[Brooklyn College sociology professor Sharon] Zukin — whose own book, “Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places,” was published in December — peered through the window at rows of glass candleholders. “Tchotchkes!” she said. “Oh, the sheer ignominy.”

Ms. Jacobs’s continuing influence on the city is clear. As Amanda M. Burden, chairwoman of the City Planning Commission, wrote a few years back, “Projects may fail to live up to Jane Jacobs’s standards, but they are still judged by her rules.”

But if Ms. Jacobs is much hailed as an urban prophet, Ms. Zukin is a heretic on her canonization. She views Ms. Jacobs as a passionate and prescient writer, but also one who failed to reckon with steroidal gentrification and the pervasive hunger of the upper middle class for ever more homogenous neighborhoods.

The pattern in places like Williamsburg and Atlantic Yards, Ms. Zukin said, is dreary and inexorable: Middle-class “pioneers” buy brownstones and row houses. City officials rezone to allow luxury towers, which swell the value of the brownstones. And banks and real estate companies unleash a river of capital, flushing out the people who gave the neighborhoods character.

Ms. Jacobs viewed cities as self-regulating organisms, and placed her faith in local residents. But Ms. Zukin argues that without more aggressive government regulation of rents and zoning, neighborhoods will keep getting more stratified.

“Jacobs’s values — the small blocks, the cobblestone streets, the sense of local identity in old neighborhoods — became the gentrifiers’ ideal,” Ms. Zukin said. “But Jacobs’s social goals, the preservation of classes, have been lost.”

Observers also love — love! — irony, and any story about Jane Jacobs now carries with it requisite colorful there-goes-the-neighborhood details:

Ms. Jacobs, who died in 2006, waged heroic war against planners who dreamed of paving the Village’s cobblestone streets, demolishing its tenements and creating sterile superblocks. Her victory in that fight was complete, if freighted with unanticipated consequences. The cobblestone remains, but the high bourgeoisie has taken over; not many tailors can afford to live there anymore. Ms. Jacobs’s old home recently sold for more than $3 million, and the ground floor harbors a boutique glass store.

. . .

Ms. Zukin recently acted as tour guide on a stroll through Ms. Jacobs’s urban village, where Irish and Italian grandmothers once watched from windows as children played on the streets, and milkmen delivered bottles as chain-smoking playwrights typed in grotty flats. It began just north of Christopher and Bleecker Streets in the West Village, once a working-class haven, then the black-leather heart of Queerdom, and now something like the back lot in a Paramount Studios version of New York.

There’s the Magnolia Bakery, where perpetual lines snake out the door not so much because of its excellent cupcakes as because of its appearance on “Sex and the City.” There’s Marc Jacobs, where the lines are no less endless. A Ralph Lauren, a Madden, and a children’s store with the most adorable petite $250 pants. Ms. Zukin sighed.

“It’s another Madison Avenue, or the Short Hills mall,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “Really, did we need that?”

An Upper East Side all-girls prep school is accusing two elderly women in rent-controlled apartments of stalling its plan to expand to the building next door.

The Nightingale-Bamford School on East 92nd Street said it has done everything by the book since it purchased the adjacent space in 2007 for $9 million, and should be allowed to take over the four-story building.

But two women who have lived at 28 E. 92nd St. for nearly 40 years aren’t so enamored of the eviction and expansion effort.

. . .

“They are harassing two elderly women and trying to drive them out of their homes,” said lawyer David Rozenholc. “I really believe they’re heartless. They knew these elderly people lived there when they bought the building. I think it’s terrible.”

The X25 bus, an express line transporting financial hotshots from Grand Central Terminal to Wall Street, will soon be eliminated by MTA bean counters, CEO Jay Walder said yesterday.

The line — and many others like it that will also soon hit the cutting block — is essentially an exclusive club for just 20 daily riders.

“It costs the MTA $80 per person to run this service,” Walder said. “I can assure you that we won’t be running the X25 much longer . . . This cannot continue to go on and on. There are services that no longer make sense.”

In 2001, both state and federal courts ruled that New York City could not require permits for artists in parks under the First Amendment under a case brought by Mr. [Robert A.] Lederman. In addition, Mr. Lederman was also a plaintiff in an earlier case which established artists’ rights to sell on the streets in 1997, under the argument that the artists deserved the same protections as booksellers and others selling printed materials, who had long been exempt from licensing.

On Saturday, Mr. Lederman said, representatives of Friends of the High Line, including security and supervisors, had approached him all day, threatening him. Finally they brought a parks enforcement officer. “I showed them a New York Times article and a New York Post article about the artist permit being overturned and that artists don’t need a permit,” said Mr. Lederman, who said it appeared that the enforcement officer believed him. However, Mr. Lederman said that the officer was pressured to issue summonses and arrest him.

When asked about the situation, Katie Lorah, a spokeswoman for Friends of the High Line, said, “We’re actually not commenting right now” and referred all questions to the Department of Parks and Recreation.

The DPR spokesperson claimed the High Line was somehow different. The artist in question fleshes out that argument for them:

“The parks department and the High Line people have their own agenda for commercializing this park, and they’re hoping to nip street artists in the bud by arresting me,” he said. “Frankly I think they made a tremendous mistake. I’m not looking to make a big commotion on the High Line. I would prefer not to have to do that. I certainly don’t need to go back there to make the point. They made the point already. They gave me five different summonses. I’m not going to have to prove anything to the judge about what they’re intentions were and continue to be. I plan to go back there to sell my art if not to protest, and I have a right to. I intend to exercise that right.”

Location Scout: High Line.

Some diehard Yankee fans were on line for 14 hours early Wednesday, waiting and hoping there’d be tickets available for game one of the playoffs when the doors opened.

. . .

Paul was on the line since 7 p.m. Wednesday night to be there for his beloved team, and he’s on a budget.

But when the doors finally opened, there was disappointment bordering on outrage when dozens of fans found out the cheapest tickets sold cost $380.

“I live right here in the neighborhood. I attended 34 games in the stadium this season, and I am not exactly rich,” said Paul. “I can’t go on line and pay an extra $25 surcharge.”

“Absolutely, something should be done for people in the neighborhood who were giving whole new life to the Yankees, but this is capitalism,” said Sam Soghar.

Fred Negron was the only one of the group who chose to buy the $380 ticket, but that’s because he just sold his house and had the cash.

For comparison’s sake, Phillies NLDS tickets are between $35 and $75.

Location Scout: New Yankee Stadium.

I used to be such a romantic, but NYC has left me bitter and jaded at the age of 24.

Hahahahahahahaha!

For the past five years, Ernie DiGiacomo has been able to count on parents to guarantee the $1,500 to $2,500 rents he charges for the 15 apartments he owns in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. When he called renters who had missed payments, he often heard, “My parents will send you a check.”

But in the past six months, the parents are pulling back financial help, he said, and as a result, he has watched more renters move out.

“Most of them are moving back with parents,” Mr. DiGiacomo said.

Luis Illades, an owner of the Urban Rustic Market and Cafe on North 12th Street, said he had seen a steady number of applicants, in their late 20s, who had never held paid jobs: They were interns at a modeling agency, for example, or worked at a college radio station. In some cases, applicants have stormed out of the market after hearing the job requirements.

“They say, ‘You want me to work eight hours?’ ” Mr. Illades said. “There is a bubble bursting.”

Famed for its concentration of heavily subsidized 20-something residents — also nicknamed trust-funders or trustafarians — Williamsburg is showing signs of trouble. Parents whose money helped fuel one of the city’s most radical gentrifications in recent years have stopped buying their children new luxury condos, subsidizing rents and providing cash to spend at Bedford Avenue’s boutiques and coffee houses.

. . .

The cutbacks for the more privileged residents are a welcome change for locals who have struggled to support themselves without parental help.

Katie Deedy, 27, an artist, works two bartending jobs to shore up her designer wallpaper business. Gazing out from the bar at the patrons playing darts and sipping bloody marys during a Sunday shift at the Brooklyn Ale House, she described how refreshing it felt not being the only local resident trying to live on less.

“If I’m going to be completely honest, it does make me feel a little bit better,” she said. “It’s bringing a lot of Williamsburg back to reality.”

Some bus riders would be stranded by bus cuts leaving them up to 2 miles from the nearest mass transit option, according to an MTA study.

Residents in four areas on the city’s border face the longest treks if the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s array of doomsday service cuts go into effect: the far West Side of Manhattan; Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn; Woodlawn, the Bronx, and Oakwood Beach, Staten Island, according to an impact study done in connection with the authority’s planned service cuts.

“It’s not right to leave us stranded,” said house cleaner Linda Girron, who works six days a week and lives at 49th St. and 11th Ave. “The bus is my only way of getting to work. We can’t get anywhere without the bus.”

Since last year, transit officials have warned they’d have to make severe service cuts to fill massive budget gaps if the state doesn’t adopt a bailout.

On the chopping block is weekend service on the crosstown M50 route used by Girron. Its demise would leave some workers and residents west of 11th Ave. a mile from mass transit, according to the study.

Residents in Gerritsen Beach, a corner of Brooklyn near Sheepshead Bay, would fare worse during the wee hours of the morning. Some parts of the neighborhood would be nearly 2 miles from another bus route if the B31 is shut down as planned between 1:30 and 4:30 a.m.

That’s bad news for late-shift workers like Alex Popov, 28, who works at a Times Square restaurant. He rides the B31 between 2 and 3 a.m. on his way home. “I need this bus,” Popov said.

On the city’s northern border, Woodlawn residents may lose the Bx34, which runs along Katonah Ave., the heart of the neighborhood, connecting with the last stop on the No. 4 subway line. Some sections of Woodlawn would be left with “no transit service within a walkable distance” during some overnight hours, the study states.

For years, Halstead Property’s Richard Grossman has run a boot camp, teaching agents how to get buyers approved by co-op boards. In it, he presents four hypothetical applicant profiles. The first is a professional — a teacher, perhaps — with an average income but an outsize down payment. The second is a bonus-dependent candidate like a banker, who makes $80,000 and is putting down the minimum, but has a bonus three times his salary. The third, a non–Wall Streeter, earns somewhere in the low six figures and has a small bonus and a standard down payment, and the fourth, a first-time buyer with a good job, relies on relatives to cobble together a decent down payment.

In the past, says Grossman, agents invariably picked the financier as the most board-worthy, thanks to his bonus. At last month’s seminar, however, the answers were unanimous: “Go with the teacher.” And that is a big change. “If you were bidding against someone from Wall Street who had this kind of bonus history, you couldn’t compete. First of all, they were willing to outbid you, and second of all, the sellers were willing to take them over somebody else,” says Gumley Haft Kleier president Michele Kleier. “Bonus used to be the favorite word in everybody’s vocabulary. Now salary is a much more attractive word.” Admits one Upper West Side board member: “We’re definitely cautious across the board now, especially when someone’s touting their bonus.”

Despite receiving a whopping $28 billion in federal taxpayer funds, JPMorgan Chase and American Express spent $125,000 to sponsor a weeklong squash tournament at Grand Central Terminal.

The six-day event — known as the “Tournament of Champions” — ended Jan. 29 and drew about 200,000 fans to what was billed as one of the “world’s premier squash championships” at the same time as lawmakers on Capitol Hill were denouncing wasteful Wall Street spending.

Reps at JPMorgan Chase declined to specify how much it spent on the tournament, but a source close to the deal told Fox News Channel it was roughly $100,000.

American Express officials also declined to provide an amount, but the company is believed to have spent $25,000, a source told Fox News Channel.

Critics have said companies should not be sponsoring sporting events if they’re getting federal bailout money.