At some point it may make more sense just take your chances:

Law enforcement officials have major concerns about security weaknesses in the planned World Trade Center complex, a Daily News investigation has found.

The potential problems expressed to the Port Authority and others involved in the most high-profile development project in New York City history include:

* A row of three mostly glass towers positioned too closely to city streets, increasing their vulnerability to attack.

* Difficulties in inspecting some 2,000 delivery trucks and sightseeing buses that will enter or leave the site daily.

* A vehicle security center that hasn’t been fully designed and relies on vehicle inspection technology that hasn’t even been developed yet.

. . .

Towers 2, 3 and 4 — which will rise between Greenwich and Church Sts. to 79, 71 and 64 stories, respectively — contain too much glass, sources familiar with the issues said.

They also are not set back far enough from the two streets — where uninspected trucks will whiz by — to meet the most rigorous security standards, the sources said.

. . .

Another concern: The buildings do not meet Department of Defense or Department of Homeland Security blast standards. That means they can withstand certain types of explosions - but not more powerful blasts.

The DOD blast standards — rarely applied to U.S. skyscrapers — are typically used in U.S. embassies and missions abroad, sensitive government facilities and military bases.

Sooner or later everything can be landmarked:

When New Yorkers talk about landmarking, they often think of genteel townhouses on tree-lined streets or distinguished cast-iron buildings. But concrete high-rises built in the 1960s?

Tuesday, the Landmarks Preservation Commission is expected to schedule hearings on preserving I.M. Pei’s Silver Towers, a modernist courtyard of concrete high-rises that towers above Greenwich Village.

“Even though this tower in the park superblock model was for the most part a failure, this was one of the most sensitive and well-designed ones,” said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, which has pushed for protecting the structures for five years. “The complex weaves itself more sensitively into the neighborhood than most, and it is one of the few superblocks in the country designed by one of the greatest architects of his era.”

. . .

“A landmark is something that was built years ago, that is historical,” said a longtime local resident who would only give her name as Dorothy. She added that she has lived in tenements in the neighborhood “for 80 years.”

“They look presentable enough, sure, but what were they built, 30, 40, years ago? That doesn’t sound like a landmark to me.”

Spending $157 million for a brand new vacant lot. Which is probably the point of the MTA pitting Lower Manhattan against West Side redevelopment proponents (and who is that exactly now that Dan Doctoroff is gone?):

Soaring construction costs could force the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to scrap plans for an architecturally ambitious glass-domed subway station in Lower Manhattan and lead to more than $1 billion in cost overruns for the authority’s major expansion projects, officials said Monday.

The rising costs could slow progress on the three so-called mega-projects needed to expand the capacity of the public transportation system, including a Long Island Rail Road link to Grand Central Terminal, a westward extension of the No. 7 subway line and the first leg of the Second Avenue subway.

The news represents another setback for the subway station project, known as the Fulton Street Transit Center, which was envisioned as a central element in the recovery of Lower Manhattan after the terror attack of Sept. 11, 2001.

. . .

Several underground portions of the Fulton Street subway project have been completed or are close to being finished, including a renovation of the platform and mezzanine serving the Nos. 2 and 3 trains.

The authority planned to finish the project by letting out a contract to cover the construction of the entrance building and oculus and several remaining pieces of the underground work.

But the authority received only one bid, of $870 million, far exceeding the $370 million the authority had budgeted for the contract.

Mysore L. Nagaraja, the authority’s president of capital construction, said the authority rejected the bid and would now split the project into smaller pieces, in the hope of attracting more bidders and greater competition.

He said the underground portions of the work could be completed by late 2009, which will make the connections between subway lines fully functional for riders.

But officials said that it was unclear now what would go on top.

“I’m sad to say that we cannot build the transit center as currently envisioned in this market with the budget that we have,” Mr. Sander said.

As it is, even without a station building, the project will reach a total cost of about $930 million, which is nearly $30 million more than the authority has in its overall budget for the project.

It is not the first time the project has run into budget trouble. The cost of acquiring real estate to make way for the project rose to $157 million from an early estimate of $50 million.

The authority has already razed several buildings at Fulton and Broadway to make way for the project, and Monday’s developments raised the prospect of the site’s remaining virtually vacant above ground for an extended time, or of a much more modest entrance building.

Funny thing about engineering, that:

A landmarked 1872 cast-iron building is looking strangely similar to the Tower of Pisa, leaning precipitously to one side after the demolition and excavation of an adjacent site. Engineers have placed long wooden supports against the wall to keep the building, on 287 Broadway, from tipping over.

“It’s terrible. One day you own a business and the next you are out of business for nothing that you did,” said David Jaroslawicz, the lawyer for the Yenem Corp., the group that owned a basement diner in the building. “It’s only in New York that you build big buildings and no one pays attention to these details. It’s like capitalism has taken away humanism.”

Settlement over time caused the building to lean slightly to the south by approximately four inches, according to city buildings officials. After John Buck Co., a Chicago-based developer, began excavation work on the neighboring property to develop a 20-story residential tower, monitors installed on 287 Broadway recorded further movement of between 3 and 4 inches. In November, residents and businesses were told to vacate the building.

Today, the diner looks like it belongs in a ghost town residents evacuated.

I can understand the park (even if “Pataki Park” sounds totally wretched) but a big old ugly bridge? Apparently he would have been happy with a bridge:

It has been an enduring wish of the Kennedy family that the Triborough Bridge be renamed in honor of Robert F. Kennedy, the former New York senator who was assassinated almost 40 years ago.

According to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Governor Carey in 1975 said he was planning to permanently attach the senator’s name to the bridge until the proposal was scuttled by the man responsible for its construction, Robert Moses. Governor Pataki, the younger Mr. Kennedy said, considered the idea but never acted.

A month ago, Governor Spitzer called Mr. Kennedy and told him that he would grant the family’s wish and launch an effort to rechristen the monumental complex of water crossings, a viaduct, and 14 miles of approach roads that connects Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx. The bridge also serves as a pathway to the airport named after RFK’s older brother.

“He would be really, really happy that the bridge was going to be named in his honor,” Mr. Kennedy, 53, told The New York Sun yesterday.

. . .

Mr. Spitzer is expected to announce the plan tomorrow in his annual State of the State address to lawmakers in Albany.

Originally, the Democratic governor intended to use the speech to publicize his intention to rename another important New York site, a source in the administration said. Early drafts of the speech highlighted a plan to name Hudson River Park, the yet-to-be-completed span of walkways and bike paths running along Manhattan’s West Side, after Governor Pataki.

Mr. Pataki, a Republican, won’t be attending the address, a factor that apparently led to removing mention of the plan from the speech, according to a source.

Location Scout: Triborough Bridge.

Staten Island is not the best place to live if you’re terrified of bridges:

The Verrazano-Narrows bridge has been called a study in grace.

For Jan Steers, it was a study in terror.

Even thinking about driving across the 4,260-foot suspension span made her start to feel dizzy, made her heart race, her breath tightening into short rapid gasps.

Mrs. Steers, 47, suffered from a little-known disorder called gephyrophobia, a fear of bridges. And she had the misfortune of living in a region with 26 major bridges, whose heights and spans could turn an afternoon car ride into a rolling trip through a haunted house.

Some people go miles out of their way to avoid crossing the George Washington Bridge — for example, driving to Upper Manhattan from Teaneck, N.J., by way of the Lincoln Tunnel, a detour that can stretch a 19-minute jog into a three-quarter-hour ordeal. Other bridge phobics recite baby names or play the radio loudly as they ease onto a nerve-jangling span — anything to focus the mind. Still others take a mild tranquilizer an hour before buckling up to cross a bridge.

The Tappan Zee Bridge, rising more than 150 feet over the Hudson River, appears to inspire particular panic — so much so that New York State offers the skittish a chauffeur who will transport them across the span.

Similar rescue measures are provided in other places around the country with especially fearsome bridges. Authorities at the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, for example, will dispatch a tow truck to pull panic-stricken drivers to the other side. The Mackinac Bridge, connecting Michigan’s Lower and Upper Peninsulas, provides a transport service like the Tappan Zee’s. Mrs. Steers’s phobia was so severe that she was virtually trapped on Staten Island for 13 years. She missed her brother’s wedding in Brooklyn. She sent her husband and two children off on family vacations without her. She had never seen her sister’s house at the Jersey Shore.

As subway “grades” consistently come out C or C-minus, why is the MTA continuing the charade of asking? There should be one grade — “needs improvement”:

The R and V subway lines received mediocre grades in the latest rider report card results released by New York City Transit.

Straphangers gave both Queens-to-Manhattan lines an overall C-minus grade.

The R received its lowest grades, Ds, for inaudible station and train announcements and uninformative station announcements. The V also received a D for inaudible station announcements.

Seriously, just do whatever it was you planned to do and get on with it! And on a related note, wouldn’t you feel dumb if your subway got an A? What would happen then?

The “galvanizing power” of a 7 train extension leads to . . . a renovated-but-no-more-expanded Javits Center:

Gov. Eliot Spitzer declared in a speech eight months ago that he would build a “thoroughbred” of a convention center in New York City and scrap the $1.8 billion plan he had inherited to expand the black-glass Javits Convention Center on the West Side.

Since then, state officials — struggling with escalating costs, competing demands and limited land — have had to shrink their ambitions, devising a series of alternative plans that provide a far more modest expansion than envisioned three years ago.

Now, in the latest blow to the governor’s ambitions, the city’s hotel association is balking at requests to triple the hotel tax earmarked for the expansion. That could force state and city officials to abandon plans for an expansion and settle instead for simply renovating the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.

Shut yer trap, undergrad — this is serious:

So the idea yesterday was to ask passengers on the No. 7 and L lines what they would do if they were put in charge.

On the No. 7, several passengers said they would order bigger cars. Never mind that subway-line managers’ check-writing authority may not be as big as the passengers’ imagination might want.

. . .

On the L, Jeffrey Griffith said he would redesign the cars. “In Japan,” he said, “all the seats on trains flip up. The conductor latches the seats up so at rush hour there is standing room only.”

He also said he would move the poles away from the doors because “people get packed in around the poles — it causes congestion.”

Other passengers on the L said they would put a priority on bringing reality to signs that are supposed to tell riders how long before a train is due. Passengers complained that the signs sometimes say a train will arrive in one minute. They said 15 minutes can tick by before the white eyes of a train appear in the darkness beyond the platform.

. . .

Other passengers said they would put a premium on different kinds of communication.

Travis Moe, a New York University student, said that if he ran the L line, he would order “unexpected things” — like having the conductors recite poems as well as deliver their announcements.

Iambic pentameter or heroic couplets? How would Emily Dickinson say, “Watch the closing doors,” anyway? Mr. Moe did not say.

“The thing about subway culture, if you can call it that, is that people don’t talk, they stare at the floor,” he said, adding that presenting “poems instead of information” would change that.

May Queens never lose its charm. A maligned rehab earns top honors from the Chamber of Commerce:

Some people looked at an unused former Eagle Electric Company factory at 19-19 24th Ave., Astoria as nothing more than a derelict shell. Joseph Pistilli, president of Pistilli Realty, saw the building’s potential. Where there was once an empty shell of a factory now stands a residence boasting 186 spacious co-operative apartments, served by a 24-hour concierge and offering spectacular views of the East River, Astoria Park and the Manhattan skyline, with prices starting in the mid- $200,000 range.

The Queens Chamber of Commerce honors Pistilli’s perspicacity and drive at its 95th annual Building Awards dinner this year. Pistilli Riverview East is one of seven buildings deemed winners in the Rehab category, sharing the honor with a single-family residence, a bank branch office, a senior adult center, a branch of the Queens Borough Public Library, an MTA subway maintenance shop and car washing facility and the Visitor and Administration Center at the Queens Botanical Garden.

(Laminate flooring.)

Buried lede: San Francisco’s BART system is nowhere near as cool as the 7 train:

Howard H. Roberts Jr., president of New York City Transit, will announce an overhaul today of how the subway system is run. The changes are designed to give individual subway lines a greater degree of autonomy by putting each one under the direction of a manager who will be responsible for almost everything that happens on the tracks, in the trains and in the stations.

The goal, Mr. Roberts said, is to have 24 subway lines operating in many ways as 24 self-contained railroads. (The number may vary, depending on how the lines are counted.) They will compete against one another and be rated on service, cleanliness, on-time performance and other measures.

. . .

The obstacles are numerous, and it is not clear that the reorganization will be the panacea that officials envision. Many problems extend across the system. The lines share miles of track, flooding can disrupt service across multiple lines, and work on the tracks must be coordinated with an eye toward the entire system. In many cases, union rules will make it difficult to isolate personnel decisions to a single line. Signals and train movements will continue to be directed from a master control center.

And a manager running just one line still has sprawling responsibilities. There are 394,000 passenger trips each weekday on the No. 7 line alone, more than the daily total for the entire BART system in the San Francisco area.

. . .

Mr. Roberts insisted that the changes are more than superficial. Currently, he said, the people who make decisions are often several bureaucratic layers removed from the problems that riders experience.

A request to fix a leak that causes slippery conditions on a station staircase can languish for months or years, he said. Most changes in train schedules have to be submitted to an executive who oversees the schedules on every line.

Under the new system, the general manager for each line will be able to make most of those decisions, large and small. They will be responsible for the workers who drive the trains, staff the token booths and clean and repair the cars.

“The general managers who take over the 7 and L are going to be running their own railroads,” Mr. Roberts said.

Staten Islanders question the federal percent-for-art program — because when a project costs billions of dollars, it adds up:

Even as the MTA is raising tolls and tempers on Staten Island, it plans to spend as much as $4 million on art installations for the Second Avenue Subway.

Some Islanders may not know art, but all know what they want: Funds to be spent on sorely needed mass transit improvements here.

. . .

The federal government requires that one-half to 5 percent of a project’s budget be dedicated to art, said MTA spokesman Jeremy Soffin.

“Art is one critical element of our stations program that has a considerable impact . . . for a small fraction of a project’s budget,” Soffin said. “We are at the lower end of the recommended guidelines, well below 1 percent.”

So it isn’t possible to eliminate the art requirement without risking the loss of the entire $1.3 billion federal contribution.

Mary DiChiara of Pleasant Plains was in no mood for explanations, “We can’t get off this Island and they put aside $4 million for artwork for Manhattan? Take the $4 million and fix this bridge.

“They think we’re living on Fantasy Island, and nobody ever wants or needs to get off.”

“Just once, I’d like to see everybody on Staten Island who works in Manhattan just stay home,” she concluded. “Then they’ll see.”

Yes, there are times when it just might be better to get out and walk:

Riding the New York City Marathon on the city’s mass-transit system was almost as grueling as running it.

It took seven buses and three subway trains to trek through five boroughs along roughly the same 26.2-mile route some 40,000 runners will follow this Sunday.

My race began on the S53 bus in Staten Island, and like the start of the actual marathon, there was little space to breathe.

I had to duck errant elbows and fists, and thanks to one of my fellow riders, I was overcome by the odor of a thousand people sweating.

. . .

If I made every single connection, I could complete the marathon in three hours, 45 minutes — a respectable finish an hour quicker than my running time last year.

. . .

I crossed the finish line in Central Park in four hours, 57 minutes — two minutes slower than I ran the race in 2006.

Of that time, I spent three hours, 15 minutes riding buses and subways and another one hour, 42 minutes waiting for them.

Along the route that took me on seven buses and three subways, I swiped my MetroCard 10 times.

How about health care for every uninsured New Yorker? Just asking! Because now you have a lame duck mayor spending his waning political capital on a subway stop:

Over the next nine months the Bloomberg administration will likely press the state for an additional $450 million in funding for the no. 7 subway line extension, as cost overruns have left the 1.5-mile project with only one planned station stop.

The city has put up the full $2 billion required for the project. Though with the major tunneling contract slated for approval tomorrow, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has dropped plans for constructing the shell of a station at Tenth Avenue and 41st Street.

The extension has been billed as an essential driver of development for the area west of Midtown, which is one of the Bloomberg administration’s key initiatives.

“The city is coming up with a couple of billion out of the taxpayer’s money — I would argue that it’s the MTA’s responsibility” to fund the station, Mayor Bloomberg told reporters yesterday.

While the city is anxious to have the MTA come up with the money, the state agency has said it is facing major budget deficits and is prioritizing other projects such as the Second Avenue Subway.

Again, that’s a $2 billion investment for a) a convention center that is fully booked to begin with and b) infrastructure for waterfront housing for rich people that doesn’t even exist yet. Oh, and probably an artificial-turf ballfield named for Dan Doctoroff forty years down the line. That would be worth it.

How could a subway extension project with only one stop be cut back any further? It’s possible:

The MTA and the city are moving ahead with a planned extension of the No. 7 subway line to the Javits Convention Center, but much of the original project may be scrapped to stay on budget, officials said yesterday.

The agency is expected next week to approve a $1.1 billion contract to dig the extension from Times Square west to 11th Avenue, then downtown to a terminal at 34th Street.

Not only will plans for a stop at 41st Street and 11th Avenue be eliminated, but the MTA may not even build a planned shell for a future station.

. . .

Normally, the MTA wouldn’t spend $2.1 billion to add a single station, but the city is footing the bill as part of its development of the West Side rail yards.

There is an option to build the station shell for $500 million more, but the MTA would be responsible for overruns and doesn’t have the money. Transit advocates called the decision to possibly eliminate the station a grave error.

“The real irony is that there are many more homes and businesses near the 10th Avenue station than near the Javits station,” said MTA board member Andrew Albert. “The bottom line is this is going to cost us a lot more later.”

Actually, I’d say it would pretty much replace a multi-billion dollar one-stop* enterprise . . . welcome to the future where trains zip effortlessly above the crowded macadam:

One of the bids to develop the West Side rail yards will propose an elevated “people mover” to get residents and office workers in the new development to and from Penn Station, The Post has learned.

Engineers for the Durst Organization are developing plans for the automated light rail line that would connect the now isolated rail yards to the city’s largest transit hub.

“It would create a direct link with Penn Station and it would complement the 7 train,” Durst spokesman Jordan Barowitz said of the people mover and its ability to link to a planned extension of the No. 7 subway line to 11th Avenue and 34th Street.

Barowitz said the cost of a people mover has yet to be calculated. It would be operated by the developer and not the MTA.

The fully automated people mover would be able to carry 20,000 passengers per hour. It would take one minute to travel from Penn Station to 11th Avenue and 33rd Street.

7 train extension — done! Now, what can $2.1 billion buy?

*”One-stop” is good if you’re, like, Staples, not a public transportation link.

Inferiority complex, anyone? The results are in on the race to number two:

The Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park will reshape Manhattan’s skyline and force a revision of the record books that catalog the city’s giants.

The 54-story building stands 945 feet tall, but tops out at 1,200 feet with the addition of an ornamental spire, inheriting the title of New York’s second-tallest skyscraper. It was held by the Chrysler Building since Sept. 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers were destroyed and the Empire State Building returned to the top spot.

“The building is topped off already,” said Jordan Barowitz, director of external affairs of the Durst Organization, the real estate development firm that partnered with BofA to erect the building. “The last piece of steel went in a few weeks ago and the first tenants will arrive in May 2008.”

One Bryant Park doesn’t break any records without its decorative spire, but the use of such a device to raise a tower’s bragging rights isn’t out of the ordinary.

Some claim that overdevelopment is threatening the cultural heritage of old Queens:

Those transit meatheads caused gushers of trouble.

Such is the sentiment in Archie Bunker’s old neighborhood — known outside of the TV world as Glendale — where residents believe a recent water main break was caused by a bus re-routing that put too much stress on the street.

“It’s absolutely the bus routes — it can’t be anything else,” said Dorie Figliola, a member of Community Board 5. “It just can’t withstand [the pressure]. Our old pipes are just going.”

The Q54 bus was re-routed in July so it could stop at the Shops at Atlas Park, a retail complex that opened last year at 80th St. and Cooper Ave.

Atlas Park management hoped the move would attract more customers, and it wants the Q23 and Q45 re-routed so that they also pass by the mall.

But the new route raised concerns about noise, pollution and traffic in a residential area that includes the Cooper Ave. home featured in the opening credits of the hit 1970s sitcom “All in the Family.”

Location Scout: Archie Bunker’s House.

The MTA has identified high-tech and low-tech ways to improve service when bad weather happens; hopefully your Blackberry can fend off three-and-a-half inches of rain:

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority unveiled plans yesterday for significant and costly changes to subway stations to prevent the shutdown of service that followed last month’s intense flooding.

The proposals include new ways to keep water out of the stations, like raising ventilation grates off the ground and building steps at subway entrances that would require passengers to walk up before descending into stations but would prevent rain from flowing downward.

The authority said it was also establishing an emergency response center, planning to install new valves in drain pipes to keep out stormwater and developing a system of customized e-mail and text message alerts for each subway line so riders would know about problems.

. . .

The deluge dumped as much as 3.4 inches of rain on parts of the city within a few hours and overwhelmed the transit system.

The report singled out the transportation authority’s failure to communicate with its workers and riders as a significant factor in the chaos that followed the storm.

Possible campaign slogan — Michael Bloomberg gets the job done:

Twenty-five years of repairs on the Manhattan Bridge are finally coming to an end, city officials announced yesterday.

The span’s lower deck with reopen on Oct. 1, roughly two weeks earlier than the scheduled completion date.

. . .

Just four lanes on the bridge have been open in recent years. In January, the seventh and final lane will reopen. Current repairs on the bridge, which opened in 1909, date to 1982 and have totaled $829 million, according to transportation officials. The bridge’s original cost was $31 million.

Location Scout: Manhattan Bridge.

Well, for $2.1 billion we ought to be able to prevent a jumper or two:

The extension of the No. 7 subway line will boast twice as many doors to stand clear of. Officials said that as part of the $2.1 billion project extending the line from Times Square to the Javits Center, the new station at 34th Street and 11th Avenue will feature platform-edge doors.

The glass doors will separate the platform from the tracks and line up with the doors of the trains.

Used on rail systems around the world, including the AirTrain at JFK Airport, they guard against passengers plunging off the platform and make it easier to control the climate in the station.

The station would be a test of the technology, which could one day be implemented on the planned Second Avenue line.

The A train — 75 years young today:

On Sept. 10, 1932, one minute after midnight, a 7-year-old boy named Billy Reilly dropped a nickel into a turnstile and boarded an A train at 42nd Street. It was a southbound express, and it was Billy’s first ride on an A.

It was the city’s first ride, too — 171,267 passengers rode it that September day in 1932, its first day of operation. The line, then called the Eighth Avenue subway, spanned only 12 miles and 28 stations, from the top of Manhattan to the bottom.

. . .

Today, on the A line’s 75th birthday, transit officials will celebrate with a ceremony at the start of the line at the Inwood/207th Street station. A special train made up of six prewar cars is scheduled to provide service along the line’s original route to the Chambers Street stop in Lower Manhattan.

. . .

The A train’s first registered complaint was apparently made just minutes after it began running, when a man at the Chambers Street station became upset because he had put two nickels into a malfunctioning turnstile.

Since then, the line has gotten mixed reviews from passengers and the Straphangers Campaign, a rider advocacy group. In the group’s latest report card, which ranks the city’s 22 main subway lines from best to worst, the A train was tied for 12th place. The group found, among other things, that the line arrives with below-average regularity.

The A line has been crippled by fires (the January 2005 blaze at the Chambers Street station, for instance) and has seen its share of tragic and bizarre occurrences.

The limbs and torso of a 19-year-old Brooklyn man were found in a blue plastic bag in a tunnel in 2005. Pigeons have been known to step aboard trains at the outdoor Far Rockaway stop and casually step off at the next station. In May 1993, a man posing as a subway motorman took an A train with hundreds of passengers for a three-and-a-half-hour ride. He made 85 stops, and arrived on time at the Ozone Park/Lefferts Boulevard station.

On Saturday afternoon, the line that carried Billy Reilly on its inaugural run — he moved to the front of the crowd at the 42nd Street station when a transportation commissioner learned he was born the day of the new subway’s groundbreaking, March 14, 1925 — carried Dr. Morrow, who sat reading and listening to a Tom Waits song on his iPod.

It carried Ernest Rivera, 28, an unemployed father of three from Brooklyn. It carried Gunther, a Manhattan couple’s white puppy. It carried a middle-aged woman with a tattoo on her chest, a man holding a surfboard and another man who had remembered to wear his A train T-shirt.

If anyone has a copy of the memo instructing Cosmo staff to keep their legs closed, well, you know where to reach us:

The cascading glass escalators in the lobby of Norman Foster’s new Hearst Tower, which carry the ladies of Cosmopolitan, Town & Country, and Harper’s Bazaar to their offices, also offer a view up their skirts. Some editors were concerned enough that they warned members of their staff prone to wearing trendy mini-minidresses or ballooning short skirts to take care to keep their legs closed. “It’s the visitors that see the ‘view,’” said one editor. “A lot of tourists walk in from the streets to see the building.” Other employees were more blasé. . . . [one editor said,] “I’m not sure it’s that much of a problem considering the fact that I can probably count the number of straight men who work in the building on one hand.”

The MTA tries to shake the funk off of what has previously stunk:

It smelled like death warmed over to some straphangers. To others, it was rancid excrement.

That stank crept from an elevator at Herald Square. The summer heat acted as an odor adhesive, keeping the foulness lingering well after people were out of the stink zone.

The dirty elevator solicited complaints throughout the week, and it has won worst-smelling elevator from a disabled riders group two years in a row. Luckily for straphangers, a Transit employee with high-powered disinfectant mopped out most of the smell Thursday, but the war on odorous subway stations is not over.

. . .

Cleanliness is a serious subject for New York City Transit, and as part of a new customer service initiative, about 350 more cleaners will be on the roster by fall to keep stations fresher, trains cleaner and platforms and tracks clearer and safer. They’ll also be able to respond to specific stenches faster.

Still, why the big stink at Herald Square and at stations throughout the system? Stations get funky for several reasons, said Bill Henderson who hears rider complaints as head of the MTA’s Permanent Citizens Advisory Council.

“Sometimes the cause is a broken sewer line,” he said. “It could also be something on the surface.”

And unfortunately, it takes a little more than a few spritzes of air freshener, sometimes a lot more. A sewer stank is sometimes caused by construction accidents, and the stink may slowly dissipate even after a cracked line is patched.

See, no one ever answers the bigger question, which is where the mud comes from in the first place:

Major flooding during last week’s subway washout was caused by clogged drains, just like in 2004, a top transit official said yesterday.

The official, who requested anonymity, told the Daily News that the backup occurred even though the drains had been cleared before Wednesday’s downpour.

The power of the torrent from the storm was such that it carried muck and debris into the tunnels, clogging the drains anew and blocking the flow of water to subway pumps.

“There’s mud in the troughs,” the official said. “It wasn’t causing a problem where it was but when water runs in like the Amazon River, now you’ve got a buildup of mud.”

Once workers cleared the drainage systems in the area around 23rd St. and Lexington Ave. in Manhattan and Court Square in Queens the flow to pump rooms resumed.

Last week’s flood crippled the entire subway system as did a similar storm in 2004. A 2006 report by the MTA’s inspector general faulted the authority for not keeping its drainage system clear.

The same storm also spawned tornadoes on Staten Island and in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where FEMA, the federal agency that let New Orleans down after Hurricane Katrina, set up shop yesterday.

(Jeez, poor FEMA!)

. . . it’s not hard, not hard to reach, then you get E. coli at Rockaway Beach:

Besides flooding subways, the wild downpour this week provided a disconcerting glimpse into one of New York’s dirtiest environmental secrets: heavy rain regularly overwhelms the city’s vast sewage system and pushes polluted water into places it is not supposed to go.

New York has a storm water drainage system that was linked many years ago to the same pipes that carry wastes from homes and businesses. That, combined with the ever-expanding layer of asphalt and concrete that keeps rain from soaking into the ground, means that whenever it storms, some of the storm water and sewage in the 6,000 miles of sewer pipe in the city start to back up.

When that happens, millions of gallons of rainwater mixed with raw sewage are routed away from the city’s 14 sewage plants and toward a web of underground pipes that empty directly into the East River, the Hudson River and New York Harbor.

The backups could also prevent water from being drained from subway tunnels.

These events — called combined sewer overflows — have been recognized as a major environmental problem for decades. The city has been dealing with the issue in response to orders from the state and the federal government, but still has a long way to go.

. . .

On a dry day, the Department of Environmental Protection, which runs the system, normally treats about 1.4 billion gallons of sewage at 14 plants spread throughout the city. But because storm water runoff flows through the same pipes, each plant has been equipped with enough capacity to handle double its ordinary load on rainy days.

But as little as a tenth of an inch of rain coming very quickly can overload that system. A series of devices called regulators that are buried deep in the ground automatically respond to pressure from the extra water by diverting the flow away from the treatment plants to nearly 460 registered sewage outflows that empty directly into the city’s rivers and waterways.

New York has a long history of using its waterways as dumps. Until the late 1980s, the city routinely poured untreated sewage into the harbor; in 1992, it became the last city in the country to halt the practice of dumping sewage sludge at sea.

Like, ew.

Underground this, underground that . . . sometimes you wish they never got rid of the Sixth Avenue El:

Powerful thunderstorms swept through the New York metropolitan area this morning, tearing up trees and damaging cars and creating mayhem during the morning commute.

Subway stations were flooded, forcing commuters out onto the streets and into taxis and buses, bringing traffic in many areas to a standstill. The region’s three major airports — La Guardia, Kennedy and Newark — all reported flight cancellations and delays.

No subway line was unaffected by the heavy rains and winds, according to the M.T.A. For the time being, the M.T.A. was advising commuters to stay at home.

. . .

In Brooklyn, the F train was delayed, and as trains started up again later in the morning, subway cars were heavily overcrowded.

John Han, 50, a financial adviser, said he arrived at the Fort Hamilton stop at around 7:45 a.m., but about an hour later had given up and was going home.

“The cars are running, but real slow,” he said, accompanied by his wife. “It looked like a sardine can. We are going home and taking a shower and going to try again, because we are very sweaty.”

Around Brooklyn, motorists drove in search of an open subway line, so that they could park and take the train.

In Manhattan, the Nos. 1, 2 and 3 lines on the West Side, and the Nos. 4, 5 and 6 lines on the East Side had ceased operations as of 8 a.m.

The 42nd Street shuttle was also suspended. The E and L lines were not in service, as were significant portions of the F and J lines.

Furthermore: Commuters Try To Board A Manhattan-Bound 7 Train YouTube Video, Commuters Try To Board A Manhattan-Bound N Train YouTube Video.

Don’t even think about getting creative with that C-section because it won’t work:

There’s no such thing as a free ride - even if you’re born on a bus or subway.

That’s the word from New York City Transit.

But Lydia Irvin is still convinced the old urban legend is true, and she hopes her granddaughter’s birth certificate is as good as a lifetime free MetroCard.

The baby girl, also named Lydia Irvin, was born on a B15 bus last Monday evening after doctors at Kings County Hospital sent her mom, Madeline Rivera, home, insisting that she was not going into labor.

Rivera and Irvin left the hospital and hopped on the B12 bus, then transferred to the B15 at Eastern Parkway.

A few minutes later, Rivera leaned over to Irvin and whispered, “I think the baby is coming now.”

Irvin suggested they get off the bus immediately, but Rivera said, “We’re almost home.”

But the baby wasn’t going to wait, and the bus driver pulled over in front of a Laundromat on Vermont Avenue. He and Irvin laid Rivera on the floor at the foot of the driver’s seat.

. . .

“She’s an MTA baby,” Irvin said. “On her birth certificate, it doesn’t say she was born at the hospital, it says on the B15 bus.

“The bus driver and several MTA employees all told me that she would get free rides for life.”

MTA officials said if that ever was the policy, baby Lydia missed the bus by some 60 years.

“I don’t know if we’ve ever done that,” a spokeswoman said. “Maybe in the 1940s, but that’s before my time.”

Nevertheless, Lydia’s grandma was optimistic.

“Too many people have told me they give at least a year’s worth of free rides,” she said. “But if they don’t, that’s OK, too — this was a miracle, and that’s all that matters.”

I don’t quite understand what Ibsen has to do with those fanciful mosaics in the subway stations, but they’re pretty kick-ass, I’ll give you that:

If you’re looking for ways to wax poetic about the New York City subway and the vast planning that went into building it, Ibsen and Shakespeare may not be the first authors who leap to mind, especially as August settles its annual swelter on the tourist-packed platforms. Kafka maybe? Beckett? Dante? De Sade?

But in 1916, in unlikely literary territory — The Public Service Record, a dry periodical about municipal works — a man named Squire J. Vickers, the subway’s chief architect, enlisted Ibsen to defend the new simplicity he was introducing into the designs of the Victorian-era system. “In his ability to omit, he is a past master,” Vickers wrote admiringly of that playwright. Then, in quick succession in the brief article, he made reference to Michelangelo, Millet, the Pharisees, Falstaff, Othello and Horatio and quoted from “Richard II” (”this royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle”).

It was, in short, another era, when the city’s builders still saw themselves as Renaissance men and moral torchbearers. But even in the context of his time Vickers was a dynamo, a grandiloquent eccentric whose other life as a painter often bled over into the subway; his taste in colors and geometric design can be still be seen throughout the system.

For both aesthetic and budgetary reasons Vickers pushed the subway onto a much more pared-down, modern path than that of his Beaux-Arts predecessors. And maybe partly because of this his reputation has always seemed to be stuck somewhere in the tunnel behind them.

But an exhibition that opened this week at the New York Transit Museum’s gallery in Grand Central Terminal may help to remedy that neglect and place Vickers more firmly among the forces that shaped the look of the city — or at least enormous swaths beneath it — in the 20th century.

. . .

Organized by Carissa Amash, a Transit Museum curator, the new show, “Squire Vickers and the Subway’s Modern Age,” tells the story of the man who, in almost 30 years as the system’s lead designer, was responsible for building more of today’s subway than any other architect: over 300 stations, many more than any other architect.

When tragedy hits, use it:

In the wake of the fatal collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis, news reports about the poor condition of the Brooklyn Bridge have brought fears of that tragedy close to home.

The iconic bridge was one of only three run by the New York City Department of Transportation to be given a poor rating in the city’s latest annual bridge report card, according to a report by the New York Times. Despite this rating, the bridge was still deemed safe by city officials. Another crucial piece of Brooklyn’s infrastructure, the Gowanus Expressway, was not included in the report, but is in serious disrepair.

To those carefully observing the state of the Gowanus Expressway, which runs along Third Avenue in Bay Ridge, it is increasingly clear that the 45-year-old structure was not intended to sustain today’s heavy traffic load.

“[The structure] is totally inadequate to handle the weight and volume of traffic that it’s getting now,” said Buddy Scotto, who co-founded the Gowanus Expressway Community Coalition. Scotto added that every time an 18-wheeler hits the airbrakes, it takes off half the concrete.

And then there’s the one-hand-clapping sort of riddle about cars and trucks that enter Staten Island but never leave it:

In late 1980s, a federal highway bill was passed that included a provision that eliminated the Verrazano Bridge’s inbound toll while doubling the price of the outbound toll.

JoAnne Simon, former chair of the Gowanus Community Stakeholders Group and current state committeewoman from the 52nd Assembly District is concerned about the volume of trucks that ride the Gowanus after a free pass on the Verrazano. “One-way toll on the Verrazano encourages extra traffic,” she said, emphasizing that trucks ride it “to save about $40 a day.”

A two-way toll would “reduce concentration on the Gowanus,” Ben Meskin, who found the Gowanus Coalition with Scotto, said. “There will always be bad traffic, but you have to spread it out,” he added.

Is there a special non-tolled route through Staten Island that the rest of us don’t know about?