And On Your Left, A Four-Year-Old Davis-Bacon Tree Is Starting To Bear Fruit

The Sun explains why it costs $1,100 to plant a tree:

The high cost can be attributed in large part to an increase in labor costs, which date to a 2003 decision by the city comptroller, William Thompson, to raise the pay of tree planters more than threefold. Today, tree planters make about $55 an hour, up from the $15 hourly wage they were paid before the change. Prior to that decision, the price of planting a tree was about $700.

“That seems like a lot,” the current commissioner for the parks department in Westchester County, Mitchell Tutoni, said when told of the $1,100 price tag in the city.

. . .

In addition to rising wage costs, one contractor, Angelo DeBartoli, said a second change in the contracts contributes to the high price of planting a tree in New York City. A new rule requires contractors to replant trees that are felled by vandalism within two years of their planting, he said in a telephone interview. Mr. DeBartoli, the owner of Robert Bello Landscaping, said it was “insane” that contractors had to guarantee the trees against vandalism once the plantings were finished.

Still, Mr. DeBartoli said the sudden rise in cost was largely caused by the required wage increase for tree planters.

The decision to raise the wages came as the comptroller’s office reclassified the job of planting trees to labor from gardening.

But that classification is in question today, as it was when it was made.

“We got lumped into the laborer category, but we’re landscapers,” Mr. DeBartoli said. “We don’t come out with cranes and all kinds of fancy equipment. We come out and dig a hole and plant a tree and put stones around it.”

I Never Smelled Him

Yes, an actual carny:

The decomposed remains of a carnival worker who was reported missing 10 years ago were found in a Bronx home after a water pipe sprung a leak, authorities said yesterday.

Dwayne Perkins said he went to 911 Ogden Ave. to check on his grandmother Monday evening and stumbled upon the ossified corpse of Michael Johnson in the basement.

As Perkins peered into a dank corner of the basement to inspect a pipe that was spitting steam, he spotted the old bones.

“I was ready to leave when I looked down, and I saw a ball covered in dirt, but when I looked closer, I [realized] it was a skull,” said Perkins, 40.

“It just blew me away.”

He called the police, who discovered a jacket among the heap of bones and rotting flesh. Inside the jacket was Johnson’s identification.

“The cops said the bones were in a disarray, probably because some cats, rats and dogs may have gotten to it,” said Perkins, whose family has owned the house for 35 years.

His uncle, Ray Stirrup, even had a workshop in the basement and was flabbergasted by the disgusting discovery. “Man, just thinking about it — I’ve been sitting here, doing my little projects, and he’s 15 feet behind me. I never smelled him,” said Stirrup, 56.

Johnson had been reported missing in his native state of Ohio and in New York in November 1997. He was 50 years old at the time.

He had been renting a $40-a-week room on a third floor of the three-story, 106-year-old house that’s just a stone’s throw from Yankee Stadium, after befriending fellow carnival worker Charles Byrd, Stirrup’s stepson.

Tonight, A Proud City Celebrates The Great Public Service The Gristedes And Food Emporiums Of Our Community Offer

Wal-Mart finally decides that it can make boatloads of cash elsewhere without all the bullshit:

Frustrated by a bruising, and so far unsuccessful battle to open its first discount store in the nation’s largest city, Wal-Mart’s chief executive said yesterday, “I don’t care if we are ever here.”

H. Lee Scott Jr., the chief executive of the nation’s largest retailer, said that trying to conduct business in New York was so expensive — and exasperating — that “I don’t think it’s worth the effort.”

Mr. Scott’s remarks, delivered at a meeting with editors and reporters of The New York Times, amounted to a surprising admission of defeat, given the company’s vigorous efforts to crack into urban markets and expand beyond its suburban base in much of the country. In recent years, Wal-Mart has encountered stout resistance to its plans to enter America’s bigger cities, which stand as its last domestic frontier.

Much of the opposition to Wal-Mart in cities like New York is led by unions. Organized labor, fearing that the retailer’s low prices and modest wages will undercut unionized stores, have built anti-Wal-Mart alliances with Democratic members of city councils.

And then there’s this:

Yesterday, labor leaders, upon learning of Wal-Mart’s apparent retreat from New York — or at the very least Manhattan — returned Mr. Scott’s sentiment.

“We don’t care if they’re never here,” said Ed Ott, executive director of the New York City Central Labor Council. “We don’t miss them. We have great supermarkets and great retail outlets in New York. We don’t need Wal-Mart.”

We do? Which ones? Oh yeah, the ones where you pay more for a box of cereal than you would for a movie ticket. Or the ones where a gallon of milk costs more than a gallon of gas — in France. Such paragons of public service. Thank god none of them have to worry about competition. I myself enjoy being gouged at the one bodega (doubtless unionized — yeah, right) that’s open in my neighborhood — and I can even somewhat afford to spend more to preserve my lousy small footprint. I’m sure those at the bottom of the economic feeding chain feel even better. There’s a reason the middle class is disappearing in the New York area and it’s only partly because of high housing costs.

Then again, I’m sure Bentonville will get a kick out of seeing the New York Times frame it like this:

. . . Wal-Mart, a cost-minded retailer known for its dowdy merchandise, and New York, a city of excesses known for cutting-edge style, have long had an uneasy relationship.

But really, Wal-Mart shouldn’t feel so bad because they’ve still got scoreboard. And that’s something even Philadelphia defied. New York City — frequently, often — is incredibly full of itself. Manhattan deserves all the Food Emporiums it gets.

Keep Those NYC & Company Vultures Away From This One

Now here’s a story to tell the folks back home in Ohio (or London* or Ireland** or Moscow***, as the case may be):

The dining room at De Marco’s Pizzeria and Restaurant on Houston Street was empty Sunday evening, save for one couple sharing a pizza and a table by the window.

They were tourists, they said, and unknowingly were among the first customers to visit the restaurant less than two weeks after a worker there was shot 15 times in the back, and two auxiliary police officers were gunned down while chasing his shooter through the streets of Greenwich Village.

But seriously — why back down from the notoriety? Everyone knows that people love to gawk:

Being the scene of violent crime has sometimes boosted business at city restaurants, according to crime historians and restaurateurs, while in other cases establishments have seen their reputations irrevocably damaged.

“In a strange sense, the notoriety can actually help,” a New York restaurateur, Drew Nieporent, said. “People will likely come to De Marco’s as voyeurs. . . . It might even gain a national reputation.”

Restaurants sometimes undergo cosmetic changes following a traumatic incident, a professor of security management at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Robert McCrie, said. “Fast food places where shootings have taken place often shut for a day, or undergo a name change,” Mr. McCrie said. He described these venues as “forbidden kinds of places” whose notoriety attracts customers.

“There’s a certain cachet associated with going to a restaurant where something bad has happened,” a sociologist at Indiana University, Thomas Gieryn, said. “We have a morbid fascination with places where impossible things happen.”

Some restaurants capitalize on the drama that transpired within their walls, Mr. Gieryn said. Sparks Steak House became a Midtown landmark after a mob boss, Paul Castellano, was murdered there in 1985.

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They Got Capone On Tax Evasion, They’ll Get You For Walking Between Cars

Is there a correlation between walking between subway cars and crime? Steven Levitt is never around when you need him:

The MTA’s rule banning people from moving between subway cars has helped put the brakes on crime and increase arrests, including 166 people busted for outstanding warrants, the NYPD said yesterday.

NYPD Chief of Transit James Hall said the subway rule, created for safety reasons, has been “extremely effective” for transit cops nabbing some rough riders.

“When we looked at that [regulation] and then looked at our complaint reports, we see a lot of victims tell us that when they were victimized that the bad guy or the bad gal walked through the cars,” said Hall. “So we’ve attempted to put a lot more officers on the trains looking for that offense.”

Since January, transit cops around the city have issued 1,953 summonses for people moving between cars, and have arrested 166 for a return on warrants, four for loaded guns and 45 for illegal knives, an NYPD spokesman said.

But it’s not so much a safety issue as it seems to be just another way to harrass bad people:

“We’re really stopping people with bad histories,” said Hall. More than 100 “people already with outstanding warrants — that’s huge.”

Now where’s the ACLU when you need them?