Post Spitzer, the rent-a-pet story has new resonance:

“There are a lot of people out there looking for companionship,” said Chris Haddix, 28, who runs the New York branch of Flexpetz. There are usually five or six dogs available for rent, many of them on display in the Wet Nose storefront window, attracting crowds.

[Sarah] Stevenson explained why she was a customer: “I’m single and moved here from Scotland two years ago, and it’s been difficult to meet people because everyone in New York just kind of goes about their business. But when I’m walking around with Oliver, I seem to get into so many conversations about him. It becomes a nice way to meet people.”

But it isn’t cheap. A monthly membership, which includes four one-day rentals, costs $279.95. Additional rentals cost $45 for a day, or part of a day.

Anyone interested must first register at www.flexpetz.com before meeting Mr. Haddix. “I ask them a lot of questions,” he said. “I want to know if they have ever owned a dog, why they can’t own a dog full time, how renting a dog benefits them, stuff like that.”

If the head office in San Diego gives the go-ahead, there is a mandatory one-hour training session on handling and training. Then members can choose one of the dogs pictured on the Web site for rental.

Mr. Haddix said his customers were a mixed bunch.

“There are people from other states and other countries who couldn’t take their dogs with them when they were transplanted to New York,” he said, “and there are families with small children who enjoy taking these dogs on vacation with them.

“There are also people who live in places that do not allow pets, and a lot of single people who wouldn’t mind just hanging out with a pal every now and then. There are all sorts of reasons for renting dogs,” said Mr. Haddix . . .

. . . the word “bicoastal”:

Eve Levine, a 34-year-old real estate broker, recalls fondly the five years when she was, as she calls it, “low-cost bicoastal.” Her primary residence was in Brooklyn — first Williamsburg, then Bushwick and now Greenpoint — but she also had an apartment in the Fruitvale section of Oakland, Calif., that she visited for long stretches.

The apartment, actually a warehouse, was really big and inexpensive, she said. Friends paid the rent, but Ms. Levine said she could come back whenever she wanted, because they were friends.

In the fall of 2005, she severed ties to her West Coast warehouse.

“If you are trying to build something, whether a career or a bank account, you need to make a choice,” she said.

These days, she is a host of a gathering in Williamsburg called Home Buying for Hipsters, at which she explains the idea of Tenancy in Common, a form of ownership that enables people to combine their resources to buy a house jointly instead of just renting together. It is popular in the San Francisco Bay Area, she said, and she hopes to bring it to Brooklyn, where there is a similar pool of young people who have a history of sharing apartments through their 20’s.

. . .

Much the way Hollywood people have shuttled between Los Angeles and Manhattan for decades, or academics commute on the Acela between Morningside Heights and Cambridge, Mass., there is a young, earnest population that is beating a path between artsy, gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn and their counterparts in the Bay Area, especially East Oakland and the area south of Market Street in San Francisco, or SoMa.

Other communities across the country also fit this bill, but what Brooklyn and the East Bay share is proximity to more cosmopolitan centers — Manhattan and San Francisco — where the “creative class,” many of whom are freelancers, can earn a living.

“You can make money in both cities,” Ms. Levine said. “Can you make money in Portland, Ore.? It’s a cool city, it’s got lots of hipsters, but can you make money?”

. . .

If there is an aesthetic credo to Brooklyn and the Bay Area, it is Do It Yourself, which connotes more than using an Allen wrench from Ikea. D.I.Y. can mean everything from wearing locally designed T-shirts to attending concerts staged in someone’s warehouse apartment, to riding a bike to work.

Several businesses that have opened in both Brooklyn and the Bay Area exemplify the aesthetic. One of them, Rare Device, a home furnishings and fashion store in Park Slope, sells felted throw pillows and “wildcrafted soap.”

. . . no, the pathetic thing is that the model for what it means to be a woman living in New York is the creation of a misogynistic gay man:

[Name redacted so as to mitigate obvious over-the-top self-promotion], who is 27, came to New York soon out of Georgetown University four years ago. Along with many of her peers, she was drawn in part by HBO’s comic but near-anthropological chronicle of the living and mating habits of a certain set of New York’s single women.

Ms. [redacted] knows the adventures and misadventures of Carrie & Company by heart, and she uses them as something of a road map for her own life.

She frequents sleek and buzzworthy bars with her girlfriends. She has danced at Bungalow 8, the celebrity-rich club in West Chelsea. She has devoured cupcakes at Magnolia Bakery, and she can sprint in five-inch heels. And, of course, she has written publicly about relationships, both for Time Out New York and on a blog of her own, among other places, with all that entails.

Ms. [redacted] has taken her devotion to “Sex and the City” further than most. She dated a onetime boyfriend of Candace Bushnell, whose column in The New York Observer inspired the television series. For the British version of the magazine Marie Claire, Ms. [redacted] analyzed how her life compares to the lives lived in the series.

“If Carrie Bradshaw were coming to New York today,” Ms. [redacted] says with no hint of self-consciousness, “she would be me.”

Ms. [redacted] may be extreme. But she is hardly alone.

It has been a decade since “Sex and the City” arrived on television, yet the adventures of Carrie and her pals continue to enthrall. This spring, even as Sarah Jessica Parker, the star of the series, turns 43, the “Sex and the City” movie will make it to the big screen. Although the film won’t officially arrive in theaters until May 30, Carrie fever is running so high that the publicity campaign began almost the moment plans for the movie were announced.

Yet young women coming to New York these days in search of Mr. Big, or at least the perfect Cosmopolitan, are finding that money and technology have altered the urban paradise that Carrie inhabited.

The city has become such an expensive playground that much of what Carrie and her friends took for granted — a Manhattan apartment, taxis for any trip longer than a half-dozen blocks, dinner at the newest four-star restaurants — is no longer easily in reach of a young woman on a budget, much less a young woman on a writer’s budget.

. . .

Alyssa Shelasky, another New Yorker who tried to follow in Carrie’s footsteps, discovered just how fast one’s fortunes could rise and fall on the Web two summers ago, when she was asked by Glamour magazine to write a blog about finding love again after a particularly heart-rending breakup.

The blog made it tougher.

“Men were freaked out by it,” Ms. Shelasky said the other day over coffee and a brownie at City Bakery on 18th Street.

With long, soft brown hair framing her open face, Ms. Shelasky has a down-to-earth, girl-next-door quality. But it is hard to be the girl next door when you’ve also been the girl about town on the Internet.

“Within five minutes on the computer,” she said, “men could find out everything I had done the night before and the night before, and that this guy did this and it really turned me on.”

In many respects, Ms. Shelasky is Carrie rewritten for the Internet age. “If I didn’t like a guy or never called him back,” she recalled, “a few childish men in particular would use the blog to retaliate.

“They would be like, ‘This is Sneakers Guy, we made out, and she was like this,’” she said. “And I was like, ‘Wait, this is my blog, and I get to decide how much of me we discuss.’”

These days, even Community Boards are tripping over themselves to suck up to location scouts:

The boards, which each have about 3 paid workers and 50 volunteer members, constitute the city’s most local form of government, serving from 35,000 to 200,000 people apiece. While they wield little direct power, the boards have a wide range of advisory responsibilities, like reviewing applications for liquor licenses and soliciting public comment on major public and private projects.

Now the boards are bracing for cuts that many of their leaders say would seriously hamper their ability to function. Although the city pays for rent and utilities, last year each board had nearly $200,000 to pay for all other expenses, including salaries, phones, office supplies, equipment and technical services. Except for the sum available for salaries, which is set apart, board officials contend that their allocation has not been increased in about 15 years.

In the past two months, the mayor’s office asked each board to plan $9,995 to $15,690 in cuts that, if approved by the City Council, would take effect July 1.

. . .

Some boards are already raising money privately, and the budget cuts may force more boards to do so. In October, Board 3, which covers the Lower East Side, earned $1,500 for renting its offices to “Law & Order” for the overnight filming of a scene set in a community newspaper office. Susan Stetzer, the district manager, said a spinoff of the show had scouted her office for a scene set in a city agency, “but we were too old and decrepit-looking.”

And your loved ones look at you like you’re Richard Dreyfus sculpting mashed potatoes:

Residents of one of the city’s noisiest neighborhoods are honking mad at hacks who lean on their horns — so they’re cooking up creative ways to quiet the nightly cabby cacophony.

The Lower East Side’s Community Board 3, which has registered 6,133 noise complaints since July, the second most in the city, voted last week to ask the Taxi and Limousine Commission to consider installing a light atop taxis that would glow when a cabby beeps the horn.

This would make it easier for cops to ticket the driver for breaking the city’s noise code, which prohibits excessive horn honking.

“Right now, the police actually have to see a cabdriver honk the horn to issue a ticket, and that’s obviously hard,” said Board 3 district manager Susan Stetzer. “This would allow the police to see exactly who honked and make it easy to enforce the rules.”

The board will include the suggested tattletale light in a letter to the TLC, which is soliciting public feedback as it designs the taxi of the future.

But that’s not the only anti-honking measure the community is clamoring for.

Residents want to see cabs equipped with horns that blare as loudly inside the taxi as outside, creating a natural deterrent.

Next on the list: a meter that knocks $1 off the fare every time the horn honks.

“If the driver lost a buck every time he blew the horn, that would stop him real quick,” said Lower East Side resident Avram Fefer, who called the din on Ludlow Street “absolutely horrible.”

“What Times Square is to the eyes, Ludlow Street is to the ears,” he said.

. . .

And if the community’s suggestions fall on deaf ears? “A very vigorous egg-throwing campaign” might be the answer, according to Fefer.

Why not two levels of horns? A quieter one for when someone is right in front of you and a louder one for real danger? Or at least when you’re six cars back and you want to know what the hold up is . . . (seriously, the culture of honking here is absurd!)

Many of the spaces in the downtown Brooklyn “park”-ing lot supposedly occupied by judges for supposed security reasons are actually being used by their secretaries:

It’s not just judges who are parking in the controversial judicial parking lot in a downtown Brooklyn park, the Daily News has learned.

Secretaries, court staffers and judicial hearing officers also are parked inside Columbus Park, a recent Daily News survey found.

Law clerks who chauffeur their judgebosses to work also have nabbed the coveted spots, the News found.

“It certainly shoots a hole in the argument that they need this parking lot for judges’ security,” said Transportation Alternatives spokesman Wiley Norvell of the Civil Court judges’ stance they need to park near the old courthouse next to Borough Hall where they preside over volatile cases. “It’s a job perk.”

The News’ findings came as judges threatened to sue the city over its plans to oust some of the cars from the lot and turn it back into a pedestrian plaza. Work is slated to begin as early as next month.

. . .

In 1999, judges allegedly promised to move their cars to a garage at the new courthouse at 330 Jay St. when it opened in 2005.

But they have more recently argued it is unsafe and inconvenient for judges who preside over divorce and foreclosure cases to park in the new Criminal Court garage and make the six-minute, two-block trek to Civil Court.

“They can’t walk two blocks to a garage, but they all walk to Queen for lunch,” quipped one insider, referring to a well-known Court St. Italian restaurant.

Among The News’ findings from its March 7 review are:

Nearly 40% of the 44 cars — 17 — did not belong to judges.

Three cars belonged to judges’ secretaries.

Another five cars were law clerks’; while two more were driven by high-level courthouse administrators.

Four cars were listed to retired judges now working as judicial hearing officers or court attorney referees.

Two cars belonged to court officers assigned to watch over the lot. One car’s owner could not be identified.

Location Scout: Columbus Park.

And she’ll be better able to deal when Gawker commenters trip over themselves to poke fun at her weight:

Think of someone you don’t like. Write the name down on a piece of paper and fold it in half.

That’s what 7-year-old Tiana Camacho and other students in her second-grade class at PS 18 in West Brighton were asked to do. Her parents were outraged — especially when several of Tiana’s young classmates wrote her name on their papers.

“My child is very sensitive,” said Ana Camacho, Tiana’s mother. “Something like that would not help her.”

The school’s principal did not return a message left with a secretary. Department of Education spokeswoman Margie Feinberg, speaking on the principal’s behalf, did not have details on the assignment but said it was intended to improve students’ oral and written skills.

“They were understanding what it means to interview people,” Ms. Feinberg said. “It was a request to interview someone whom they don’t get along with.”

Parents said they might believe that if the teacher hadn’t read out the names of the students.

“[The teacher] went about it the wrong way,” said Mrs. Camacho. “Children shouldn’t be exposed to something like that at such a young age.”

Apparently, officials at the department didn’t think it was a very effective project, either. According to Feinberg, the teacher was given a verbal warning.

“Poor judgment was used,” Ms. Feinberg said. “There was a conference and a discussion with the teacher.”

Officials wouldn’t release the teacher’s name, but parents identified her as Linda Jacobellis.

The student, Tiana, was stunned and saddened by the incident. She said her teacher was fun to be around, which made this assignment unusually upsetting. Ms. Jacobellis supposedly explained to the class that they were given the assignment because many of the classmates don’t get along. But never did Tiana expect that she would be picked.

“She called my name a few times and I had to go to the front of the room,” Tiana said. “I was sad. I thought I was everybody’s friend.”

. . . let them decamp to the suburbs where they can close off those people’s streets:

WHITE PLAINS — Martin Scorsese’s crime drama “The Departed” may be a paean to the city of Boston, but a number of scenes featuring Leonardo DiCaprio were shot at the county courthouse and library here. It was a surprisingly apt title, since 2007, the year “The Departed” won the Academy Award for Best Picture, was also the year that many film and television shoots departed — for Connecticut.

With a proud film history dating back almost a century, to D. W. Griffith’s creation of a 28-acre production lot in Mamaroneck, Westchester County is increasingly watching production companies be lured across the border to Connecticut, which now offers them a 30 percent tax credit, compared with New York State’s 10 percent.

Since the Connecticut tax credit took effect in July 2006, that state has gone from playing host to the occasional film shoot (remember “Mystic Pizza”?) to attracting 66 feature films, television shows and commercials with a collective $400 million in production costs, the majority of it in the Fairfield County suburbs of New York.

At the same time, similar suburbs across the border in Westchester County have seen their film shoots shrivel. In 2006, Westchester was the setting for scenes from 14 big-budget features, as well as numerous independent films; last year, two movies were partially shot here.

And Blue Sky Studios, the company behind “Horton Hears a Who” and “Ice Age,” recently announced that it would leave downtown White Plains for Greenwich, Conn., by the end of the year. The studio, a unit of Fox Filmed Entertainment, with 300 employees, was drawn by generous digital-animation and infrastructure tax credits that Connecticut created two years ago.

“We just sat back and rested on our laurels,” said Iris Stevens, director of Westchester’s Film Office. “New York was one of the early states to create an incentive program, but then we went into cruise control and didn’t follow through. The film industry, quite frankly, has no loyalties. They’re going to go where they get the best deal, which makes perfect sense.”

Clearly caught off guard by Connecticut’s campaign for film business, state officials in New York are rushing to address the imbalance.

New York City is somewhat insulated from the changes, thanks to its iconic skyline and the fact that the city government gives production companies an additional 5 percent tax credit, but it, too, has seen a decline in film shoots. The state’s 10 percent film credit is dwarfed not only by Connecticut’s, but also by the 25 percent credit in Massachusetts and the 20 percent credit in New Jersey.

. . .

It did not take long for the effects of Connecticut’s new incentives to be felt across the border, said Pat Swinney Kaufman, executive director of the New York Governor’s Office for Motion Picture and Television Development. In the 12 months before the introduction of Connecticut’s tax credit, the New York State film office received 60 applications from feature films for the incentive, with a projected total expenditure of $966 million. In the 12 months after, there were 39 applications, with a total projected budget of $215 million.

“It’s a very dramatic drop,” Ms. Kaufman said.

I Don’t Care If You’re Filming, You’re In My Goddamn Way.

One wonders how teachers introduced the assignment, and whether clarification was necessary:

A year ago City Councilman Leroy Comrie (D-St. Albans) led a successful battle to ban the N-word from New Yorker’s lips and last week he honored youngsters who made sure it stays that way.

The councilman awarded 26 city middle-schoolers official city citations for winning the second annual Black History Month Essay Contest at City Hall on March 19. The subject for the 250-word essay was “Why the N-word Should Never be Used,” a theme Comrie supports strongly.

These students were able to express their ideas about why the ‘N-word’ should never be used and it is my hope that they will begin to work with their peers in hopefully putting an end to this cultural phenomena,” he said in a statement.

Of the 26 winners, 15 were from Queens schools, including MS 8 in Jamaica, MS 172 in Floral Park, MS 226 in South Ozone Park, IS 147 in Queens Village, MS 147 in Cambria Heights and MS 268 in Jamaica.

You know, you don’t need new planners or spokespeople to administer a toll, or even a sales tax:

The city is already seeking résumés for high-paying gigs with its congestion-pricing initiative — despite the fact it might never be approved.

And, according to the salaries being offered, drivers aren’t the only ones who’ll pay if the plan gets off the ground.

The Department of Transportation posted 10 positions — paying up to a combined $1.2 million — for engineers, planners and spokespersons who would work in a variety of capacities promoting and managing Mayor Bloomberg’s contentious plan to charge drivers $8 to enter Manhattan’s business districts.

“Starting the search now is necessary, so we can quickly hire the engineering and planning professionals we need to implement the many components of congestion pricing efficiently within one year of approval,” said DOT spokesman Seth Solomonow.

The gigs, advertised on the DOT’s Web site and on Craigslist, run the gamut from press officers to planners.

The position of “administrative city planner” can earn a maximum of $162,790 while an “administrative public-information specialist” can make up to $135,240.

Even low-end salaries in DOT’s want ads are in the ranges of $50,000 to $60,000.

NYU no longer dream school for teens:

The dream is over.

New York University’s three-year run as the No. 1 “dream” school for college-bound students has been derailed, according to survey rankings released yesterday.

Harvard, Princeton and Stanford all vaulted ahead of NYU in the annual Princeton Review “College Hopes” list — relegating the downtown crown-wearer to fourth place.

. . . to burnish your legacy somehow, somewhere:

With time running out on Mayor Bloomberg’s dream of rebuilding Coney Island, the city is now looking to bring a controversial developer back into the plan to build America’s largest amusement park, sources told The Post.

Only six months ago, when the term-limited mayor announced his grand 47-acre rezoning plan for Coney Island, city officials said developer Joe Sitt and other boardwalk property owners weren’t qualified to build the new 15-acre park the mayor envisions there.

But with the economy dwindling and deals to buy the 15 acres — including 11 Sitt controls — far from being reached, city officials said they are suddenly open to them playing a yet-to-be defined role in the park, even through the goal remains finding a world-class operator to run it.

A malfunctioning science project forces its owner to go into full Magritte mode to calm fellow subway riders:

A school science project that went awry and caused smoke to billow from a student’s backpack sent panicked B train riders scurrying for the exits Thursday in Brooklyn.

“This is not a bomb! This is not terror!” yelled Gregory Kats, 29, a computer engineering student at the New York City College of Technology.

Kats, 29, was heading home from school when wires on a device he had built short-circuited in his backpack, he told the Daily News afterward.

When white smoke began spiraling out of his backpack as the train neared the Seventh Ave. station in Park Slope, riders quickly became alarmed, he said.

“They were panicking, and I realized their fear,” an apologetic Kats said at his Sheepshead Bay home.

They “started to jump out of the train” as soon as it stopped at the platform and the doors opened, Kats said.

He said he tried to disassemble the contraption on the platform even as he reassured riders, “Don’t worry. This is my science project.”

Not only are New Yorkers getting fat because of the smoking ban but some parts of the city are also noticing a disturbing trend of rising numbers of underage patrons in bars:

A new South Slope bar has waded into the ongoing battle over whether kids should join their parents at taverns by siding with the stroller set.

Minus the strollers, however.

The owners of the one-month-old Toby’s Public House, a pizzeria/bar on the corner of 21st Street and Sixth Avenue, have posted the seemingly contradictory sign on the door reading, “NO STROLLERS, FAMILY FRIENDLY.”

But there’s no contradiction — kids are welcome. General Manager Tim Judge will even give you a bike lock to secure your stroller outside.

“We have a very small space, so we can’t let strollers inside,” said Judge. “But we’ve got locks for six or seven strollers. If the weather gets really bad, we’ll even bring them down into the basement.”

The fact that such a sign is even necessary shows the struggle that bar owners face when they choose to open in family neighborhoods: bars that welcome kids run the risk of alienating harder-drinking patrons, while bars that ban babies outright stand to lose their parents as customers.

How will the mayor build support for congestion pricing? Pick a pet project — high-cost, low-impact, no matter — and “negotiate” away:

One Staten Island politician has separated himself from borough colleagues who either oppose congestion pricing or look at it with raised eyebrows.

Meanwhile, the state Assembly, regarded as the biggest legislative hurdle for a proposal that requires city and state approval, said it will introduce a congestion pricing bill today.

Insisting that the plan is the borough’s best hope of getting substantial money for mass transit, state Sen. Andrew Lanza, a Republican who left the City Council for Albany last year, told the Advance yesterday he is endorsing Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s ambitious, controversial proposal.

Lanza stepped into the pro-congestion pricing camp after a private meeting Tuesday with Bloomberg and his staff in City Hall, at which the senator said he was promised the Island will not be shortchanged when the projected revenue is doled out.

. . .

Bloomberg did not offer Lanza any new transportation promises, nor did he guarantee the borough would be given a specific percentage of the money pot — a proposal Oddo and Ignizio have floated to the mayor’s office. But throughout negotiations, Lanza said he has secured several assurances from the mayor’s office, such as completing a long-awaited private ferry line into Midtown Manhattan from the South Shore.

. . .

Island gains from congestion pricing so far include the expenditures laid out in the MTA plan, as well as 33 new express buses and a study of the dormant North Shore rail line, and Bloomberg is assuring the politicians that more gifts would be unwrapped if his plan is approved.

For the assignment desk: Cost-benefit analysis of ferry service . . . start here, for example.

. . . they live hand to mouth:

Less than 48 hours after news broke that Bear Stearns & Co. Inc. would be bought for a fire-sale price, the wives of two of the firm’s senior investment bankers called their high-end interior designer to cancel their contracts.

It’s yet another sign that some bankers are slashing spending on luxury items as they fear for their jobs and the value of their firms’ shares.

“We only had about $50,000 worth of final touches [to go], and the wife called me last week and said stop,” said interior designer Darren Henault, whose work has been featured in Vanity Fair and Elle Decor.

“She said they’re not poor, and are never going to be poor,” Henault said, “but their capacity for discretionary income for things like window valances just went out the window.”

A commitment to efficiency in state government:

Horace Mann School, the $29,000-a-year preparatory school in the Bronx, and dozens more New York educational and cultural institutions just got stuck between the collapse of auctionrate bonds and an expired New York law.

Rates on $60 million of the securities sold by Horace Mann in 2002 rose to 5.4%last month from 3.4%. At nearby Riverdale Country School, where tuition is $35,250 for grades six through 12, interest jumped to 11% from 3%. Interest costs almost doubled for borrowers in the $330 billion auction-rate bond market this year after banks stopped buying unwanted securities for the first time since they were created in the 1980s. Unlike local governments across the country, the New York institutions can’t convert the bonds into other types of debt after a state funding law expired January 31.

. . .

More than 800 YMCAs, libraries, hospitals, universities and prep schools in the state sold socalled civic-facility bonds, including auction-rate debt, through industrial development authorities, according to the Albany-based New York State Economic Development Council.

Auction rates for some of these borrowers have risen as much as fourfold.

. . .

Civic groups in New York lost their ability to borrow using development agencies as state lawmakers battled over rewriting the law that governs industrial authorities. Assemblyman Sam Hoyt of Buffalo, a chairman of the local governments committee, refused to extend debt-issuing authority.

And unless something drastic is done, the city may start to eat itself:

New York City is growing fatter faster than the rest of America, a Health Department report said. The study, published in Preventing Chronic Disease, said that the city’s rate of obesity grew by 17 percent between 2002 and 2004, versus 6 percent nationwide. Diabetes also grew by 17 percent in the city, but remained unchanged in the rest of the country. “Obesity is now just as common in New York City as in the rest of the U.S.,” said study author Gretchen Van Wye. The department said the city gained 10 million pounds during the two years studied.

Or is it just because everyone quit smoking at the same time? Thanks a lot, Mayor:

While public health officials said the findings underscored the need for disease prevention programs, others drew a correlation between the rising obesity rate and a smoking ban that took effect in the city’s bars and restaurants in 2003. According to city health officials, about 240,000 New Yorkers quit smoking since the agency launched a comprehensive antismoking campaign in 2002.

Weight gain among individuals who quit smoking has been well documented. According to one study that evaluated weight gain after smoking cessation, researchers found the risk of weight gain is highest during the two years after a person quits. The study, published in 1998 in the Journal of Family Practice, found that on average, those who quit gain between 11 and 13 pounds.

“What you see on the micro level of your friends gaining weight after they quit smoking has to also have an effect on the macro level,” a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Walter Olson, said. “Yes, it probably is true that one of the reasons America is gaining weight is because of tobacco going out.” He said the ban was probably “one factor among many” contributing to the high obesity rates here.

(Takeaway: If someone can blame a smoking ban for something, they will.)

You mean to say that you asked to skirt the City’s conflict laws for this? Nice legacy:

Given current economic realities, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s selection on Wednesday of a team led by Tishman Speyer to develop the West Side railyards seems like a wishful fantasy. Yet even if the project takes decades to realize, it is a damning indictment of large-scale development in New York.

Like the ground zero and Atlantic Yards fiascos, its overblown scale and reliance on tired urban planning formulas should force a serious reappraisal of the public-private partnerships that shape development in the city today. And in many ways the West Side railyards is the most disturbing of the three. Because of its size and location — 12.4 million square feet on 26 acres in Midtown — it will have the most impact on the city’s identity. Yet unlike the other two developments, it lacks even the pretense of architectural ambition.

On the contrary, as a money-making venture conceived by a cash-starved transit authority, it signals a level of cynicism that should prod us to demand a moratorium on all such development until our public officials return to their senses.

. . .

. . . [A]t ground level, the project is miserably depressing. Although it is described as a public park, the central garden is a meager strip of grass, trees and walkways that would be overshadowed by the buildings on either side. Tishman Speyer envisions a gantlet of stores and cafes, further chipping away at any notion of noble public space and threatening to transform the garden into a glorified outdoor mall.

I’m sorry. Did I say threatening? In fact the park’s eastern end, which would be developed first, would be a glorified mall anchored by a vast outdoor plaza. Encircled by rings of shallow steps, the plaza would extend northward to connect to a proposed pedestrian boulevard. Both the plaza and an adjoining multistory mall suggest the kind of pseudosuburbia that has been eating away at our urban identity since the Giuliani years.

. . .

If recent history teaches us anything, it is that the project is only likely to get worse. This is because of the nature of the urban planning process in New York, which tends to lock in the worst parts of a design while allowing a developer to chip away at what is most original and often most costly.

New York is experiencing the repercussions of such thinking at ground zero, where Daniel Libeskind’s master plan, unveiled by Gov. George E. Pataki to mixed reviews in 2003, is now a distant memory. Various design components have been watered down until they are barely recognizable.

In the Atlantic Yards project, Forest City Ratner acknowledged last week that it would delay building most of the elements of Frank Gehry’s design for that eight million-square-foot development because it is short of financing. If built, the project would be a pathetic distortion of the original design. And the developer already has city approval.

There will be a similar predicament if the city manages to steamroll the Tishman Speyer railyards proposal through the public review process. The broad outlines will be virtually set in stone, from the position of the park to the location of a yet-unchosen cultural institution. So will the site’s density, among the highest in the city. And the architecture within the plan will gradually diminish in quality. The West Side railyards is as good a place as any to start rethinking this disastrous approach to charting the city’s future. The transportation authority could begin by taking the planning process out of the hands of bean counters who have little interest in anything but profit. It could bring in more thoughtful voices from the urban planning and architectural fields. It could take into account the ups and downs of the area’s economy and how a neighborhood of this scale might evolve.

But that would mean championing the public good rather than hustling for money.

Even though Manhattan just gets tweedier, speculating on a dorm strains credulity:

The city can legally deny developer Gregg Singer a permit to build a student dormitory in the East Village on the basis that he does not have an educational institution lined up to use the facility, the New York State Court of Appeals has ruled.

In the ruling yesterday, the court wrote that if the dormitory were completed and no school leased its space, the city would be unnecessarily forced to either allow Mr. Singer to use it for other purposes or require it to be torn down or left vacant. The 7–0 decision overturned a ruling by a lower appellate court.

The long-standing dispute involves the former home of P.S. 64, on East 9th Street between avenues B and C, which Mr. Singer purchased from the city in 1998 for $3.1 million.

Community groups protested the developer’s plans to build a 19-story student dorm on the site, saying it was an attempt to illegally build luxury housing. In 2004, the city’s Department of Buildings rejected Mr. Singer’s application to build the dormitory, saying the building needed to be affiliated with a specific academic institution beforehand. A state court upheld the city’s decision in 2006, but last year an appellate court sided with Mr. Singer. Yesterday’s decision, by the state’s highest court, reversed the 2007 ruling.

If you gave me nice new trains like the ones on the L line — instead of these 40-plus-year-old dinosaurs — maybe I’d be less likely to chuck my chicken bones any which way:

Wet, sticky spots on the train floor, chicken bones, nut shells, spilled coffee, hot dogs and “lots and lots of rolling bottles” often greet subway passengers who travel on the E and the Q trains — rated the dirtiest lines in the New York City subway system in the latest survey by a rider advocacy group.

Riders on the L line, however, are getting the cleanest ride, according to the group, the Straphangers Campaign, which released its findings on Tuesday.

. . . or yeesh:

Staten Islanders are so reluctant to give up their cigarettes that one in five pregnant women still light up, alarmed city health officials said Tuesday.

. . .

The Staten Island smoking rate has held at about 27% since 2002, even as other New Yorkers have given up the deadly habit. Nearly 20% of Staten Island moms reported smoking in their third trimester of pregnancy, according to a fresh look at a 2004-05 survey.

The Post is less polite:

Even when they’re knocked up, Staten Island’s Marlboro moms refuse to put their cigarettes down, according to disturbing figures the city released yesterday.

Ignoring common sense — and the advice of doctors — 19 percent of expectant Staten Island mothers admitted to smoking through their third trimester, compared with the 5 percent of pregnant women who smoke in the other four boroughs, city health officials said.

. . .

City officials are trying to understand why Staten Island women are more willing to turn their babies’ umbilical cords into hookahs.

There is no better argument for congestion pricing, and the massive increase in transit revenue that will surely result, than a law-abiding man made crazy from irregular B13 service:

A Sing Sing prison guard has been busted for allegedly using his state-issued revolver to carjack three strangers in Brooklyn, The Post has learned.

Brian Duran, 46, was arrested Sunday at 12:20 a.m. after one victim flagged down a patrol car.

Duran allegedly smashed in the rear window of a Ford Taurus parked at 100 Bushwick Ave. in Williamsburg.

Sources said the three friends were waiting for a fourth when Duran, who had been standing at a bus stop, suddenly came over.

“What’s your f- - -ing problem?” driver Anthony Peña, 23, quoted him as yelling.

“Nobody has a problem. Just go about your business,” he was told.

To which Duran allegedly countered, “I’m going to show you a problem!” — as he pulled his state-issued Smith & Wesson and struck the window so hard that he dropped the gun inside the car.

Said Peña: “I got out and hid on the side and said, ‘What are you, crazy?’ ”

. . .

Duran, suspended without pay, was arraigned Sunday on charges of grand and petty larceny, menacing, criminal mischief, criminal possession of stolen property, and unauthorized use of a vehicle.

His estranged wife, who declined to give her name, was at a loss to explain his actions.

“There has to be more of this story. He’s never done anything like this,” she said. “I just can’t believe it. This has to be an [early] April Fool’s joke.”

$57 million from old seats is a tidy sum. But add $25 baggies of dirt to that, and you’ve got a lot of money:

The Yankees and Mets are in secret talks with the city to buy their old ballparks before the wrecking balls hit — so they can plunder them for lucrative memorabilia to peddle to fans, The Post has learned.

A spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg confirmed the negotiations but would not say how the deals might go down — specifically, whether the city would hope to get a lump sum from the teams or a percentage of the profits of any sale or auction of items.

“At other stadiums, everything from the scoreboards to the dugout urinals have been snatched up by fans, but Yankee Stadium is in a whole other league of collectibles,” said Mike Heffner, president of Lelands.com, which has handled several stadium garage sales.

“Each brick could sell for $100 to $300,” Heffner said. “I doubt we’d have any trouble selling every seat in the house for as much as $1,000.

“With its huge fan base, Shea Stadium will also fetch a big payday.”

Yankee sources and a Mets spokesman separately confirmed the teams’ negotiations with the city but refused to give details, citing their ongoing talks.

While the city owns the two stadiums, experts said the teams are in a far better position to bring in bigger bucks from a sell-off because of the emotion factor.

A tiny baggy of infield dirt from Yankee Stadium could fetch $25, experts said.

Again, they act like this is a good thing:

Working largely on its own, the NYPD has transformed an unmarked Brooklyn warehouse into a counterterrorism center with a national and global reach. In a second facility in Manhattan, the department runs undercover operations, recruits spies and houses intelligence analysts.

Inside police headquarters is a high-tech situation room where rows of computer monitors give off a moody blue light and floor-to-ceiling television screens beam images from around the world. It’s staffed 24 hours a day with officers tracking local and international threats as well as the movements of as many as a dozen NYPD detectives on foreign assignments.

During a recent interview there, Mr. Kelly and the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for intelligence, David Cohen, were interrupted by a liaison officer calling from the scene of a suicide bombing in Israel to report on a new technique employed by the bomber.

Successes include the arrest in 2004 of two Muslim men on charges of plotting to blow up a subway station near the Republican National Convention, and the arrest and deportation in 2003 of two Iranian men who were filming a subway track in Queens, Mr. Cohen said. The former probe, in which one of the men pleaded guilty and the other received a 30-year prison term, was based on a year of undercover work by one of Mr. Cohen’s top detectives.

A subway station near the Republican National Convention . . . oh yeah, they’re talking about the two saps they entrapped back in 2004.

Yes, Wall Street accounts for like 85 percent of the city’s tax base, but then again it would be nice to . . .:

The collapse of a major financial institution is usually an occasion for hand-wringing and tut-tutting over potential job losses, lower consumer spending and missed mortgage payments.

In New York City, it’s also seen as an opportunity.

For many of the city’s middle class, especially those in the creative class, who have felt sidelined as the city seemed to become a high-priced playground for Wall Street bankers, the implosion of the brokerage house Bear Stearns raises a tantalizing possibility: participation in an economy they have been largely shut out of.

Few romanticize the nearly bankrupt New York of the 1970s or the recession of the late 1980s. But if the city suffers an economic downturn, as many now predict, there are fantasies of New York returning to a pre-Gilded Age, before the average Manhattan apartment cost $1.4 million, SAT tutors charged $500 an hour and dinner entrees crossed the $40 threshold.

Andre Anderson, 34, an account executive at TheDeal.com, a financial news Web site, would like to buy a Manhattan apartment with his girlfriend, but he said their combined incomes still make it nearly impossible to afford one.

Like many, he is rooting for what could be called a Bear Stearns discount, as newly unemployed financiers cut back on the buying binges that inflate the cost of life in the city.

“If there is greater good for everyone, is it worth a few people losing their jobs?” Mr. Anderson asked. “I think so. I hate to see people lose their jobs, but prices in the city have become ridiculous.”

. . .

New York City has always been defined by the yawning gap between its haves and have-nots. But the last 15 years have witnessed the rise of a class of financiers whose salaries and bonuses have reached staggering heights. Over the last five years, the median compensation for a managing director working in investment banking rose from $650,000 to $1.37 million, according to Johnson Associates, a compensation consulting firm.

That is a pittance compared with hedge-fund managers. The highest-paid managers earned at least $240 million a year in 2006, according to the Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine, nearly double the amount of 2005 (and up from a minimum of $30 million in 2002).

Their pay — and eagerness to spend it — has encouraged the growth of a luxury market in everything from groceries to restaurants to spas to specialty boutiques. Witness the Marc Jacobs-ization of the West Village, the surging average price of a two-bedroom apartment in Harlem to $1.1 million, and the rise of $15 tubs of ice cream in, of all places, the Lower East Side, at Il Laboratorio del Gelato.

It’s getting as expensive as sex to go to Yankees games:

Those $250 box seats at Yankee Stadium will seem inexpensive in 2009.

The Yankees will charge $500 to $2,500 for seats near home plate in the first five to eight rows of their new ballpark — yet say they already have commitments for all 122.

The team’s Web site touts the premium areas as offering “an exclusive experience for those with discerning taste who seek the very best that life has to offer.”

Lonn Trost, the Yankees’ chief operating officer, sent a letter to season-ticket holders on March 14 that outlined premium seating in the $1.3 billion ballpark-to-be and asked whether they wanted to upgrade.

Trost said yesterday that more than 3,000 fans — “a remarkable response” — had already said yes.

This seems like a losing proposition, but they should know, I guess:

A group of Brooklyn judges is preparing to sue the city to preserve its parking privileges in a park next to Borough Hall, claiming that the removal of 20 or so spaces will endanger the judges’ safety because the nearest garage is two blocks away.

Oh yeah, Brooklyn judges . . . I seem to remember reading something about them.

Restauranteurs, although it may seem strange that you can charge someone $8 for a beer and no one will flinch but try to get $5 for a soda and people get all in a snit, trust me, it’s not worth it:

They don’t call it “The Five Spot” for nothing — because this otherwise reasonably priced Myrtle Avenue soul-food restaurant is now charging $5 for a soda.

Yes, $5 for a large Sprite, Coke or root beer — the same price as about a gallon and a half of gas; two and a half shares of Bear Stearns or a Barnes and Noble classic copy of “Macbeth.”

That’s also 50 cents more than a Coke will cost you at The River Café, one of the most-expensive restaurants in Brooklyn.

Surprised?

So was Kate Myers, who dined with her husband and 5-year-old son at the Five Spot on Sunday, March 9.

The family walked into the restaurant, at Washington Avenue, at about 3:30 pm, and ordered two notably reasonably priced entrees: the Clinton Hill Crispy Chicken Fingers ($6.90), and the Five Spot Fish N Chips ($7.95).

And they ordered three drinks: one vodka tonic ($8), one Brooklyn Lager ($8), and a Sprite for little Joe ($5).

Lest you think the high price for soft drinks stems from a bottomless mug, think again. There are no refills — which Myers discovered when she ordered her son a second soda.

“The bill came and we saw there were $10 worth of Sprites,” said Myers, still in disbelief. “If it had been $3, I would have thought it was too much. I travel a lot for my job, and for room service, I don’t pay ever $5.”

NIMBYers somehow invaded the bodies of the four preservationists devoted to the cause of the Gowanus Canal:

Activists admitted that there was some irony in trying to retain the current polluted state of the canal by seeking protection for the industrial buildings that hastened its demise during the 19th and 20th centuries. But they said it’s possible to separate the buildings themselves from the messy business that went on inside.

“They are perfect specimens of what industrial buildings looked like at the start of the Industrial Revolution,” said Betty Stoltz, a member of Friends and Residents of the Greater Gowanus. “Think of it this way: I don’t love everything the Church does, but I don’t want to see churches destroyed.”

Location Scout: Gowanus Canal.