Governing’s A Bitch, Ain’t It?

Councilmembers continue the heavy lifting at City Hall:

One down. Two more to go. City lawmakers are now hoping to slap a symbolic ban on the words “bitch” and “ho.”

Councilwoman Darlene Mealy (D-Brooklyn) is calling for a halt on the use of the two sexist slurs, which are popular in rap lyrics.

“When these words are used, they injure all women,” Mealy told the Daily News.

Mealy’s resolution, introduced last week, comes after the Council unanimously approved a similar stance on the N-word in March.

The resolutions are not legally enforceable bans. Instead, they are designed to persuade the music industry and young people to take the insults out of their vocabulary.

EDC Danes To Leverage Its Control Over Coney Island

Would you prefer Joe Sitt or Tivoli Gardens? I mean, Coney Island and Copenhagen are close to each other in the dictionary, but that’s about it:

Robert Lieber, president of the city’s Economic Development Corp., flew to Copenhagen last week with other top agency officials to meet with representatives from Tivoli Gardens.

The meeting, he said, was both about Tivoli’s preliminary interest in Coney Island and to learn from the success of the 164-year-old amusement park on how best to transform Coney’s amusement district into a year-round attraction.

He said a Tivoli branch in Coney Island could work without giving up the area’s famous freakiness, adding Tivoli officials promised a future visit.

“We aren’t trying to create Disneyland in Coney Island, but we’re trying to create a demand-oriented model that maintains the neighborhood’s character and economic interests,” Lieber said.

Tivoli, which has more than 20 rides and famous gardens, features the world’s tallest carousel and a 93-year-old wooden roller coaster, called the Rutsjebanen, that is slightly older than Coney Island’s Cyclone.

. . .

With the city planning to rezone Coney Island’s amusement district this year to help future development, Lieber said he’s still not satisfied with developer Joe Sitt’s proposal to build a $1.5 billion hotel-entertainment complex in the heart of the amusement district.

Lieber pointed out that Tivoli is successful year-round without the onsite condos, time-shares or hotels that Sitt has pushed for, despite Denmark’s cold winters and the park’s many outdoor rides and attractions.

“They’ve learned to think outside the box and continuously reinvent themselves,” said Lieber. “They’ve made Halloween a weeklong event and have a two-week event centered around Christmas.”

With Sitt controlling 10 acres of prime boardwalk real estate, both he and City Hall will have to reach a compromise or risk Coney Island remaining stagnant.

The city could theoretically try taking Sitt’s land through eminent domain, but Lieber said he’s “not ready to go there” when asked about condemnation.

(Using eminent domain against a developer . . . now that would be a hoot!)

Location Scout: Coney Island Amusement Core.

Like Foxes In Henhouses, Pedophiles In Schools Or Alcoholics In Distilleries . . .

As reports maintain that women commuters are in large numbers threatened, harassed or otherwise somehow sexually assaulted on the subway, new fears emerge that the system is becoming a magnet for sickos and pervs:

A city transit worker was arrested for sexually abusing a woman in a subway car, police said yesterday.

Bus dispatcher Glenn Jones, 37, was off duty when he allegedly approached a 30-year-old straphanger on the No. 4 train as it rolled into Grand Central station on Saturday afternoon.

Jones rubbed against her buttocks, according to police.

Halal Is The New Hot Dog

Hot dogs have finally gone the way of the egg cream:

Although the city doesn’t collect statistics that distinguish between different types of street food, halal vendors generally agree that their ranks have swelled in the last five to eight years, prompting the obvious question: How did the halal platter become the city’s new hot dog?

“The hot dog now is for tourists,” said a rueful Chafik el-Mokhtar, office manager at 2M Friend Corporation, a hot-dog cart garage and supply store on West 47th Street near 11th Avenue.

“The people usually go for chicken and rice because it’s good for hunger,” he added wistfully.

Mohamed Abouelenein, an Egyptian who used to sell hot dogs, said, “Hot dog is not a meal.” That’s one reason he switched to gyro and chicken in 1992, becoming, he claims, the first peddler in New York to sell halal meat from a cart.

“We figured out that most of the cabdrivers are Egyptian, Pakistani,” he said. “They suffered too much from no halal.”

On some corners of Manhattan, halal carts outnumber hot-dog vendors by as much as three to one. Mr. Abouelenein’s cart, named 53rd and 6th, after the Midtown corner on which it sits, stays open from 7 p.m. to 4 a.m., feeding throngs of clubbers, foodies and cabbies. Its success has been such that Mr. Abouelenein recently opened a new cart across the street, supplanting — yes — a hot-dog stand.

The term halal may be applied to any food prepared in accordance with the laws of the Koran, although in New York the term has taken on special connotations: oily chunks of chicken or gyro meat, yellowish rice, some scraps of lettuce, hot sauce and, of course, the mysterious substance known as white sauce.

It’s All After-School Drama Club And Community Theatre Productions . . . And Then You Have Drunky Old Eugene O’Neill To Muss Things Up

Is he kidding? Everyone knows the horrible truth about “theater people”:

If all the world really were a stage, Louis Salamone would have no problem getting a liquor license for his new theaters on Bleecker Street, near Mulberry Street.

But many local residents fear that all the world between the Bowery and Broadway north of Houston Street is fast becoming one long bar crawl, and contend that adding yet another place that sells alcohol will produce even more in the way of drunken crowds and late-night rowdiness.

“We are worried that it would be a camouflage for a cabaret and nightclub setting, which we all know is the predominant activity in Lower Manhattan,” said Zella Jones, president of the NoHo Neighborhood Association. The group opposes Mr. Salamone’s effort to sell liquor, and wants beer and wine sales limited to specific areas and times.

Mr. Salamone, executive director of a production company that also owns two Off Broadway houses, plans to open his new performance space, the Theaters at 45 Bleecker Street, in September.

“For a theater to survive, it can’t just be a theater,” Mr. Salamone said. He cited both soaring rents — he pays about $50,000 a month for two floors in a mustard-colored, six-story brick building — and the plight of the building’s previous tenant, the Culture Project, which left in December because of financial problems.

“We’re theater people, not nightclub people or restaurateurs,” Mr. Salamone added. “But the bottom line is we need additional sources of revenue, mainly drinks, a little food, to add to our income.”