After several years of tinkering, participants in the city’s homeless decoy program develop some guidelines about how to sell the part:

The first rule of being a decoy homeless person: Don’t talk about being a decoy homeless person. Also, don’t read books the homeless wouldn’t read, and don’t haggle with real homeless people over their prime hangout spots.

Those were among the instructions officials gave almost 200 people getting paid about $75 each to pretend to be homeless for a few hours yesterday morning. The decoys were acting as statistical checks-and-balances in the fifth annual citywide census of how many homeless people live on the streets and in the subways.

. . .

A professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work, Julien Teitler, said many of the decoys gain an appreciation for what it’s like to be homeless.

If some of the decoys were subjecting themselves to the winter cold for the goodness of their hearts, others were there purely for the cash.

One of them was a costume designer and theater student named Elizabeth Cassarino, who said unabashedly that she didn’t care about the homeless. She planned to use the $75 to buy food and cigarettes.

“I know what goes into being a character. So for this role, playing a homeless person, you have to have the right costume — baggie clothes, layers — you have look sad, you have to play like you’re homeless. You can’t have a smile on your face. You have to do emotional recall, think of a time when you were hungry,” Ms. Cassarino said before deployment. “These are all the things they taught me in school, and now I’m actually getting a chance to perform. You know, my audience is going to be the people waiting for a train at Broadway and Lafayette.”

And does this also mean that from here on out the landmarked building would always have to be used in a “similar function”? The Landmarks Preservation Commission considers the case of a topless bar:

Robert Kremer, who holds the lease on the Pussycat Lounge, spoke in favor of landmark designation of one of Manhattan’s oldest houses at a public hearing yesterday at the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

Preservationists say 96 Greenwich Street House, along with the adjacent 94 and 94 1/2 Greenwich St. buildings, are rare examples of a row of Federal-style houses, offering a glimpse of early New York. The area south of ground zero has suffered from being blocked off from the rest of the city by the 16-acre void left at the site of the former World Trade Center. Recently, developer Joseph Moinian has begun work on a 53-story hotel and condominium nearby. Much of the financial district has seen conversion to residential from office space in the past few years as the nature of downtown has changed toward a more full-time environment.

The Pussycat Lounge, long a neighborhood watering hole for Wall Street brokers and civil servants, sits on an eclectic block that also has a boxing gym and delis. A long bar runs most of the length of the Pussycat Lounge, behind which is a stage where scantily clad women perform. A small knight and a cat are design props upon the stage. The second floor is a rock ‘n’ roll club.

The executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, Andrew Berman, said these structures, built when John Adams was president, were among the few surviving relics of the first era of development in New York.

Thor Equities can play hardball, as the Post reports, but what exactly is their leverage? They don’t even have a basketball team to bring to the table:

The developer planning a $2 billion Vegas-style makeover for Coney Island’s boardwalk strip says the project will have to be scrapped if City Hall won’t let him build a luxury apartment building in the heart of the seaside district.

The Coney Island project “isn’t a financially feasible investment” without the inclusion of high-rise housing along Stillwell Avenue just off the fabled seaside boardwalk, Thor Equities spokesman Lee Silberstein — speaking for company chief Joseph Sitt — told The Post.

“Everybody wants Coney Island to be revitalized, and housing has got to be part of it,” Silberstein said, adding that from a planning perspective the project needs guarantees that there will be people on the boardwalk year-round.

The news that the city faces losing its biggest private investment in Coney Island’s future if it doesn’t meet Thor’s request comes while the developer this week took a calculated gamble by beginning to clear some of the land where its planned construction would occur.

Bulldozers have begun removing longtime attractions on Thor property along Stillwell Avenue. In doing so, Thor is banking on city officials granting necessary land-use changes.

Beside housing, Thor’s project calls for a water-park-themed hotel, another full-service hotel, time-share facilities, new retail, a multilevel carousel and a 4,000-foot roller coaster.

Chuck Reichental, a member of the agency that will determine how Coney Island is rezoned, said a majority of residents opposes housing in the amusement district as well as any new development exceeding the height of the 262-foot landmark Parachute Jump.

Sources familiar with informal talks between the city and Thor say these are the two biggest obstacles to the developer’s plan.

Amazingly, this time it’s not a prop for a film shoot but rather the sooty chug-chug of commerce that’s rolling around the bend:

Gritty freight trains may be a familiar sight out West and in cowboy movies, but in Queens and Brooklyn and the neat suburbs of Long Island, they are a roaring, sooty cause for a big double take.

“We go through here every day, and everyone still looks at us like ‘What the heck is this?’” said Tom Materka, a rail freight engineer, as the train approached the Hicksville station, one of the Long Island Rail Road’s busiest commuter stops, one recent afternoon. “People are always shocked to see a freight train coming through here.”

Mr. Materka, 30, an engineer for the New York & Atlantic Railway, one of the few remaining short-line rail freight companies in the region, was running two screaming 120-ton diesel locomotives towing a string of sooty boxcars from Queens out to eastern Long Island. Well-dressed commuters looked up from their newspapers and coffee and stared as the smoky train roared by and transformed the suburban station into Tumbleweed Junction.

The line uses obscure rail tracks in Queens and Brooklyn and tracks of the Long Island Rail Road in Nassau and Suffolk Counties.

Since freight trains are far outnumbered by commuter trains, few people glimpse the bulky, graffiti-covered boxcars as they lumber past the sleek silver commuter cars rushing passengers to or from Pennsylvania Station.

But passengers can expect to see more of these trains soon. Transportation experts, government officials and rail freight advocates say conditions are suddenly in their favor.

Who’s behind congestion pricing proposals? The powerful bike lobby:

Once the domain of traffic nerds, congestion pricing has taken hold here recently like never before. Both the Partnership for New York City, a prominent group of business executives, and the Manhattan Institute, the conservative think tank, endorsed or re-endorsed it in December, joining a list of longstanding proponents such as the Regional Plan Association.

[Transportation Alternatives executive director] Mr. [Paul Steely] White represents the left flank, then, of a set of strange bedfellows. Founded by radical bicyclists in the 1970’s, Transportation Alternatives comes across as a sort of alterna-elite group of forward-thinking urban planners.

About half of its 5,500 members are from Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn, and its 18 full- and part-time employees are generally white, well-educated twentysomethings who ride their bikes to work. Many of its largest donors are Wall Street types, and its largest individual funder is Mark Gorton, the high-tech entrepreneur who founded LimeWire. To them, Mr. White says, “Biking is the new golf.”

But T.A., as it’s called, has long tried to project itself as a generally pro-person, anti-traffic group. The city Department of Transportation ended up copying Safe Routes to Schools, a program established by Mr. White’s predecessor, John Kaehny, which seeks improvements to streets near schools. A similar program, Safe Routes for Seniors, is next in line for adoption, Mr. White hopes.

And the group regularly submits suggestions for traffic improvements throughout the city, sponsors bike rides, and gives away helmets in poor neighborhoods.

The potential constituency for this tiny, million-dollar-a-year organization headquartered in a Chelsea loft is quite large. Everybody has a gripe about traffic, after all, and it’s only going to get worse.

Unbelievable:

Digging for the Second Avenue subway will start in March, Mysore Nagaraja, president of Metropolitan Transportation Authority Capital Construction, said yesterday.

Major work will occur between East 96th and East 92nd streets, where a hole will be dug to get the tunnel-boring machine underground. Some utility infrastructure will also be relocated.

The first phase of the $3.83 billion project to create a new Lexington Avenue line from 96th Street to 63rd Street will also come in under budget.

The MTA budgeted $350 million for initial tunneling, but the agency’s contractor said it can do it for $337 million.

The project is expected to be completed in 2013.

No doubt coordinated with the Post to burnish his tough-guy image:

Never say Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter is afraid to do the heavy lifting.

The gray-maned magazine mogul took matters into his own hands over the weekend when workers raised a racket as they erected a 22-foot scaffold outside his tony home and near an eatery he owns on Bank Street in lower Manhattan.

Annoyed by the noise, Carter rushed out of his three-story, $5 million townhouse in frigid, 36-degree temps wearing shorts, snatched a 5-foot rail and flung it to the ground in exasperation.

“Scaffold hurling . . . It’s a venerated Canadian sport, like curling,” the Canadian-born Carter joked to The Post yesterday.

“Everybody up there does it.”

Carter then explained, “Fact is, I’ve had construction across the street from me and next door to me for four years. On Saturday morning, a flatbed pulled up and began unloading scaffolding. It blocked the street off and on all day.

“At 7:30 that night, I was home with my family and the sound — and it was loud — just continued.”

To make matters even worse, he said, “cars were by now honking.”

So, he said, “I headed out into the street in my scaffold-hurling gear to see if I could get them to stop.

“I couldn’t get their attention, so I grabbed one of the pieces of scaffolding.

“Not the most appropriate response in such a situation, but there you have it.”

I really don’t know which is weirder — Camilla’s tenacious sudoku addiction or Charles asking children what NBA stars eat:

Prince Charles came to Harlem to shoot hoops yesterday, netting baskets while his wife sat down with her favorite game — Sudoku.

The royal couple showed their physical and mental prowess while touring the Harlem Children’s Zone, a kids’ project designed to help inner-city youngsters reach their potential.

While watching teams in the Zone’s basketball league, the prince was persuaded to try his hand — and got his second shot through the rim.

“It was perfect,” said Christopher Valazquez, 13, who congratulated the prince on his shot. “I would pick him for my team.

“He said he’d never played before. He asked, ‘Is it on TV?’ like he didn’t know about it. He asked how tall are NBA players, and what do they eat?

“That surprised me. I told him everybody plays it here. Everybody.”

Just before watching her husband’s basketball skills, his wife, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, helped with a Sudoku puzzle while meeting kids preparing for a math competition.

“She told me she was addicted to it,” said Zone staff member Heidi Lopez, 24. “She said she’d wished she’d brought her glasses so she could play more.

“She was showing me her strategies and everything. She had to be dragged away.”

Until the MTA implants chips in our bodies, there will likely be Metrogami:

Sitting in a token booth all day can be dull and draining, but station agent Luis Torres has found artistic inspiration on the job.

This MetroCard Michelangelo makes sculptures out of the used plastic cards straphangers toss on the ground near the turnstiles each day.

He bends, folds, cuts and assembles the yellow rectangles into mock city skyscrapers, dancing figurines and even religious icons.

“The possibilities are endless, and so is the supply of MetroCards to recycle,” Torres said. “A homeless guy brings me 50 to 100 cards a week. He says, ‘I know if I bring them to you, you’ll make more sculptures.’ ”

Although he insists he does not hone his craft on NYC Transit time, Torres has turned his booth at West 110th Street on the A, B and C lines into a gallery.

. . .

The MTA does not sanction Torres’ gallery. Last week, one of his supervisors came into the booth and said, “These are great, but you have to take them down.”

But at the insistence of his customers and fans, Torres later put the work back on display.

Torres, 36, has constructed the Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, Twin Towers and a Crucifixion. He cuts the magnetic stripe into narrow strips to make hair.

Not all MetroCards are well-suited to what Torres calls “Metrogami.”

“Most people don’t realize this, but there are actually four different types of cards, and the darker-yellow ones are much thicker — too thick to take the folds and bends as well,” he said.

A new benchmark for overpriced undesirable apartments may have been reached:

Just $3,600-a-month will get a luxury Brooklyn apartment with jaw-dropping, scenic views — of the truck-filled, exhaust-choked Gowanus Expressway.

Developers Jack Basile and Nick Barone are building a brownstone-style 10-unit apartment building with ground-floor commercial space in Carroll Gardens — just a stone’s throw from the elevated expressway.

In fact, their five-story building at the corner of Court and Garnett streets is so close to the highway that future tenants heading into Manhattan won’t need to check traffic reports before battling the morning rush, they can just step onto their terrace or peek out a window.

While the fumes and noise from passing vehicles could be a deterrent, Basile and Barone expect a lot of interest.

“The apartments will do very well because they have a Court Street address, which is desirable, and it’s great for people who can’t afford Manhattan but want that Manhattan feel,” Basile said.

“That Manhattan feel” — read: bedrooms with value-added car exhaust smell.

The New York Sun puts forward a theory that there is a pro-number bias within the MTA:

While the city’s lettered subway lines, with the exception of the L, are running old trains well past their expiration dates, the numbered routes have received many new train cars over the past few years. Now the lettered lines are receiving a high-tech fleet of cars and taking the lead in an ongoing rivalry between the two divisions for better service and more modern technology.

The split between the lettered and numbered subway lines predates the creation of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Two private companies, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company and the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, ran the two divisions as separate subways until 1940, when the city purchased both and merged them into one system. But the same trains cannot run on both line divisions because the company that owned the lettered lines dug tunnels wider than those on the numbered lines.

The varied history of the two divisions still shows itself today in the competition for capital from the MTA, which modernizes only one division at a time. After two decades of using trains that break down more often than those on the numbered lines, the lettered lines may finally be gaining the technological edge.

. . .

The numbered lines have historically been the first to receive technical upgrades from the MTA. While the numbered lines received new cars about five years ago, the C and the E lines are still equipped with trains that date back to 1964, a Transit Authority spokesman, Charles Seaton, said. A subway car is built to last about 35 years, but Mr. Seaton said the MTA’s maintenance procedures have extended their natural shelf lives.

“There have been lines that have been favored and lines that have gotten screwed and ignored,” a coauthor of “The Subway and the City: Celebrating a Century,” Stan Fischler, said. “A lot of it is political.”

The latest New York mini-trend — as per Talk of the Town — complaining about “I Am Legend” location shoots:

Like residents of other photogenic parts of the city, people who live between the Brooklyn Bridge and the South Street Seaport have become accustomed to seeing their blocks turned into movie sets. Film trucks idle day and night in the street; there’s no parking; klieg lights illuminate the bedroom windows; and, as one resident put it the other day, “arrogant guys with a thug attitude tell you to stay off your own sidewalk.”

Even by local standards, last Tuesday’s shoot, for “I Am Legend,” a forthcoming Will Smith disaster movie, was remarkable. “I Am Legend” is, in terms of size, length, and logistics, one of the most ambitious location shoots that has ever taken place in the city. Since shooting began, in October, “Legend” has been establishing a new precedent for the aggressive takeover of public space. The movie camped out in Washington Square Park for weeks in October and November, restricting access for most of that time, and occasionally setting off loud explosions in the wee hours. Tuesday night was the first of six night shoots on Dover Street, near the Seaport. In addition to simulated gridlock on Dover, there was to be a panicked evacuation across South Street, and a Black Hawk helicopter was to land on a two-hundred-foot barge in the East River.

At 5 P.M., more than a thousand extras were waiting in two huge heated tents that had been set up in a lot near some basketball courts. There were men and women of all ages, and lots of kids, some of whom were doing their homework at long wooden tables. The film is set in a plague-ridden Manhattan; the infected extras had hectic splotches of red makeup on their faces. Some of the extras (or “background artists,” as they were referred to by the P.A.s) were making seven dollars and fifty cents an hour, and would be working well past midnight. On Tuesday, the temperature was thirty-four degrees; by Friday it would be in the teens.

At quarter past five, a P.A. began going around in the tents, making sure that the evacuees had their motivations down. “O.K., people, listen up,” he yelled through a megaphone. “You are tired. You’re on the verge of despair. But you’re not panicked — not at first. Later, you panic.”

Gary Jarvis, who vowed to run every street in Brooklyn after moving there in June, has reached the halfway point and is perhaps running out of steam:

Gary Jarvis’s quest to traverse the length, width and depth of Brooklyn has been well-documented — but the enormity of the task has, frankly, taken its toll.

“I didn’t realize how big and dense and concentrated Brooklyn is,” said the Iowa native, who had apparently failed to look at a map before predicting that he could run the entire borough.

“Brooklyn is enormous.”

Perhaps by comparison to Iowa City, whose 230 miles of streets Jarvis once ran. As he learned, however, that’s nothing compared to Brooklyn’s 1,599 miles of mean streets.

Jarvis had never spent time in Brooklyn until he moved here to be with his girlfriend. Like any newcomer, he figured the best way to get to know his new home would be to get out.

“Talk about not thinking things through,” said Jarvis, whose presence has been noticed everywhere from Greenpoint to Bensonhurst.

. . .

On Friday, Jan. 19, Jarvis hit the halfway mark and started a much-needed break.

He claims he’ll be back on the roads in six weeks — but it’s no longer clear if he’ll make it.

“I feel so awful and so tired,” said Jarvis, who doesn’t warm up or stretch.

Not as cool as a drive-thru synagogue but close:

At 10 o’clock on a recent Thursday night, the corner of 53rd Street and 13th Avenue in the heart of Borough Park was bustling with traffic. In this neighborhood, an ultra-Orthodox stronghold for the past decade, a sea of religious Jews clad in traditional black and white garb scurried in every direction for late-night prayer, shopping or something to eat. This corner of Brooklyn never sleeps, or so it seems.

The main attraction is Congregation Shomrei Shabbos, a 24-hour synagogue where a service begins every 15 minutes. What started more than three-quarters of a century ago as a tiny congregation has grown into a mainstay of this community: transit hub, soup kitchen, community center, bookstore and prayer hall all in one.

The late-night traffic generated by the synagogue has spilled onto the streets, so much so that over the past few years a neighborhood has literally grown up around it. Restaurants and stores are open long past midnight. Peddlers vie for street space in the wee hours. Religious music streams from a small boombox. Men stop their cars in the middle of darkened streets to announce the birth of a child.

Even in a city renowned for the hours it keeps, the late-night liveliness here is remarkable.

. . .

Thanks to all this activity, the once-inconspicuous synagogue is now a trigger for local nightlife.

“Real estate surrounding the synagogue is in high demand,” said Mendy Handler, owner of Cellular 4 Less, one of several local businesses that stay open past midnight to attract late-night synagogue-goers. His busiest hours are from 6 p.m. to midnight. “People can drop off their phones to be fixed while they are praying next door,” said Sol Oberlander, the store’s manager.

Other businesses have followed suit. Copy Corner stays open until midnight, as does Gal Paz, a music store. Sub Express, a kosher fast-food restaurant whose menu includes what is described as a unique “brisket egg roll,” keeps its doors open until 1 a.m.

The satisfying chunk-chunk of democracy is saved for at least one and probably a couple more elections:

New York officials have given up on replacing the state’s aging voting machines by the fall elections, and some would like to put off buying new electronic voting systems until after the 2008 presidential election, state officials said yesterday.

New York is the last state to update its machines, and the latest delay comes amid growing questions about the work of a laboratory that was hired to help test the machines being offered by five bidders.

Based in part on the problems with the testing lab, the New York State Board of Elections has pushed back its deadline for certifying which machines would be acceptable until at least May.

Given the months it would take for counties to acquire the machines and train poll workers, “that would make it impossible to replace anything more than a few isolated machines for the 2007 elections,” said Douglas A. Kellner, a board co-chairman.

Mr. Kellner said it might be possible to have the new system ready for the presidential primary in March 2008. An association of county election officials passed a resolution last week urging the state to wait until 2009, and Mr. Kellner said most board members agreed that it would be better if the state did not have to make such sweeping changes amid the high turnout of a presidential election.

But because the electronic systems are easier for the disabled to use than the old lever machines, the state was required by Congress and a federal court order to make the changes more quickly. Mr. Kellner said those orders would need to be amended to allow for further delays and to let New York hold on to at least $50 million in federal funds to help pay for the machines.

Landlords are going to great lengths to challenge their rent-regulated tenants:

Bill Golodner idled his sport utility vehicle beside the curb a few doors down. He clipped a surveillance camera to the steering wheel and brought the house into focus. He ran a rough paw over his shaved head, switched on a camera concealed behind the third buttonhole of his dress shirt, then slipped out into the chill morning, heading for the front door.

Philip Marlowe, if he were around, might be doing rent-fraud cases, too.

These are busy times for private investigators in the real estate racket in New York City. Market-rate rents are in the exosphere. Denizens of the city’s 1.1 million rent-regulated apartments have dug in, and landlords are shelling out serious money in search of grounds to dislodge rent-law violators and get a chance to push up rents when an apartment turns over to a new tenant.

At the confluence of those crosswinds, a private eye can flourish. Investigators like Mr. Golodner sweep up whatever incriminating evidence can be used by building owners and their lawyers to show scofflaw tenants the wisdom of, say, relocation.

Mr. Golodner and his partner, Bruce Frankel, both former New York City police detectives, say their firm has handled close to 500 real estate cases in the past year. They mine public records, plumb the depths of the World Wide Web, plant hidden cameras — trawling for proof of illegal subletting, income-limit violations and the improper use of apartments for businesses, even prostitution and drug dealing.

Then again, sometimes you don’t need to hire a private dick to discover the truth:

Take the tenant who seemed to be allowing her Manhattan apartment to be used for illicit business. The owner of the building answered an ad for what Mr. Frankel and Mr. Golodner call a massage. Unexpectedly, he found himself in a building he owned. When Mr. Frankel and Mr. Golodner investigated, they say the found the tenant of record was paying $800 a month but living in Westchester County, while collecting $2,700 a month from the woman in the apartment selling her services.

Some people’s luck . . .

And then there’s the use of private investigators as leading indicator of housing prices:

Another private investigator, Nick Himonidis, founder of NGH Associates in Roslyn Heights, N.Y., recalled a case in which a tenant was operating an architectural office out of a rent-regulated apartment: three architects, support staff, cleaning crews. Two investigators from Mr. Himonidis’s office made an appointment, talked to the architects and asked for a tour of the office. They captured the whole thing on hidden cameras.

“As a percentage of our business, our work for landlords as clients has probably gone from 5 percent to closer to 20 percent in the last 24 months,” said Mr. Himonidis, who believes the rise in rents has made an owner more likely to call in an investigator. “It simply might not have made economic sense 5 or 10 years ago. And now it does.”

Is the cute name supposed to distract us from the fact that hundreds of fake badges and thousands of guns have been confiscated from people trying to get into secure areas around the city? Because then it’s not so cute:

Authorities have confiscated 243 fake police badges and some 21,000 weapons and made 164 arrests or citations at city federal buildings since May 2005, according to sources and documents obtained by The Post.

Sources said most of the busts came at 26 Federal Plaza, home of the FBI’s New York office, considered a prime terror target.

They added that one arrest turned up an individual suspected to have terrorist ties, and that other fake-badge arrests have nabbed criminals with outstanding warrants and lengthy records, including a convicted child molester.

A children’s nursery is located at 26 Federal Plaza.

One elderly man confessed after his arrest that he was using an old badge to sneak a brick into a federal building and assault a Social Security Administration employee whom he believed had bilked him on a payment.

A source with intimate knowledge of the Federal Protective Service’s crackdown — dubbed Operation Stinking Badges after the often-quoted line from the Humphrey Bogart flick “The Treasure of Sierra Madre” — said it was initiated in part after police “noticed a spike in people coming in with badges.”

In May 2005, the Federal Protective Service, a Department of Homeland Security agency that protects government buildings, changed its policy and started verifying every badge.

Prior to that, it was possible for someone to flash a shield and walk into a federal building unchecked.

Some visitors are packing plenty more than a fake badge. Officers netted bulletproof vests, 10 guns — even a spiked bat.

They act like being a convicted sex offender is a bad thing:

Nearly a third of the city’s most dangerous sex offenders live within just two blocks of an elementary or middle school — and authorities have no power to make them move farther away, the Daily News has learned.

The sobering findings emerged from the most exhaustive examination ever conducted of the state sex offender registry.

The disturbing report, completed by Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn), shows that about 670 of the city’s 2,114 worst sex offenders live within two blocks of a school.

The clusters of sickos grow even larger a few more blocks away.

More than 85% of the city’s Level 2 and Level 3 sex offenders — the worst of the worst — live within a quarter-mile of a school, Weiner’s examination found. “Every day my kids when they leave the house I say a little prayer that they won’t cross one of these sex sickos,” Bronx mom Cynthia Hawkins, 35, said as she walked her kids home from Public School 33 in Highbridge.

Anthony Weiner: master of the low-hanging fruit.

Activists seeking to stop the Parks Department from renovating Washington Square Park take things to an absurd point, charging that construction in the urban park will damage the habitat of a red-tailed hawk:

The lawsuits keep on mounting against the embattled Washington Square Park renovation plan, threatening to further stall, if not outright kill, it. Two new lawsuits take aim at the $16 million project on environmental grounds. Among their charges are that the renovation will chainsaw down a full third of the trees in the park’s northwest quadrant, create pedestrian bottlenecks and threaten the habitat of a juvenile red-tailed hawk that recently took up residency and started hunting in the park.

Last Friday, two plaintiffs, Jonathan Greenberg, coordinator of the Open Washington Square Park Coalition; and Luther Harris, author of the definitive history book on Washington Square, filed the first of the two lawsuits. An Article 78 suit in State Supreme Court, it charges that an environmental impact assessment, or E.A.S., the Parks Department did for the project was faulty and that a more lengthy and involved environmental impact statement, or E.I.S., must be done.

In addition, the Emergency Coalition to Save Washington Square Park, or ECO, was expected to file suit in State Supreme Court on Wed., Jan. 24, also challenging the renovation on environmental grounds.

. . .

On Tuesday, attorney Joel Kupferman, representing ECO, said he couldn’t publicly discuss much yet about the second suit, which he hoped to file the next day. However, he said, it does contain a bird specialist’s affidavit on the significance of the new hawk’s presence.

“The bird story is a good part of it,” Kupferman said. “The long-range damage — what’s going to happen to the trees — what’s going to happen to the root system” are other significant aspects of the suit, he added.

Councilmember Alan Gerson, however, feels that not court, but the recently started Washington Square Park Task Force, set up under the so-called Gerson-Quinn Agreement with Parks on the renovation, is the best venue to solve disagreements.

“An E.I.S. is not a binding document,” Gerson said. “We’ve seen E.I.S.es that don’t result in any significant change on a project. To go to court — you don’t know how the court’s going to rule. I think enough is enough. We have a process in place. I think the best thing at this point is to work it out through the task force. Under the Gerson-Quinn Agreement the Parks Department is required to work with the task force in good faith.”

As for the trees, Gerson said he believed Parks’ revised bid documents now accurately reflect how many will be removed.

If the renovation doesn’t move forward soon, though, Gerson warned that more of the park will become “cordoned off, like the mounds.”

As for the hawk’s figuring prominently in Kupferman’s lawsuit, Gerson said, “This is the first I’m hearing of it — again, that issue could be dealt with through the task force.”

Location Scout: Washington Square Park.

NYPD undercover agents — with no guns blazing this time! — get back on the ball by busting Scores strippers for alleged prostitution:

Several Scores strippers — including a lovely who still lives with her parents in an upscale suburb — were caught with their G-strings down after they allegedly offered to sell sex to undercover cops inside the Chelsea club.

The four strippers agreed to engage in various sex acts in locked back rooms for prices ranging from $200 to $750, police sources said.

Another dancer and two male managers were also arrested on charges of promoting prostitution in what appeared to be the first vice roundup at the famed flesh palace on W. 28th St. “It was wide open,” a police source said. “They didn’t have to work for it.

“Somewhere the managers are sweating,” another police source said. “They put the club’s legitimate money at risk. . . . People above them can’t be happy.”

. . .

Manhattan South vice cops raided Scores just before midnight Wednesday after getting a tip some of the girls were performing sex in rooms at the back of building.

Unlike the club’s glitzy Champagne and President rooms that VIPs rent for private strip shows with their favorite girls, the secluded sex rooms had doors that locked, a police source said.

“Management was involved. They were prepping the backroom. They escorted them back,” another police source said.

The strippers also set their own rates for certain sex acts.

. . .

Last night, a Scores manager who asked not to be identified said the vice squad has been raiding a number of strip joints — not just Scores. “I can guarantee you no girl did anything like that,” he said. “Lap dances or table dances, that’s what we do. There is no friction.”

A raven-haired stripper at the club seconded the manager’s claims. “I don’t do anything like that,” she said. “My mother would kill me.”

So paranoid:

A graffiti crew called “Made U Look NYC” — or MUL NYC — is boasting to have spray-painted a piece spanning 10 subway cars last month, according to a Web site madeulooknyc.com.

The site is selling T-shirts featuring a photo of an R train with the Monopoly character painted on it, and promoting a 60-minute documentary about the piece’s creation that they plan to auction on eBay Mar. 1.

Some bloggers, however, speculate that the NYPD may be behind this stunt as a way to lure the culprits.

“If you were thinking of buying a T-shirt commemorating Made U Look’s painting of 10 whole NYC subway cars, you may want to reconsider now,” warned city blog RazorApple.com. Its recent posting of an explainer showing how the NYPD might be monitoring the site’s visitors got picked up by various blogs such as Gawker and Gothamist.

“It seems illogical that [MUL] would incriminate themselves in this way, with a Web site selling T-shirts,” Razor Apple’s editor Will Sherman told Metro yesterday, “but stranger things have happened.”

Sherman doesn’t doubt MUL was behind the “staggering feat” of painting the 750-foot-long piece — “Nothing this large was put on the subway since Easter Sunday 1988,” he said — but the site’s photos, which appear to have been taken at a rail yard on Dec. 26, seemed fishy, he thought. “It’s hard for me to believe they were able to film and take all those photos in daylight.”

He grew more suspicious after an e-mail exchange he had with “Frank,” who responded to the e-mail address listed on MUL NYC’s site. “He talked about other members in his crew, calling them ‘gentlemen,’” Sherman said. “I wouldn’t think you would describe the people in your crew like that.”

“Frank” denied allegations of police involvement in an e-mail to Metro.

There’s something kind of quaint about controversy still erupting over Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues:

Students have already begun taking sides over the controversial issue of whether or not a performance of “The Vagina Monologues” should be allowed on campus.

Senior Alisha Brizicky first presented her desire to have a production of the play at St. John’s in September, but administrators would not allow the play to be produced as a student activity, claiming it is too controversial. The student body is divided on the issue, with some agreeing with the administration’s decision while others argue that the play is an effective means of promoting women’s rights.

. . .

But while some students are urging the school to bring “The Vagina Monologues” to campus, others seem content with the administration’s decision.

“The Vagina Monologues reduces a woman to her private parts and inadvertently does what has been so destructive to the cause of women over history, turning their bodies into objects and failing to see the spiritual element in femininity,” said Michael Paris, a member of the Catholic men’s group Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati Confraternity. “For those who want to run the play under the banner of academic freedom: How is a positive representation of a teenager getting sexually assaulted by an older woman academic? How is reducing a woman to her vagina promoting freedom?”

Some landlords may be hard-assed old battle axes but at least they’re not gun runners:

A Brooklyn landlord who once smuggled high-powered sniper rifles to Kosovo guerrillas is now at the center of a more domestic dispute.

Tenants in a Carroll Gardens building are taking their landlord, Florin Krasniqi, to court, claiming he is using a ploy to kick them out of their rent-regulated homes.

The six low-income families live in a four-story walk-up at 137 Nelson St., where all the apartments are either rent-stabilized or rent-controlled. The tenants, some of whom have lived in the building for more than 40 years, pay between $350 and $550 a month.

. . .

The tenants’ attorney, Michael Weisberg, said he wasn’t aware of Krasniqi’s intrigue-filled past, which was detailed in a 2005 PBS documentary, “The Brooklyn Connection.”

“No way. Wow. That doesn’t bother me,” Weisberg said of Krasniqi’s history as a gun-runner. “I’ve met him. He didn’t seem particularly dangerous. He seemed like a jackass landlord.”

Not telling him what you got at the UJA thrift shop is one thing, but explaining what that big wedding dress is doing in the closet is quite another:

A 27-year-old Manhattan woman twirled before a full-length mirror in a lace wedding gown yesterday morning. “If my boyfriend knew I was doing this, we’d break up,” she said.

The strapless gown by Vera Wang retails for $12,900. However, the yet-to-be-engaged woman, who didn’t want her name mentioned lest her live-in boyfriend find out she was planning ahead, bought it for only $450.

Donated new and store-sample wedding dresses by high-end designers went on sale yesterday at the United Jewish Appeal Federation of New York Thrift Shop on West 17th Street. All of the usually four- or five-figure gowns were tagged at $500 or less.

At those prices, bride-to-be Molly Davis, 31, bought two. One was a white backless empire-waist Monique Lhuillier white gown, which retails for $4,700. The other was a slinky, ivory halter dress by Vera Wang, usually priced at $2,300. Ms. Davis, who works in the fashion industry, paid a total of $750 for the dresses. “I was planning to pay more, but I’m not going to argue with these prices,” she said.

The Daily News reports that Astroland will soon be transformed into a glittery hulking mass of commercialism and obsequiousness:

The big-bucks developer who bought Coney Island’s oldest amusement park plans to replace it with a glitzy $250 million playground anchored by a roller coaster that dips under the Boardwalk, the Daily News has learned.

Double the size of Astroland, the multitiered park will include 21 rides, a hotel, a manmade canal for boat rides, a glass-encased atrium and commercial space.

“We’re trying to deliver on the promise of what Coney Island is,” said Chris Durmick, creative director of Thinkwell Design & Production, the California group that is drawing up the 6-acre plan. “Whatever you come looking for at Coney Island, it’s all going to be there.”

It’s a Ken Jackson-Robert Caro grudge match to the death, with the title of supreme Robert Moses scholar at stake:

Sometime last fall, the biographer Robert Caro got a phone call from Roger Hertog, then vice chairman of AllianceBernstein and a rich and powerful New York City history buff. Columbia was planning a big exhibit on Robert Moses, New York’s master builder from the mid-20th century, and he wanted to know if Mr. Caro would give a lecture as part of it.

It was the first time, Mr. Caro said, that he had heard from anyone connected to the massive three-part exhibit opening next week, “Robert Moses and the Modern City,” which includes among its backers noted historian Kenneth T. Jackson.

And yet Mr. Caro had written the book on Moses, hadn’t he? Since its publication in 1974, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York has sold 315,000 copies through its 30 printings (and counting), and can be found on the bookshelf of every self-professed New York–ophile the world over.

With the exhibit (which is to be staged at the Museum of the City of New York, the Queens Museum of Art, and Columbia University) still not open, and with the academic conference weeks away, Mr. Caro gleaned what he could about the whole undertaking—especially the sort of re-evaluation of Moses’ life (and therefore his book) that the exhibit would prompt—by studying its 336-page catalog.

In particular, there were four pages written by Mr. Jackson, another great narrator of the saga of New York, that had gotten Mr. Caro’s attention — four critical pages that made him wonder whether this exhibit was going to be an attack on The Power Broker.

Mr. Caro’s editor Robert Gottlieb, who also read the four pages, told The Observer: “I got this impression that Mr. Jackson, even if he didn’t have a direct animus toward Caro, was suffering from some kind of Moses envy, as if he wanted to own Moses himself.”

. . .

Criticizing Mr. Caro must make students of New York history feel like Oedipus killing his father: The Power Broker is where they all learned about Moses in the first place.

“I wish it had my name on it rather than his,” Mr. Jackson said.

Yet more trash talk:

“There was no intention on my part or by any of the sponsors to not include him,” [Columbia professor and event organizer Hilary] Ballon said. “I have been very concerned that this project not be taken as a critique of what he did. The exhibit raises a different set of questions about Moses’ impact on the physical character of New York City. I’m really interested in what got built.”

Mr. Jackson, who co-edited the catalog with Ms. Ballon and is co-organizing the academic conference, said that he hadn’t thought that Mr. Caro would be interested in the conference, which won’t pay its participants and will probably have a smaller audience than the museum event. Ms. Ballon said that Mr. Caro was the first person to be invited to the public portion of the exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York.

“I understand his speaking fee is pretty large,” Mr. Jackson said.

That was fast! Man of the year Wesley Autrey makes it into President Bush’s State of the Union address:

One thing everyone at the State of the Union address could agree on applauding was President Bush’s introduction of Wesley Autrey, the New Yorker who saved the life of a stranger in a Harlem subway station.

Autrey was commended in Bush’s speech yesterday for jumping onto the tracks when he saw the man fall into the path of a train, pulling him out of harm’s way and holding him until the train passed above their heads.

Bush said: There is something wonderful about a country that produces a brave and humble man like Wesley Autrey, who attended the speech with his daughters.

And speaking of which:

The chamber erupted most unanimously and loudly for Wesley Autrey, the man who leapt into the tracks of a New York subway to save a fellow passenger. (The only ones not clapping, it appeared, were Mr. Autrey’s two young daughters, who napped beside him in their bubblegum-colored dresses.)

The worst problem plaguing the city’s exclusive preschools is poor street access for chauffeured transportation:

The cars gather in front of the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan about 8:30 a.m. In the front seats sit hired drivers (nobody uses the term chauffeur anymore). The cars are mostly big and mostly black luxury-edition sport utility vehicles like the Mercedes GL-Class or the GMC Yukon Denali. They fill the lanes in front of the Y’s entrance on Lexington Avenue, often two or three rows deep.

It looks like the outside of an arbitrage house just before trading hours, or perhaps the Knicks’ private entrance to Madison Square Garden on game day.

Until, that is, the drivers open the back-seat doors and the passengers’ feet emerge.

These are not the feet of profit-takers or N.B.A. players. These feet wear Sonnet Maryjanes and Primigi sneakers with Velcro closure straps.

These feet are only a half-foot long.

The children — ages 3 through 5 — are enrolled at the Y’s famous nursery school. The livery convention on Lexington Avenue occurs most every weekday. Neighbors of the Y and parents with children in the nursery school say they have seen the number of cars and drivers increase considerably over the past couple of years.

In exasperation, the director of the school, Nancy Schulman, drafted a letter to all families insisting that the drivers wait somewhere else while parents or baby sitters take the children in: find a legal parking space, or take their cars for a few spins around the block.

. . .

The Y is hardly the only school in the neighborhood where children get to school by car and driver. Dropoff hour at Nightingale-Bamford, on 92nd Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues, and at Dalton’s lower school, on 91st between Park and Madison, is often clogged by chauffeured S.U.V.’s.

Dalton’s chief financial officer, Ned Pinger, stands outside every morning to greet students, which often involves opening doors and helping them out of the back seat. “The heads of elementary schools are often outside doing this, and it becomes a little ridiculous,” said Sandra R. Bass, who publishes Private School Insider, a newsletter for New York parents. “You can’t tell who the master is in this situation.”

. . .

A parent whom other parents identified as a chauffeur-using mother, Alison Schneider, whose husband, Jack Schneider, is a hedge fund manager, said, “I got the letter, but I don’t really have any feelings about it one way or the other. It’s kind of boring. It’s about cars and parking.”

Over the past couple of weeks, a staff member from the Y’s nursery school has been seen directing waiting cars away from the school. The chauffeurs idled in double-parked formation one block farther down Lexington, or around the corner on 91st Street. Posters to the New York bulletin board of the Web site Urbanbaby.com, which is popular with mothers of young children, have occasionally made note of the scene. “So this morning I was at the 92nd Street Y and there were 10 black Escalades and Range Rovers double-parked with huge guys in black suits,” one wrote last month.

Mr. Miller, put down the remote . . . and for pete’s sake, stay away from the Oprah books:

At the northwest corner of Central Park, construction is under way on Frederick Douglass Circle, a $15.5 million project honoring the escaped slave who became a world-renowned orator and abolitionist.

Beneath an eight-foot-tall sculpture of Douglass, the plans call for a huge quilt in granite, an array of squares, a symbol in each, supposedly part of a secret code sewn into family quilts and used along the Underground Railroad to aid slaves. Two plaques would explain this.

The only problem: According to many prominent historians, the secret code — the subject of a popular book that has been featured on no less a cultural touchstone than “The Oprah Winfrey Show” — never existed. And now the city is reconsidering the inclusion of the plaques, so as not to “publicize spurious history,” Kate D. Levin, the city’s commissioner of cultural affairs, said yesterday.

. . .

Algernon Miller, who designed the memorial site, said he “was inspired by this story line,” which he discovered in the library. His was a re-interpretation, he said, noting that he was “taking a soft material, a quilt, and converting it into granite.”

“Traditionally what African-Americans do is take something and reinterpret into another form,” he said.

. . .

Giles R. Wright, director of the Afro-American History Program at the New Jersey Historical Commission, rattled off the historians’ problems in a telephone interview: There is no surviving example of an encoded quilt from the period. The code was never mentioned in any of the interviews of ex-slaves carried out in the 1930’s by the Works Progress Administration. There is no mention of quilting codes in any diaries or memoirs from the period.

Mr. Miller responded to critics: “No matter what anyone has to say, they weren’t there in that particular moment, especially something that was in secret.”

“I Am Legend” officially becomes shorthand for “obnoxiously intrusive, seemingly eternally omnipresent film shoot”:

Don’t be alarmed by the fleet of Black Hawk helicopters and military ships converging on the Brooklyn Bridge tonight — it’s only the new Will Smith movie, police said yesterday.

For the next eight days, these mock military vehicles and more than a thousand extras will shoot an evacuation scene for the next Big Willie blockbuster, “I am Legend.”

The post-apocalyptic sci-fi flick is due out this December.

Filming will start at 4 p.m. and is expected to wrap up weekdays at 10 p.m., police said.