to say, but when it comes to sweetness, Yellow and Red continue to melt your heart, but not in your hand.”

Ms. Blanchard said she did not know what the announcers knew about the accident at the time.

Masters of the universe trade company picnics for the opportunity to blow away inanimate objects at a shooting range — think Gordon Gekko with a semi-automatic — explained in full in “Now, Accounting Can Get Its Gun”:

This past summer, members of a Manhattan law firm went on a field trip to Danbury, Conn., where they spent an entire day at a range without swinging bats or golf clubs. The members of Kobre & Kim LLP were there not to hit and hack, but to lock and load, and to experience the thrill of firing pistols, rifles and even submachine guns.

“We do very aggressive litigation and trial work,” said Michael Kim, a partner in the firm. “So we prefer an activity that dovetails nicely with that aggressive culture, and hitting a little white ball on the greens doesn’t do much for us.”

In the last few years, a growing number of professionals like Mr. Kim are abandoning traditional company outings like softball, golf or fishing, choosing instead to escape the pressures of their busy workdays by blowing off steam - and rounds of ammunition - at shooting ranges that give corporate retreats some of the atmosphere of military attacks.

. . .

Russ Savage, a Manhattan lawyer who took a shooting holiday earlier this year, said that some of the men and women who have pulled the trigger on the increasingly popular excursion, especially those in the world of high finance, may have done so to gain “a feeling of empowerment.”

“For major corporate executives whose job it is to lead, this is a much more powerful way for them to maintain a sense of aura than by simply taking their people on a company picnic,” Mr. Savage said. “It’s an exhibition of strength and power.”

That said, the question remains whether this is a healthy activity to engage in:

“They might not be the best thing for a society that is already way too aggressive,” Dr. Kenneth Porter, a Manhattan psychiatrist, said. “When you look at what is in the media, and what kids growing up are exposed to, something like this could have a negative effect on the overall mental health of the population.

“However,” Dr. Porter continued, “shooting can be viewed as a legitimate sport and can be seen as a constructive outlet to express aggression, so it cuts both ways.”

Then, the reveal:

Seconds later, Dr. Porter, sitting at a picnic table at the Highland Lakes site with his fiancée and her son, picked up a long-range rifle and began firing at a wooden bull’s-eye, shell casings flying behind him as he squeezed off round after round, his body recoiling slightly after every blast.

“Before today, I thought something like this was unequivocally harmful,” he said. “But now I’ve learned otherwise.”

No word on whether the Postal Service has plans to institute such team-building exercises, for obvious reasons.

Another Thanksgiving, another super-cloying Times article about how new immigrants celebrate that ur-immigrant holiday:

Every November, Thanksgiving - a celebration of the original immigrant feast - plays out in this city of immigrants as the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians could have hardly fathomed in 1621: a cross-cultural hodgepodge holiday improvised by new American families often inspired and instructed by some of their youngest members. The children of immigrants act as pint-size ambassadors of all things Thanksgiving, urging parents throughout the world to prepare all-American turkey meals that they learned about in school and sharing their incomplete yet innocently sweet knowledge of the holiday’s origins.

. . .

Sometimes, the children are not so much teachers as they are cheerleaders. Occasionally, they are simply culinary advisers. Maha Attieh, 47, a Jordanian-born Palestinian, takes her children to the market when she goes shopping for Thanksgiving, which she usually celebrates at her home in Midwood, Brooklyn, with a turkey stuffed with rice, chicken cutlets, nuts and raisins.

“They make their own menu,” said Mrs. Attieh, who works at the Arab-American Family Support Center in Brooklyn. “What they hear in school, what they hear from friends, they want the same thing. I say, ‘As long as it’s halal meat, I’ll do it.’”

My idea of hell is willingly surrounding myself with people who self-identify as “snarky.” But that was before I considered the possibility of interviewing the applicants who answer the Craigslist ad “Snarky Writers Wanted to Cover Nightlife”:

A local publisher is looking for snarky, talented & responsible writers to contribute a MINIMUM of 100 nightlife reviews over a 4-month period (Dec. thru April) for a new nightlife guide. Experience with nightlife writing and/or professional publications is a big plus. Must be able to write in a clever, snarky, informative way. We are looking for writers who can commit to a large workload and work with our style. Ideal for a freelancer living in Manhattan. Think Gawker, not City Search.

To apply, please send a resume (no attachments!) and a short review (50 words) of your favorite bar…impress us with your snark and style! [Emphasis added . . . duh!]

Impresarios everywhere ought to be shaking in their boots, “Oh no! Please don’t skewer me with your acid tongue and that poison, poison pen on your mildly influential weblog! I’m so scared!”

Bonus Points: Other Snark; Snark . . . So 2003 (”Plucky and sharp upon first arrival, poor Snark skyrocketed to ubiquity and, predictably, soon became overused, overexposed, and had its meaning completely (and ironically) overhauled; the very use of the word (oftentimes uttered with the same petulant tone and pointing finger as one would use to bark, ‘J’accuse!’) became a demonstration of its definition. To call snark was to commit it, thereby rendering it as a word a self-fulfilling self-parody, and as a concept a paradoxical meta-oxymoron”).

Are we to assume that you can jump off of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge but not the George Washington Bridge?

First, a 19-year-old apparently survives a jump from the Verrazano:

A Brooklyn teen told cops he survived a leap off the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge last night.
Pavel Kononov, 19, was soaking wet when he flagged down an off-duty cop who was driving onto the Belt Parkway from the bridge at 7 p.m. Earlier, cops had responded to reports of a possible jumper, but nobody saw one.

At its highest point, the bridge is 237 feet above the water, but it’s not clear how far he fell.

He was taken to Lutheran Hospital in critical condition but was later upgraded to stable.

This comes on the heels of the death of a man on Monday after diving headfirst from the GWB:

A lover’s spat between two gay men driving over the George Washington Bridge ended in tragedy yesterday when the driver stopped the vehicle mid-span and dived headfirst into the Hudson River, police and witnesses said.

“It was terrible, just terrible — something awful to see,” said Gus Guerra, who was in his boat under the bridge and got to the victim first. “He was shaking a bit and moving in the water when I pulled him out. His face was pretty bad and blood was coming out of his ears.”

The jumper, 45, was pronounced dead a short time later.

The nightmarish drama began at 11:30 a.m., when the two men got into an argument as they headed toward New Jersey on the upper level.

Police said the driver pulled the car over by the bridge’s New York tower, climbed over the railing and took a 220-foot dive.

Guerra, a mechanic at a marina, said a cop told him the driver had flipped out during an argument with his lover.

“He landed head first. He looked pretty rough. There was no way he could have survived,” Guerra said.

Visual comparison: Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and the George Washington Bridge.

In a watershed year for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade that includes the first Latina character ever, the Times sounds the alarm about balloon safety:

After volunteers at the 1997 Thanksgiving Day parade lost control of a balloon in the wind, nearly killing a 33-year-old woman, Macy’s said that balloon handlers would never again be sent down Central Park West and Broadway without proper training.

Though the company welcomed the press to watch as it trained a thousand balloon handlers on an empty soccer field in Hoboken, N.J., in 1998, over the years Macy’s has quietly backed away from that assurance, internal company documents and interviews with handlers show. So tomorrow, with forecasters calling for rain and heavy winds, many untrained volunteers will help wrangle flopping towers of polyurethane through Midtown guided only by instruction sheets reminiscent of airline safety cards.

“There’s no, like, training,” said one first-time handler who was given an instruction sheet and told to report for duty at 6 a.m. tomorrow. John Piper, vice president of Macy’s Parade Studio, which is owned by the company and charged with supervising 2,000 balloon handlers, said Macy’s held four training sessions a year and invited all volunteers, though the training was mandatory only for a few hundred team leaders.

The bombshell article explores the instruction sheets, which obviously include important safety information:

A chart marked Balloon Handlers Instruction Guide explains hand signals with sketches of a torso in a baseball cap marked with arrows for forward, slow down, stop, left turn and right turn. Another sketch marked Landing a Balloon shows four figures holding a rope just below chest level while two others bend down, appearing to tie their shoes.

“Continue to hold your lines, until the balloon is stabilized,” the section concludes. “Please do not inhale helium escaping from the balloon.”

New York Magazine writes up the eleven things you need to know about Kindergarten admissions. Number 2, whether bribery works:

In a word, no. “Not only will making a big contribution to the kindergarten of your dreams not help you get in, it will hurt you,” warns [private school admissions consultant Amanda] Uhry. The schools don’t appreciate being treated like the maître d’ at Per Se.

And the most selective schools, finding themselves flush with both healthy endowments and negative press over preferential treatment for those who can add extra zeros to donation checks, have put out the word that money doesn’t talk like it once did.

Then again, there are “bribes” and there are ways to make it clear you’re loaded and will be happy to endow facilities and programs when the time comes:

Of course, not all schools are so loftily uninterested in money. “Look at the schools in the Bronx,” says one admissions expert. “With all those acres and buildings, they’re the size of a small college. For them, a $20 million endowment is nothing, so you better believe they’re aware of how much you can give.”

Chapin, for example, makes no bones about its expectations. “Annual Giving makes everything at Chapin possible,” it posts on its Website, listing the gap between tuition and cost ($6,900 per student and growing). The schools, however, can’t come right out and ask what you’ll give. So consider giving to your nursery school. Your pre-K director may remember your generosity at a crucial moment. “That’s definitely one of the topics of conversation, and it doesn’t have to be asked explicitly. Your pre-K director will let the school know,” says one consultant.

If you’re cheating on your spouse, New York Magazine reports, do yourself a favor and avoid buying gifts at Tiffany’s. The sales help — and the private investigators who are trailing you — know what you’re up to:

“What drives the whole holiday thing is diversion of assets,” says Michael McKeever, another P.I. “Think of it like caveman days. You suspect your husband is out banging some broad. Then he comes home from hunting with only half a yak. You got to wonder, Where’s the other half of that yak going?”

In New York these days, that proverbial yak carcass often comes inside a powdery blue Tiffany’s bag. Although cheaters can purchase gifts at several stores for both their lovers — or more — private eyes are pressed to remember a Christmas they didn’t spend staking out the store’s jewelry cases. Salespeople there know what’s up. “Typically,” says one clerk, the two-timer goes for “pieces that go wow! Pieces that try to recapture a certain spark.” Simple solitary diamond pendants (about $2,000) are also popular. The smarter ones pay for their gifts with company credit cards or cash.

Beating out the last most expensive apartment ever, here’s the newest most expensive apartment ever:

A brash hedge-fund manager is putting his money where his mouth is — agreeing to pay a record $45 million for a Manhattan residence.

Daniel Loeb, the outspoken founder of New York-based Third Point LLC, has signed a contract to buy a more than 10,000-square-foot penthouse condominium under construction at 15 Central Park West at the site of the old Mayflower Hotel.

The hard-charging investment mogul, who manages a $3.6 billion fund, is known for his publicly circulated poison-pen letters to executives he claims are pretentious or lazy. The New Yorker magazine described him as an investor’s version of the late political columnist H. L. Mencken, but added that his manner could be “self-interest disguised as moralistic bombast.”

Loeb had no comment about his purchase.

Plans for the 10,700-square-foot, full-floor pad include eight bedrooms, 10 full bathrooms, two powder rooms, a large screening room, his-and-hers offices, a library and terraces measuring nearly 800 square feet. The 39th-floor apartment features 14-foot ceilings. It is to be completed by spring 2007.

The towering sales figure beats the previous record held by News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, who paid $44 million earlier this year for the late Laurance Rockefeller’s triplex co-op penthouse on Fifth Avenue. News Corp. owns The Post.

It also bests the previous record condo price of $42.25 million that Mexican financier David Martinez paid at the nearby Time Warner Center. Martinez combined a full-floor apartment on the 76th floor with a half-floor residence above. He then recently purchased the other half of the 77th floor for about $12 million, giving him almost 17,000 square feet total after spending nearly $53 million.

Loeb’s purchase comes seven months after he bought a sprawling eight-bedroom West Village town house for $11.2 million.

Confirming what you assumed to be true, it is nearly impossible to buy a home anywhere near the national median home price, and when you can, it tends to be a studio or some such thing:

The question sounded laughable: Given that the national median home price recently calculated by the National Association of Realtors is $220,000, is it possible to buy something for that price in New York City?

Or even, just to provide some wiggle room, up to $250,000?

The initial reactions of real estate brokers in all five boroughs included: “Hah,” “C’mon” and “Yeah, right!”

But then they searched Web sites, peering, virtually, down the avenues, streets and cul-de-sacs of communities beyond the neighborhoods they normally serve. And sprinkled here and there in every borough - even in mind-rattling Manhattan, where the current median price is $750,000 and the average price is $1.15 million - they found what Willie Kathryn Suggs, a broker in Harlem, called “hidden gems.”

To be sure, those gems were rare, usually small and sometimes very much in need of a lot of polishing. And, in large part, they were limited to co-ops and condominiums. Only a few single-family homes below $220,000, or even $250,000, could be found, and only in the far reaches or still-struggling enclaves of the boroughs outside Manhattan.

In the Wakefield section of the Bronx, for example, a two-story wood-frame house on a 25-by-100-foot lot sold for $249,000 last month. It was, however, described as a “handyman special,” requiring a lot of work. And in the Rockaways - that 11-mile sliver of south Queens once known as “the poor man’s Riviera” - five bungalows are currently listed for $209,000 to $243,000.

Each day walking down West 43rd Street to work, Times employees pass by the Hotel Carter. One day, a young writer can no longer resist the urge, and feels compelled to write a human-interest feature about it that barely conceals outward disdain for and condescension towards the place:

People have been saying for years that the old Times Square - the seedy, lowbrow ancestor of what is now a largely sanitized, Disneyfied tourist haven - is dead. But those people have never spent a night at the Hotel Carter. The 615-room hotel at 250 West 43rd Street offers travelers a cheap room in an expensive city, and something more: an adventure. In the middle of Manhattan and at the neon-bright Crossroads of the World, the hotel has been a little-known source of grimy hospitality, low-budget accommodations and equal numbers of satisfied and dissatisfied customers from around the world.

As a guest of the Hotel Carter, you may or may not have your room cleaned. You may or may not find the multicolored, multipatterned carpet on the floor and the walls agreeable. You may or may not have a working television and telephone. You may or may not have a smooth check-in, since the front desk keeps track of reservations without the benefit of a computer system.

In short, you may or may not have an enjoyable stay. The answer depends on which room you get - the top floors have numerous large recently renovated rooms with splendid views - and on your answer to this question: What do you expect for $99.23 a night?

. . .

Room 1105 was not so much a room as it was a place to lie low. It took eight paces to walk from one wall to the next and 21 paces to get from the door to the window. The telephone was dead. It sat on an old desk, its drawer broken and placed on the stained carpet, a copy of the Manhattan white pages, 1994-5, among the contents inside. The room was lighted by a bare bulb on the ceiling, and the headboard of the bed was a rectangle of blue carpet nailed to the wall. There was a big moldy splotch on the ceiling above the bathtub.

The feather in every city reporter’s cap — the Times’ Nicholas Confessore finds a subject who still curses Robert Moses:

To survey the history of Frank’s Department Store, you need only look at the merchandise scattered and stacked about the place. A partial list, in no particular order, includes children’s sailor suits, bone knitting needles, thermal underwear, truckers’ caps featuring the 1980’s sitcom puppet Alf, corduroy slacks with blue piping, newsboy hats, bicentennial American flags, gray plaid knickers and black nylon stockings preserved in tissue paper.

Since the 1930’s, Frank’s has carried a little bit of everything for everybody, crammed into a single long, musty room on Union Street in Brooklyn, one block from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Today the few leftovers layer the shelves and counters like rock strata.

. . .

Now Frank’s, too, is a relic. These days, if you want pantyhose, you go to Duane Reade; if you want corduroys, you go to Old Navy. (If you want knickers, you’re pretty much out of luck.) Some time in the coming days, when it finishes selling its stock, Frank’s will go dark.

“A store like this is really passé; it’s an antique,” Mrs. Milea said. “Business has not been good.”

Once, Frank’s was part of the thriving commercial district along Columbia Street. With the nearby waterfront booming, and pushcarts filled with fruits and vegetables lining the streets, Frank Sacco borrowed $1,500 from his in-laws in 1937 and opened the store in a space a few doors west of its current location.

. . .

Construction of the expressway in the 1950’s, however, sliced the area in half, cutting Frank’s off from many of its customers. “I wasn’t too fond of Moses,” says Mrs. Milea, referring to Robert Moses, New York’s master builder and prime mover of the expressway, among many other projects. Then the shipping industry began to trickle across the harbor to New Jersey, taking jobs with it and sending the Columbia Street area into a slow decline.

And big, big bonus points to dropping in a totally organic reference to Alf trucker caps . . . !

It sounds like the start of a bad joke — Hillary Clinton and Ellen Degeneres board the Staten Island Ferry, except it’s real:

U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton took talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres aboard the Staten Island Ferry yesterday for a quick trip to New York’s “forgotten” borough, fulfilling a promise she made on the comic’s show last month.

The world’s most famous junior senator waxed sentimental over the Statue of Liberty, touted Staten Island as “one of the best places to live,” and gave DeGeneres some history lessons about her adopted home state.

. . .

Many of the ferry riders burst into applause when DeGeneres and Clinton ambled onto the boat.

“It’s just classic,” said tourist Cali Alpert from Santa Barbara, Calif., who was visiting family in New York. “People were so excited.”

Her sister-in-law, Manhattan resident Barbara Alpert, was a little less star-struck.

“We see famous people every day — that’s the thing about New York,” she said.

Now that’s not fair — it’s one thing to see “famous people” on their way to, I don’t know, Bergdorf’s but quite another to see Ellen Degeneres and Hillary Clinton on the Staten Island Ferry. How jaded is that? No word on whether they enjoyed the ferry’s Budweiser tall boys however . . .

They couldn’t shut ‘em down in Tampa, and it remains to be seen whether allegations, er, oblique suggestions that the specimens may have been acquired in an, er, uh, unethical manner will deep six the cadaver show at the South Street Seaport:

The jaunty fellow with the conductor’s baton waving in one hand stands on a pedestal seemingly lost in the music. But there are a few startlingly odd things about this tall, lithe gentleman: He is dead, his skin has been methodically ripped away and there is a pinkish void where his viscera are supposed to be. Besides a few supporting segments of muscle, bone and ligament, the man has been rendered into a web of white spindly nerves.

It is impossible to know what he did in life, but in death the man has become a ghoulish show-and-tell exemplar of the human nervous system, part of a new exhibit that opens tomorrow at the South Street Seaport. The show, called “Bodies . . . the Exhibition,” features the preserved remains of 22 people and 260 other specimens, including a set of conjoined fetuses, a set of male genitalia, a pudgy woman who has been vertically sliced into four equal segments and a sprinter whose flayed muscles fly around him like slices of prosciutto.

(”Slices of prosciutto” . . . almost Gopnikian, that!)

The problem is where they got the cadavers from — in this case, China:

While the notion of displaying the dead for profit is bound to provoke controversy, some critics say this particular show, which relies entirely on cadavers from China, is more troubling than those sponsored by other companies that have gotten into the macabre business of anatomical exhibitions. Citing the Chinese government’s poor human rights record and the medical establishment’s practice of recycling the organs of executed prisoners, medical ethicists and human rights advocates are questioning whether the show’s specimens were legally obtained.

“Given the government’s track record on the treatment of prisoners, I find this exhibit deeply problematic,” said Sharon Hom, the executive director of the advocacy group Human Rights in China.

Arnie Geller, the president of Premier Exhibitions Inc., the company that spent $25 million to obtain the specimens from a Chinese university, insists that the human remains, all but two of them male, are those of the poor, the unclaimed or the unidentified. Although he said he was not allowed to keep copies of documents, officials at Dalian University in northern China showed him papers attesting to the origin of the remains. The documents were kept confidential, Mr. Geller said, because international law forbids public disclosure of the identities of those who have donated their bodies to medical science.

“I am certain that all these specimens were legally obtained,” he said.

But Harry Wu, the executive director of the LaoGai Research Foundation, an organization that documents abuses in China’s penal system, said officials from Dalian University had been previously implicated in the use of executed prisoners for commercial purposes, having supplied bodies to Gunter von Hagens, the German entrepreneur who started the first traveling show of the dead, “World of Bodies.” Dr. Sui Hongjin, who was previously Mr. Von Hagen’s Chinese partner until a falling out three years ago, is now working with Premier Exhibitions, which has its headquarters in Atlanta.

“Considering that China executes between 2,000 and 3,000 prisoners a year and their long history of freely using death row prisoners for medical purposes, you have to wonder,” Mr. Wu said, adding that he would pursue legal steps in this country to ensure that the show was not using illegally obtained bodies. “In China, a piece of paper means nothing.”

Of course, the Times is smart, and they freely admit this could be a stunt (a Drudge-tastic one, at that):

If the past is any guide, such controversy coupled with public hand-wringing over the show’s ghastliness is fully expected, even welcomed, by its sponsors. A publicly traded company that has prospered by exhibiting relics from the Titanic, Premier is clearly hoping news coverage will help draw enough people, at $24.50 for adults and $18.50 for children, to earn back its sizable investment.

. . .

A smaller show the company organized last summer in Tampa, Fla., provoked condemnation from religious leaders, a state medical board and the state attorney general (who could not find a reason to shut it down). That exhibition has been drawing huge crowds.

. . . Gimmie a “C,” gimmie an “O,” gimmie an “N,” gimmie an “I,” gimmie another “A,” gimmie another “N”! What’s that spell? Draconian. Or, as the Post puts it — “Moron Fans On Notice”:

Run onto the field at Yankee Stadium and you’ll get more than a Bronx cheer — you could wind up doing a year at Rikers.

The City Council yesterday passed a new law that raises both the fines and jail time for obnoxious sports fanatics who interfere with players or throw things onto the field.

Fans who throw stuff on the field or court could be convicted of a class-A misdemeanor — with a maximum of $1,000 in criminal fines or one year in jail. They could also get hit with $25,000 in civil fines.

Not to minimize the coarsening effect of generally boorish behavior on society at large — after all, chucking double A batteries at Manny Ramirez is a serious, serious thing — but is a sentence of up to a year in jail really commensurate with the crime?

“What are you in for?”

“Throwing tennis balls at Lleyton Hewitt.”

Meanwhile, Councilmember Peter Vallone reveals how much beer he consumes:

“Real fans should not have to put up with drunken idiots,” said Queens Councilman Peter Vallone, the chief sponsor of the “You’re Out” legislation. “We’re going to take the beer money away from these idiots so they won’t do this again.”

That’s up to $26,000 worth of beer! A lot of beer!

As the Channel 7 folks glibly remarked last night after reporting on this apparently unprecedented legislation, New York is at the forefront of all things . . .

INT. QUEENS DINER:

The end came for Omar Castro, of 40th Street, in the New Post Coffee Shop on Queens Boulevard in Sunnyside as the gunman shot him once in the face and once in the chest, police said.

Witnesses said the desperate Castro, 41, ran from his apartment building on 40th Street and fled down the block with the assailant right behind him. The gunman got off as many as five shots, witnesses said, but none found their mark — until the final two inside the diner.

A waitress at the New Post named Candy, 44, said Castro burst into the place, terrified, just as a handful of customers were settling down for breakfast at about 6:30 a.m.

“A man came running in and said, ‘Call the police, the guy’s coming,’” said the waitress, who fled to a basement kitchen. She said the victim ran into a restroom then came back out, the last thing he ever did.

. . .

A woman identified as Castro’s wife later arrived at the scene in her pajamas. When she looked at her husband’s body beneath a sheet, she showed little emotion, said a family friend.

“She says, ‘He’s dead,’ but she wasn’t crying,” said Giselle Vargas, 42.

The Times previews one of the quirkier ways New York City is fetishized — the New York Botanical Garden’s annual Holiday Train Show:

The scene inside was New York in delicious disarray: the Apollo Theater next door to the Chrysler Building, the golden Prometheus statue from the Rockefeller Center skating rink reclining just beyond the center field wall of Yankee Stadium, and half of the Brooklyn Bridge teetering on a wheelbarrow.

Workers were busy sprucing up these miniature landmarks recently and placing them carefully along 1,000 feet of miniature train track that winds through a landscape of plants in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory greenhouse.

The 150 miniatures are part of the Holiday Train Show, which opens on Saturday. The miniature city is made not of concrete and steel but of leaves, twigs, mushrooms, branches, berries and pine cones. In this botanical metropolis, the romanticized models are made out of bits and pieces of plants.

. . .

They are the creations of Paul Busse, a quirky Kentucky landscape architect who has built the models for the holiday season since 1992. This year, the new batch of miniatures includes Yankee Stadium, with floodlights fashioned from acorn shells and fans made from a potpourri.

. . .

As he crouched next to the New York Public Library, he inspected the lion statues on the steps, with their fuzzy wheat manes and peppercorn eyes. He checked the stained glass on the facade of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, fashioned from translucent flower petals coated with urethane. He dusted off the red script of the Radio City Music Hall sign, painstakingly made from radish seeds.

“Every year, we take a ride into Manhattan,” he said. “But after working with our buildings, the real thing can almost be a letdown.”

Bonus: New York Botanical Garden Holiday Train Show Information Page

There’s no mistaking the sentiment when words slip out this easily. The Post’s lead paragraph about last night’s County Music Awards, for example:

The star of last night’s Country Music Awards at Madison Square Garden didn’t sing a note or win a prize. It was New York City, which lent the show the credibility and elegance it’s always lacked.

I mean, you expect this sort of thing from the Times, but the Post . . . ?

The Post answers the question on everyone’s mind after hearing about a brazen armed robbery at a Brooklyn post office:

Three gun-wielding, masked thugs barged into a Brooklyn post office early yesterday, tied up six workers and fled with a canvas mail bag stuffed with about $10,000 in cash, authorities said.

So there you have it: $10,000.

Page One Sunday Times, albeit below the fold — They’re Soft and Cuddly, So Why Lash Them to the Front of a Truck? Tsk, tsk . . . if you have to ask:

A bear with a prominent grease spot on his little beige nose spends his days wedged behind the bumper guard of an ironworker’s pickup in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn. A fuzzy rabbit and a clown, garroted by a bungee cord, slump from the front of a Dodge van in Park Slope. Stewie, the evil baby from “Family Guy,” scowls from the grille of a Pepperidge Farm delivery truck in Brooklyn Heights, mold occasionally sprouting from his forehead.

All are soldiers in the tattered, scattered army of the stuffed: mostly discarded toys plucked from the trash and given new if punishing lives on the prows of large motor vehicles, their fluffy white guts flapping from burst seams and going gray in the soot-stream of a thousand exhaust pipes.

Grille-mounted stuffed animals form a compelling yet little-studied aspect of the urban streetscape, a traveling gallery of baldly transgressive public art. The time has come not just to praise them but to ask the big question. Why?

That is, why do a small percentage of trucks and vans have filthy plush toys lashed to their fronts, like prisoners at the mast? Are they someone’s idea of a joke? Parking aids? Talismans against summonses?

Don’t expect an easy answer.

Which is to say, expect one of those half-serious, unself-aware answers the Times loves to dredge up:

At the same time, [New York City Department of Sanitation artist in residence Mierle Laderman] Ukeles said, the trucker, perhaps uncomfortable with his soft side, may feel compelled to punish it.

“Binding a soft thing to a very powerful truck - there’s a kind of macho thing about that,” she said.

That double identification with both victim and agent of violence may reflect the driver’s frustrating position in society. Stuffed animals are found mostly on the trucks of men who perform hard, messy labor, which, despite the strength and bravery it demands, places them on the lower rungs of the ladder of occupational prestige.

The motley animal, then, can function as a badge of outsider status, a thumbed nose to the squares and suits. In that case, the cuter the mascot, the more meaningful its disintegration.

Thus, while Mr. [Dan] DiVittorio, of the Queens carting company, is quite fond of the red plastic skull that adorns his garbage truck, he will never forget its predecessor, a three-foot-high stuffed Scooby-Doo.

And it gets worse:

Scooby’s story lends credence to the theory of [School of Visual Arts art history lecturer Monroe] Denton . . . that the grille-mounted stuffed animal draws from the same well as the “abject art” movement that flourished in the 1990’s and trafficked heavily in images of filth and of distressed bodies.

“That is part of the abject,” he said, “this toy that is loved to death quite literally.”

The externalization of an indoor object is another abject trope, Mr. Denton said. “An important aspect of the abject is the informe, the lack of boundaries,” he said, using the French critical theory term, “the insides oozing out.”

Charlie Maixner, a steamfitter for Deacon Corp. in Jericho on Long Island, has taken the informe to its logical extreme.

On the dashboard of his Econoline van is an adorable and pristine white bear, a gift from his 5-year-old daughter. But the bear is not for the outside world. On the grille is Mr. Hankey, salvaged from a chef’s office during a kitchen renovation job.

Mr. Hankey, to the pop-culturally illiterate, appears to be a brown worm in a Santa hat. He is not. He is the carol-crooning excrement from “South Park,” where he is formally known as Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo.