And now they don’t know what to do now that alternate-side parking has been temporarily suspended while the Department of Sanitation replaces street signs this summer:

Park-Anywhere Day arrives Monday, with the indefinite suspension of alternate-side parking rules in Park Slope, and no one knows just what to expect, with bring-it-on bravado and it-can’t-get-any-worse resignation meeting just-you-wait-and-see predictions of the worst. The city announced the suspension in Park Slope this week, to give workers time to change 9,200 parking signs. In the meantime, drivers may park along the curbs of Park Slope without being forced to move their cars as they did up until now, often twice a week for three hours at a stretch.

Rosemary Fine, 47, a coffee shop owner born in Limerick, Ireland, plans to greet the new day in high style.

“I’m going to pop open a bottle of Champagne, sit in my car and celebrate!” she said on Thursday. “What if that’s what all the Park Slopers did on Monday, we went into the streets with Champagne?”

But elsewhere, outrage.

Another seasoned immigrant, Marlyse Henchoz, who did not give her age, stopped sweeping in front of her home and said, “Terrible.”

“Whoever thinks up these schemes, I don’t know what they are thinking,” she said. “That’s why I want to move back to Switzerland. They couldn’t do this. We have referendums and we vote.”

. . .

The Department of Transportation estimates that the suspension will last a few months. So after the Champagne is gone, there will be several lingering questions about what people are and are not allowed to do with their vehicles.

City law prohibits “street storage” of vehicles: “When parking is not otherwise restricted by posted signs, no person shall park any vehicle in any area, including a residential area, in excess of seven consecutive days.”

The police said Thursday that they did not have records of how often such a ticket was written, or how such a violation could even be tracked, short of cumbersome surveillance of every vehicle.

. . .

One benefit of the new signs in Park Slope will be that alternate-side rules will now be in force only 90 minutes once a week, down from three hours and twice a week.

But even that concept seemed to backfire with some residents, like Barat Ellman, 49, a university Bible instructor.

“I work out and plan my work schedule based on car parking,” she said. “Ninety minutes may be too short of a time to be able to get things done and move the car. We’ll see.”

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 . . .

Leaving the house without makeup does not a trend make, though some will try*:

“I dress like a boy because I feel like boys are generally more comfortable than women,” said Ali Tenenbaum the other day, sitting at a West Village coffee shop and wearing a “typical” outfit of black Hudson jeans, blue J. Crew cardigan, yellow T-shirt and designer sneakers. Ms. Tenenbaum, 38 (whose family was the inspiration for the Wes Anderson film The Royal Tenenbaums, though she said the actual resemblance is slight), has unfussy brown hair that falls to several inches above her shoulders, and clear, radiant skin. She doesn’t wear makeup. She is a professional photo organizer who meets with her (largely) Upper East Side clientele wearing sneakers. “Sometimes it throws them off a bit, but then I charm them and they’re fine with it!” she said.

It was just a few years ago that everyone was nattering about the metrosexual, the New York man who, though straight, loved his Kiehl’s and Thomas Pink tattersall shirts and is addicted to Grey’s Anatomy. Less discussed has been his female counterpart: gals who, while not lesbians, dress like guys (young guys), well into their 30’s; who leap into games of pickup basketball with male friends while the rest of us watch wanly from the sidelines; who affect a wry detachment from their sex’s conventional concerns of shoe-shopping, man-hunting and family. Think of the comedienne Sarah Silverman, mugging and shrugging and strumming her way through an “I’m F*cking Matt Damon” video, a birthday gift to her boyfriend, ABC talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel. Or matter-of-fact Juno actress Ellen Page. Or surly pop star Avril Lavigne.

And these gals are everywhere in New York. Urbane tomboys in $200 jeans, they wear sneakers to the office or the studio (they probably work in a creative industry). They’ve largely given up on mainstream women’s fashion, with its expensive, often unflattering vicissitudes, finding refuge in an eternal sporty girlhood that may or may not be tied to any real athletic bent. They borrow from men’s wear, which is more constant, comfortable and, lately, focused on well-made basics like jeans and T-shirts, and they profess ignorance of female grooming rituals, even if they have a secret love of eyeliner. Ever self-deprecating, this kind of woman is quick to tell you she “wears the same thing every day,” or that she dresses like her husband or boyfriend.

. . .

They like to order Scotch at bars, rather than fruity drinks like cosmos; roll their own cigarettes; and profess to not know their way around a powder puff.

. . .

Many fellas, as girly girls can attest, are all too enchanted with the novelty of the urbane tomboy.

“If you go to a club and you pick someone up and they’re all dressed up and they have a lot of makeup on, you take them home and you roll around in bed and they wake up and take a shower, who knows what they’ll look like?” said Adam Parker Smith, 29, a sculptor from Brooklyn.

Avril Lavigne? For reals?

*[checks calendar; no it's not April 1 yet]

On the list of red light-districted activities in city parks — dog runs, for one — now add skate parks:

Work on a $1.25 million skateboard park that a local Councilman has been trying to have built in Astoria Park for years is finally scheduled to get underway soon.

“This project will give kids a place to skate that is far away from the busy sidewalks and parks where they sometimes inconvenience other people, especially seniors,” said Councilman Peter Vallone Jr., who provided most of the funding.

. . .

Currently, skateboarders use Athens Square Park at 30th Ave. and 30th St., among other areas.

“I have been working to bring this project to Astoria for a long time. It is fulfilling to see something go from an idea to a completion during my term as a Council member,” Vallone said. “Before, all we had here was trucks and equipment. Now, we will have a great park for kids to come and have fun.”

Queens Parks Commissioner Dorothy Lewandowski said the new park will offer the obstacles skateboarders crave while at the same time limiting the city’s liability.

“What we are creating in Astoria Park replicates in many ways a lot of the municipal street furniture that kids skate on already. But this gives them a destination location where they can meet in a safe, secure environment,” Lewandowski said.

The new skate plaza “will have ramps that have a maximum height of three feet, which for the city meets our criteria for limiting liabilities,” she added. “Anything over three feet requires that Parks have supervision and that it be gated and closed when we don’t have park staff on duty.”

Contractors are scheduled to break ground on the project in early May and expect to finish in nine months, Vallone said.

Located under the bridge and near Shore Blvd., the skate park site, he said, is situated far enough away so as not to disturb Astoria residents.

Hmm . . . can a city-sponsored graffiti park be far behind? Mr. Ecko?

Time was, you could rub hot peppers on your child’s genitals. That’s apparently not true anymore:

A 10-year-old boy from Charleston did not want to sit at his desk at a Staten Island elementary school last week, his teacher noticed.

She soon discovered why: His rear end was sore and bruised from a belt lashing he received from his stepfather the night before.

If this had happened 25 years ago, it may have been met with an ambivalent shrug.

But today, stricter reporting requirements, more aggressive prosecution and growing public awareness means “traditional” childhood discipline can lead to criminal charges much more frequently.

The man who allegedly doled out the corporal punishment, 30-year-old Ukraine native Alexandr Privler, was charged with a felony, assault with intent to cause physical injury with a weapon, and a misdemeanor, acting in a manner injurious to a child.

. . .

Over the past five years, arrests and convictions of cases in Staten Island in which endangering the welfare of a child — the most common charge in child-abuse cases — have gradually risen, according to the state Department of Criminal Justice statistics.

. . .

The unusual case of Clifton resident Ganganue Gonseh last April is a glaring example. A native of Liberia, Gonseh punished his then 8-year-old and 11-year-old boys by making them strip naked, then rubbing a hot yellow pepper on their faces — including their eyes — and on their genitals. The boys were brought home by police for skipping school and allegedly shoplifting video games at a Hylan Boulevard store earlier that day.

The two kids were treated at Richmond University Medical Center in West Brighton for itching and skin irritation, and Gonseh was charged with third-degree assault and endangering the welfare of child.

The father argued that the disciplinary practice — called “Hot Peppering” –is common practice in many African countries and in parts of this country. He eventually pleaded guilty to endangering the welfare of a child and a disorderly conduct violation, with the provision that the endangering charges would be dropped once he completed a parenting course.

A edict is handed down and a show is canceled:

For thousands of Orthodox Jews, the “Big Event” — a concert featuring the popular Hasidic entertainer Lipa Schmeltzer — was supposed to happen next Sunday at the WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden. But fans and organizers were shocked to learn late last month that a group of rabbis had issued an edict against the show, effectively canceling it.

The decree, published in Hebrew in the Orthodox newspaper Hamodia and signed by 33 rabbis, warned that the sight of dancing and singing performers would cause “ribaldry and lightheadedness” that would lure young people away from spiritual purity. It prohibited Orthodox Jews from attending the concert and called on Mr. Schmeltzer to back out.

The ban has inflamed tensions among ultra-Orthodox Jews over how to address the influences of popular culture, and it has thrust what has largely been an internal debate into public view.

Assemblyman Dov Hikind, whose Brooklyn district includes many Hasidic neighborhoods, said the ban had triggered unprecedented dissent and outrage among Hasidim. “In all my 26 years of representing this community, I can’t remember anything that has so shaken the people,” Mr. Hikind said on Sunday.

The growing fame of Mr. Schmeltzer, who weaves pop melodies with traditional Hasidic songs, has troubled some Hasidim, who have chided him for introducing Jewish youth to secular musical styles. Others fear his popularity could rival that of the rabbis, who wield spiritual authority over Hasidic daily life.

In an effort to assuage those fears and uphold the religious practice of modesty, the concert organizers had promised separate entrances and seating for the more than 5,000 men and women who had been expected to attend, and Mr. Schmeltzer had agreed to perform only traditional Hasidic songs.

But that was not enough to prevent two community leaders in Brooklyn from mobilizing opposition to the show, which was raising money for an Israeli charity that finances weddings for orphans.

Sure, keep worrying about “appearances” . . . this as it takes me 45 minutes to use an elevator that stops at every floor on a Saturday:

Popular Upper East Side restaurant Talia’s Steakhouse recently began cooking up what is believed to be the city’s first kosher cheeseburger — a real-beef patty topped with tofu cheese in American or mozzarella flavor.

The formerly forbidden food is now being served as a “Kosher Parve Cheeseburger” at the popular glatt kosher eatery, which does not serve meat and dairy together, in accordance with Jewish law.

While many are excited to give the taboo take-out a taste, others are kvetching that the burger is bad news.

“I would never entertain the thought of eating cheese — real or fake — with meat,” comedian Jackie Mason, who keeps kosher, told The Post. “It makes me nauseous just thinking about it.”

Trying to skirt tradition is what irks others, also.

“Jewish law is very concerned for appearances,” said Rabbi Basil Herring, the executive vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America. “Not only should you always do the right thing, but it should be seen as the right thing.

“Any Jew who keeps kosher knows a cheeseburger is not permissible. But . . . what happens if a young kid, a 10-year-old, goes in there and says, hmm, maybe cheese on a burger is OK?”

New York’s linguistic heritage isn’t necessarily threatened but it does seem to be changing:

Hollywood gangsters planned rub-outs in a city where hoodlums said “Toidy Toid and Toid.” Archie Bunker confused “terlet” for “toilet” and called his long-suffering wife “Edit.”

Does anybody really speak that way anymore? Did anyone ever, really? In the New York of 2008, where small shops and whole blocks meet the wrecking ball at every turn, is the New York accent on the way out, too, shamed into obsolescence as each generation adopts a kind of speech Ralph Kramden wouldn’t recognize?

You can take that concern and just fuggedaboudit.

The New York accent is very much alive, linguists will happily tell you, but like all dialects — and that’s what our accent is — it’s changing. To be sure, it’s been a long time since anyone called a toilet a “terlet.” But many of us still drink “cawfee” and call our “fathas” on Father’s Day. What’s also true is that fewer of us, especially younger New Yorkers, are speaking this way in our increasingly mobile and diverse city. That said, you’d be mistaken to conclude that means New York talk is going the way of the Third Avenue El.

. . .

The New York accent is part of a broader East Coast way of speech, with major distinctions in places such as Boston and Philadelphia. Our accent fits like a glove in between these two geographic zones, and the forces buffeting it include immigration waves, the city’s transient young population and New Yorkers’ tendency to clean up their speech. So it should come as no surprise that if indeed any part of the city is sounding less like New York, it’s Manhattan.

“New York more than a great many other places is subject to homogenization,” Jochnowitz said, “And I think that has already happened in Manhattan, where kids growing up in most of the neighborhoods in Manhattan don’t have New York accents anymore.”

What they’re hanging on to in Manhattan, Jochnowitz said, are certain pronunciation distinctions he feels are worth preserving.

“New Yorkers who may be losing their accents are not losing the distinction between Mary, marry and merry. That really seems to be very much alive,” Jochnowitz said, speaking of the distinctions (cot and caught is another one) that are rarely seen outside the East Coast.

Marty Scorsese has blood on his hands:

A wiseguy wannabe who killed for the mob apologized yesterday to Italians everywhere for being a living, breathing stereotype — and blamed Hollywood for turning him into one.

“Although I made all my drastic decisions on my own, Hollywood intensified my love for that life and in the process blindsided what being Italian meant,” Bonanno crime-family informant Francesco Fiordilini said at his sentencing for killing a drug dealer in 1993.

“The mob is a gang. It’s made up of individuals with very low self-esteem who together feed on the weak — and most of the time their own,” Fiordilini told Brooklyn federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis.

After apologizing to the drug dealer’s family, Fiordilini offered a sweeping apology to Italians everywhere for “conspiring and utilizing our culture in the same manner the entertainment industry does with its stereotypes.”

The miracle of childbirth . . . with bonus Betsy Gotbaum sighting:

The rate of babies delivered by cesarean section in New York City increased to 30.6%, in 2006, up from 29.7% in 2005, in a trend that some politicians, doctors, and women’s health advocates say is cause for concern.

The citywide increase reflects a national upward trend in the number of cesarean deliveries in recent years. Last month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the national cesarean rate in 2006 reached a record high, 31.1%, according to its preliminary birth data for that year.

“There is alarming concern throughout the country that there are too many cesarean sections,” said Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, who in 2006 released a report based on 2005 data detailing individual hospitals’ cesarean section rates. “It’s additional cost and it’s additional risk,” Ms. Gotbaum said, adding, “I hate to impart motives on hospitals and doctors . . . I can just tell you the numbers speak for themselves.”

“It’s clearly been rising,” the head of obstetrics at Brooklyn’s Lutheran Medical Center, Dr. Iffath Hoskins, said. “On a day-to-day basis, there will be three or four cesareans going on at a given time,” she said, estimating that one in three deliveries at Lutheran results in a cesarean.

. . .

The overall increase in cesareans has also been triggered by the changing perception of cesareans among women.

“There’s such a relaxed attitude about induction and c-sections that it’s not considered risky anymore,” the president of the group Choices in Childbirth, Elan McAllister, said.

She said women were getting a message from their peers and from their doctors that vaginal delivery is dangerous, while cesareans are more civilized. “A lot of women today are career women who are used to being in control, so the idea of being able to micromanage their birth is appealing,” she said.

Mormonism as big city coping method:

“I think it’s exciting to be in New York and experience the city in a more wholesome manner because I’m Mormon,” said Colin Wheeler, 30, who recently moved to Manhattan from Sacramento and works for the CW network’s morning show. “This city would be very cold and very lonely and very depressing if I wasn’t Mormon.”

Voo-da-la:

Sometimes after a long day off-island, you just want to catch the boat back to the Rock and head for Town, maybe do a little train crawl along the way.

Translation: Upon returning to Staten Island by ferry from a long day elsewhere, a person might want to stop at a few of the bars that flank the stations of the Staten Island Railway, en route to an evening in downtown Great Kills.

As befits a place that can take pride in its otherness and even in its relative isolation, Staten Island has evolved, if not exactly its own language, then certainly a lexicon of words and phrases that require explanation to off-islanders.

And a linguistic journey into the heart of Staten Island leads inexorably to the Talk of the Town Tavern, a train-station bar on Great Kills’s very smalltowny main street, where Statenisms flow nearly as freely as the $2 draft mugs.

. . .

Eugene Machules, a locksmith who was feeding dollars into the Talk of the Town’s jukebox, offered one more local neologism: “Voo-da-la.”

“You say that like when you make a great shot in basketball,” Mr. Machules said. “When you hit the home run, the best shot — the top of the pinnacle, that’s it. Or if you toast someone who’s passed away, you say ‘Voo-da-la.’”

Voo-da-la, Mr. Machules said, was the signature phrase of Monte Vandenburg, a longtime bartender at another Great Kills watering hole, the Swiss Chalet.

“He’d just turn and say ‘Voo-da-la,’ and nobody knew what the hell it meant,” Mr. Machules said.

Mr. Vandenburg died suddenly in September at the age of 46. It is not clear how long Voo-da-la will survive him.

Location Scout: Talk of the Town.

Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities,” 20 years later:

To some New Yorkers, Mr. Wolfe’s satire was bitingly accurate, nailing both a racist criminal justice system and the politicians who played on white fear and minority anger for personal gain.

To others, it was a cynical endorsement of racial stereotypes that did not so much critique white paranoia as cater to it.

Either way, though, the New York of “Bonfire,” to a degree that might well have shocked people in 1987, no longer exists. Not in reality, and not in the collective imagination.

New York is on track to have fewer than 500 homicides this year, down from 2,245 in 1990. The white population is no longer shrinking, and diverse immigration has made the city less black-and-white.

The crime drops that marked the Giuliani era — along with some divisive police confrontations with minorities — have continued under a Bloomberg administration that civil rights leaders credit with bringing more interracial respect.

More locally, the Bronx neighborhoods near the site of Sherman’s accident are now dotted with owner-occupied row houses and apartments. Artists have moved into Mott Haven lofts.

And here they are now to entertain us:

You could tell the tribes apart by variations in dress: the tartan kilts and pleated skirts of Nightingale-Bamford, Sacred Heart and Spence; running shoes on the girls who had made their way over from Chapin and Hewitt; leggings and anoraks for students at Dalton, with its relaxed dress code.

Beyond that, the girls looked a lot alike, particularly when it came to accessories: pendant earrings, orthodontia, camera phones. All this week and part of last, the cast and crew of “Gossip Girl,” the CW network series based on the young adult novels, have been camped out on 93rd Street between Madison and Park Avenues. They are shooting an episode at the grand Georgian complex that in its workaday life houses the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia.

. . .

Three from Hunter College High School, the public magnet school a block away, edged toward the gates of “St. Jude’s.” They said they had been taking all their free periods, plus lunch, here. “Not that we’re obsessed or anything,” Alexa Levy said.

“We saw the person who plays Dan,” said her friend Sophie Zucker. “He’s actually, notoriously, like, nice.”

“It’s really refreshing to see a star who’s like that,” said Charlotte Weiss.

“Because she knows so many, of course,” Miss Zucker said, teasing her.

“Do you want to know the honest truth?” Miss Weiss said. “It’s based on private school girls, and they’re very superficial. The woman who wrote the novels said it’s based on Nightingale. We go to Hunter. It doesn’t relate.”

“So these girls –” Miss Levy gestured around her. “These are the girls it’s making fun of.”

“And I think they’re proud of it instead of being ashamed,” Miss Weiss said.

Buried lede — the researchers at Media Matters may be the only ones who pay attention to him:

After eating dinner at a famed Harlem restaurant recently, Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel told a radio audience, he “couldn’t get over the fact” that there was no difference between the black-run Sylvia’s and other restaurants.

“It was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there and they were ordering and having fun,” he said. “And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.”

Mr. O’Reilly said his fellow patrons were tremendously respectful as he ate dinner with Al Sharpton.

The comments were made during Mr. O’Reilly’s nationally syndicated radio broadcast last week. The liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America called attention to them by distributing a transcript and audio clip on the Internet. Karl Frisch, a Media Matters spokesman, called Mr. O’Reilly’s comments “ignorant and racially charged.”

Untz, untz, untz, untz:

It was almost 3 a.m. last Thursday at the Guest House, the Chelsea nightclub. Vodka bottles stood on low tables, paired with carafes of cranberry and orange juice. People danced, D.J.s spun music, but one thing was missing. The models had yet to arrive.

The party was called “Fashion Night,” sponsored by RussianRadioNY.com, a five-year-old Internet-only radio station. Though the station had staged similar parties, this one was during Fashion Week and promised Russian models.

“They are coming from another party,” said D.J. Gio, the 28-year-old founder of RussianRadioNY.com. “They will be here. They are very beautiful.”

. . .

Gio and his fellow D.J.s have given parties at the Guest House on West 27th Street since April. To do so, they eliminated some party staples common at the Russian nightclubs in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, that they think don’t translate well across the river.

“Here, we are more upscale,” Gio said. “In Manhattan, people can afford more. They don’t want Russian food. Tonight, we have no pickles.”

He was referring to sour pickles, a traditional Russian snack used as a chaser with vodka. Brighton Beach parties have pickles. Manhattan parties do not. In Brighton Beach, people drink their vodka straight. In Manhattan, they mix it with cranberry or orange juice. And tonight was very Manhattan.

. . . This night’s crowd was not limited to Russians. A trickle of non-Russians have found a novel way to spend their weekends.

“This is one of the last places to play house music around here,” said Gene Khesin, a 30-year-old trader and a frequent visitor to the Guest House.

Mr. Khesin said he liked the Russian parties because they play the late-90s Euro-dance music that has fallen out of favor with most nightclubs.

“Nobody plays this stuff anymore,” he said. “Everywhere else is hip-hop.”

So perhaps Fashion Week is an attempt to cook the books:

[O]n most weekdays, there are more women in the park than men. This is how . . . Dan Biederman, would like it to be. Biederman, the longtime president of the Bryant Park Corporation, was a protégé of the urban sociologist William (Holly) Whyte, whose theories about the dynamics of public space included the idea that the presence of women indicates civic health.

“Women pick up on visual cues of disorder better than men do,” Biederman said the other day. “They’re your purest customers. And, if women don’t see other women, they tend to leave.” Biederman visits the park several times a day and sometimes goes undercover. (Look out for a fit, middle-aged gentleman in a pin-striped suit, reading “The Red Badge of Courage.”) He has discerned that women notice homeless people more than men do, object more to crumbs on picnic tables, and are more sensitive to foul odors, such as that of urine, which signals that there are no clean, functional bathrooms nearby. Twenty years ago, Bryant Park was an infamous shambles. Few women — or men — would go near it. Now it’s a handsome place, with flower beds, pétanque games, a lending library, a carousel, thousands of portable chairs, theatrical performances, and many other inducements. And so the women come. Presumably, a female preponderance not only emboldens more women but also entices more men. “There’s great girl-watching,” Biederman acknowledged.

. . .

“Go to any public space in the world,” Biederman had said. “If it’s skewing overwhelmingly male, get out as soon as possible.”

Location Scout: Bryant Park.

When the Dow drops, the ice plops — or, scotch as economic indicator:

Just as a storm of change has been rattling the New York Stock Exchange of late, so has there been a change in the weather at the New York Wine Exchange, a well-stocked shop on Broadway near Battery Place, just a few blocks from its namesake.

. . .

According to Paul Couto, the owner, sales of hard liquor have risen several percentage points since Aug. 16, the day the major stock indexes plunged to more than 10 percentage points below their July peaks.

Are the gods of finance smiling down on Mr. Couto even as they chuck lightning bolts at the financial companies that employ many of his customers?

More than a decade’s experience selling wine has taught him otherwise. He has found that when finance workers go for the hard stuff, it’s not because they want to drown their sorrows, but because liquor is a better bargain than wine.

“You open a bottle of Scotch,” he lamented, “it lasts you a week.”

. . .

Mr. Couto said that he wouldn’t be able to fully gauge the effects of the recent financial turbulence until next month, when many of his regular customers return from vacation. But even if they don’t all switch to hard liquor, he worries that some of them may soon exit the neighborhood.

Is it a convenient way to use up some of that Homeland Security money or a profound cultural shift? You know, like role-playing games once were:

E-Tech Computers, located at 71-06 Grand Avenue in Maspeth, recently introduced a new security camera system that offers 360-degree views, making them ideal for warding off burglars, prowlers and other miscreants.

Eric, the proprietor of the store, said the time seemed right to expand into the field of home security. Currently, E-Tech has a variety of high-tech models for sale, some having the familiar security camera shape, while others are half-spherical and offer full-room views to guard against blind spots.

The employees of E-Tech take great personal pride in the cameras and security they offer. Not only are the cameras on the cutting edge, Eric said, but he believes they have never been more necessary in Maspeth, Middle Village or just about any part of the big city. “People get robbed,” he said. “Bad stuff happens.”

Staff members at the store agreed. “Right now, New York is becoming less safe,” one worker claimed. “People need something to record what happens.”

Still, the cameras represent a slight departure from the usual merchandise E-Tech sells. The store, which has been in business for five years, is best known for dealing in hardware and software, not surveillance technology.

Eric and his E-Tech co-workers, however, have the freedom to change directions depending on what they presume the market demands. After all, the store is not part of a computer conglomerate, but like so many Grand Avenue retailers, a homegrown business financed out of Eric’s own pocket. As such, the store offers some items one wouldn’t expect in a traditional computer store, such as 30-sided dice and replicas of samurai swords.

No sense in wasting a good detail:

All across the city, the watchers take up their posts, pillow or towel spread across windowsill, Bible or remote close at hand. The white-haired woman leaning on a golden cushion above Nostrand Avenue in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The retired pizza maker on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in his undershirt and khakis. The tragic-looking woman with pulled-back hair over the Drama Cafe in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and the long-sideburned deaf man two windows down.

And they sit there. And they look out at nothing; and at everything.

From the city sidewalk, there are few summer sights more archetypically urban than the face glimpsed in an open window, gazing silently out at the street. In a world where entertainment is delivered via modem and iPod, the very idea of someone drinking deep from the well of unmediated, nonvirtual reality exerts a strange pull. It also taps into our own voyeurism: to see someone inside a home, after all, is to witness a private moment.

The view from the other side of the window frame turns out to be no less engrossing. For the committed window gazer, there is no better place than the exact juncture of the public and private realms.

“Instead of going outside,” said Willie Taylor, 69, who holds court over his block in Harlem, “you sit at the window and you are outside. It’s better than being outside.”

The sociologist and window-gazer extraordinaire Jane Jacobs, in her 1961 polemical valentine “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” championed “the ballet of the good city sidewalk,” an intricate dance which, she wrote, “never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.”

. . .

On East 107th Street in East Harlem, a square-jawed woman in a sleeveless T-shirt answered a request for an interview with a cigarette butt flicked from the third floor.

As the last of the Four Hundred passes on, a new dynasty emerges:

For almost nine hours on Sunday, Eliot Spitzer, the Upper East Sider with the Princeton and Harvard education and the reputation for a hyperkinetic braininess, indulged his other side. Nascar, possibly the vehicle for the nation’s most overt display of country fried machismo, has recently become a calculated interest for ambitious politicians trying to appeal to a working-class male demographic.

Mr. Spitzer, however, can lay a legitimate claim to fandom, and appears to relish the sport as fervently as he does the Yankees.

Outmigration and a more-educated population aside, you’re living longer because you walk more. Ooh-kay:

In essence, there is a health gap emerging between our massive metropolis and the rest of the country — some X factor that’s improving our health in subtle, everyday ways. In fact, a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that once you take out those uniquely New York ways to die — AIDS, homicide, etc. — we’ve still added at least 200,000 extra years onto the city’s life-expectancy tables since 1980, making crucial advances in the same health areas the rest of the country struggles with. Like many New Yorkers, I’d moved here with some trepidation — always figuring that the stress, pollution, and 60-hour workweeks would knock about five years off my life. I was wrong — precisely wrong. But where, exactly, is our excess life coming from?

I take this question to Thomas Frieden, New York’s commissioner of public health. Frieden is a wonk’s wonk — a handsome, energetic doctor who has gained a nationwide reputation for his aggressive effort to push New York’s average-life-expectancy figure ever higher. The smoking ban of 2003? The trans-fat ban of last year? You can thank Frieden for both. These measures have already begun to lengthen life spans in the city. The smoking ban had an immediate effect: The number of deaths attributable to smoking has decreased from 8,960 in 2001 to 8,096 in 2005, a drop of 10 percent. Lung-cancer rates should begin to see the same effect a few decades from now, since it takes longer for the body to repair smoking-related lung damage.

But even Frieden admits that public policy can’t account for all the gains. When I ask what the X factor is — where the “excess life” is coming from — Frieden goes over to his desk and returns with a clear plastic statuette. It’s from the American Podiatric Medical Association and Prevention magazine: BEST WALKING CITY, 2006.

“We’ve won it a couple of years in a row,” he tells me with a grin. He’s got a bunch of them kicking around.

Just keep telling yourself that . . .

Or maybe there’s just less of a desire on the part of New Yorkers to look like leathery Jerseyites:

A lone cluster of clouds gathers demurely behind the Con Edison Building as Claire Kuhn and Jessica Watson spread their striped beach towels into a pristine pool of sun that has formed on the roof. Un-self-consciously, they splay their bikini-clad bodies toward the light.

On a quest for that ultimate summer badge — casually sun-tinged skin — Claire, 15, and Jessica, 16, are here on the blacktop nearly every day on East 10th Street in Manhattan. If they remember, on the half-hour, they flip onto their stomachs to make sure they brown evenly. They usually can stand an hour or so before it gets too hot.

As long as there have been sun worshipers in search of the perfect tan in the city, there has been the tar beach. Roofs have long been the urbanites’ slightly hotter, slightly gooier answer to the backyard pools and lawns of the suburbs — like private little plots without bothersome trees to throw shade.

Jessica even insists that she likes this urban substitute better than the real beach; she cites the view, the pleasurable sense of being part of a members-only world, and of course the fact that “there is no sand to get stuck to your skin.”

But in this she may be a vanishing breed. This time-honored summer escape is a diminished, perhaps even dying habit. This has been noted by those who have a bird’s-eye access to the city: helicopter pilots, water tank repairmen and occupants of tall buildings in otherwise low-lying neighborhoods.

There are many explanations: security and insurance concerns since 9/11, real estate prices so high that roof space has become a lucrative commodity, and the rise in popularity of summer beach shares among young people.

From the skies above New York where he reports on accidents and fires in a helicopter for WCBS-TV, Joe Biermann has noted that rooftop tanning is a declining pastime. “Since 9/11 we don’t see a lot of people on the roofs,” he said. “Maybe it is a security issue. We think the landlords must be keeping the doors locked.”

. . .

Richard Casciato and April Dinsmore, married artists who live off Flatbush Avenue in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, resist the trend.

The living room window of their four-story walk-up opens onto 600 square feet of roof space, and their use of it effectively doubles the size of their apartment for six months of the year. They have covered part of the roof with beige AstroTurf, but they leave a fringe of honest-to-goodness tar (silver-coated to reflect heat).

They insist that the breeze from the harbor, visible in the distance, keeps them cool even in hot weather and that the sound of traffic on Flatbush is a little like the roar of the surf.

They are out here every day for breakfast, reading the paper and, of course, soaking up the rays. Mr. Casciato, 39, who is Irish-Italian, is particularly devoted to the task. “He sweats a ton,” Ms. Dinsmore, 37, explained, “and eventually he turns a different ethnicity.”

Like WNYC’s attempts to cash in on its wonky, somewhat female-overloaded Soterios Johnson-loving unattached demographic, the new Whole Foods on Houston is hosting events for, er, thin-slicing singles:

Over samples of aged Gouda and amid aisles of extra-virgin olive oil, New Yorkers shopping at Whole Foods Bowery are turning the grocery into a thriving pick-up scene. The gelato bar, the upstairs café, the chilled, private cheese room, and long checkout lines are where flirting is most rampant in the 71,000-square-foot store that opened last March, Whole Foods employees said.

. . .

While many pick-up lines fall flat, single shoppers said the floodlit aisles provide a “safer” space to start up conversations with strangers than most bars in the neighborhood. Peeking into each other’s grocery carts, they said, could also be more revealing of a person’s lifestyle choices than an online profile on a social networking or dating Web site.

“I’m really health conscious,” a 28-year-old singer in the band edible red, Collette McLafferty, said. “I want to date health conscious people, and that could be why Whole Foods seems like a good place to meet people.”

After chatting with an attractive man at Whole Foods two nights ago but forgetting his name, Ms. McLafferty, who lives on the Lower East Side, posted a message on Craigslist looking to reconnect with him.

“He had dark, curly brown hair, blue eyes, he was well built, probably about 5-feet-10,” she said. She is waiting for a response to her posting, she said. Ms. McLafferty, who said she has often been approached by shoppers who comment on the tattoo of a dragon around her upper arm, added that flirting was easy at Whole Foods because of low expectations. “When you go out with the intention of meeting someone, you never meet anyone,” she said.

. . .

“I make eyes at people,” a 27-year-old actor who lives near South Street Seaport, Ari Rossen, said. “It’s a hip neighborhood, everyone who shops here is young, and there are plenty of things around to talk about.”

Whole Foods Bowery is actively boosting its reputation as a place for singles to meet, a spokeswoman for the store, Rebecca Ulanoff, said. In August, the store is hosting “Check Out,” a singles night co-sponsored by the Web site Gothamist.com. The store is also hoping to attract a fashion-forward, eco-friendly crowd tomorrow morning when it sells Anya Hindmarch shopping totes printed with the message: “I’m Not a Plastic Bag.”

I guess the singles events at the Pathmark by the Manhattan Bridge were sparsely attended?

Potential sociology dissertation topic ca. 2014: “The Rise Of The Co-Optation Of Interpersonal Relationships By Corporate Entities In The 21st Century.”

Confirmation of what we always sensed was the case:

Williamsburg is known for cool bistros and trendy hangouts, but few realize that the neighborhood and its environs are a magnet for hip, young librarians. Although “hip” is not an adjective generally associated with librarians, a stack of archivists, publishers, illustrators, librarians, and other bibliophiles called the Desk Set is out to challenge their image as staid.

The traditional idea of a librarian is “uptight in a bun,” the group’s co-founder, Maria Falgoust, said. “It would be nice if we could change that.”

To follow up on a well-attended Desk Set dance party Memorial Day weekend at Enid’s in Greenpoint, Ms. Falgoust is planning a screening of “Desk Set,” the 1957 Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy romantic comedy from which the group took its name, for the end of this month. She is also considering a Labor Day weekend dance party.

“Being smart and having fun are not opposites,” a digital imaging specialist at the Brooklyn Museum, Sarah Gentile, who has a master’s degree in library science, said at the Desk Set dance party. Ms. Gentile and others wore pins with such statements as “Withdrawn” or “She blinded me with Library Science.” The mood was more merriment than Merriam-Webster.

“Prepare to be shushed!” read the announcement for the event, at which the reference desk revelers downed cocktails with Dewey Decimal numbers instead of names. No one guessed the identity of a concoction of Champagne and raspberry vodka that had the call number of “The Joy of Sex.” Lime Rickeys were served in honor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, as was gin and pineapple juice, said to be a favorite of Vladimir Nabokov.

. . .

At Enid’s, the crowd was checking out each other rather than books.

“I wore my glasses because I wanted to maximize my look,” a children’s librarian, Andrea Vaughn, said. “I already got hit on,” she added. “It’s working.”

Joe Sitt knows just as well as the next guy that blacks just want jobs, Jews just desire bookstores and Russians have got to have their nightclubs:

Joseph J. Sitt, who says his company has spent $120 million buying up land underneath and around the rides, said on Friday that he had “rolled over” in response to the criticism of his earlier plans for an entertainment and residential complex.

So the looming 40-story tower planned for the Boardwalk at Stillwell Avenue is gone. So are the hundreds of rental apartments and luxury condominiums in the old plan. The new proposal is less dense, he said, but has more of “the new, the edgy, and the outlandish” rides and attractions that America’s first resort was once known for.

“This is our way of showing the New York community that we’re responsive to what they want,” said Mr. Sitt, the founder and chief executive of Thor Equities, which buys and develops commercial, residential and retail properties nationwide. “Our design, in all its greatness, is a way of showing the world what Coney Island can be.”

. . .

The hotels, Mr. Sitt said, would offer black residents not only jobs, but careers. The Russian immigrants, who enjoy a “quality of life and activity by the water,” would flock to the hotels and nightclubs. Jewish and Italian-American residents would get the “quality retail, bookstores and entertainment venues” that they want. As for everyone else, “what’s better than having fabulous restaurants, catering halls, shows and concerts?”

“Tell me, what issue any one of these constituencies would have with our plan,” he said. “We’re asking for motherhood, motherhood. Apple pie, Chevrolet and Coney Island.”

Believe me, I like Jonathan Schwartz as much as the next guy, but if you overdo the branding thing, there’s the real and present danger of turning “public radio listener” into shorthand for “cat lady”:

A cadre of New York singles who wake up to National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” and listen to podcasts of the network’s “This American Life” are seeking out dates and mates who enjoy public radio as much as they do.

Noticing the number of self-proclaimed “NPR aficionados” on online dating and social networking Web sites, the staffers at a local affiliate, WNYC, decided to sponsor a series of singles mixers. These events are led by the station’s popular on-air personalities, and some feature news and pop culture quizzes — not unlike those heard on a long-running public radio program, “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!”

“Just like certain online dating sites attract a specific type of person, WNYC draws a certain type of listener — someone who’s interested in arts and culture,” a 37-year-old city policy director, Alexandra Warren, said during a station-sponsored under-40 singles event, “This is Your Brain on Love,” held at Williamsburg ’s Brooklyn Brewery Thursday.

. . .

“WNYC Singles” events cost $35 in advance, or $40 at the door. In an attempt to maintain a gender balance, the station offers a limited number of tickets to women and men. Station officials say women’s tickets generally sell out weeks in advance.

The Post reports that the first openly bisexual person since David Bowie will be representing the Upper East Side in the State Assembly:

An aide to City Comptroller William Thompson became the first openly bisexual member of the state Legislature last night after defeating his Republican opponent in a special election.

Micah Kellner, a Democrat, took 64 percent of the vote to Republican Gregory Camp’s 36.

Kellner, 28, a top aide to Thompson, has also worked for Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-Manhattan).

“We campaigned on the issues and I really think that’s what voters responded to,” Kellner said.

The special election in the 65th Assembly District — which covers the Upper East Side and Roosevelt Island — fills a seat held for 33 years by Democrat Pete Grannis, who now heads the state Department of Environmental Conservation. There are currently four openly gay members serving in the Legislature.

We’re still waiting for a statement from Sean Delonas, assuming he knows the difference between gay and bisexual.

In case you assumed New York kids were precocious specimens straight out of a Salinger short story or some Wes Anderson feature, rest assured that they’re just as lame as their culturally deprived suburban counterparts:

High school students in New York City have some of the world’s greatest cultural attractions in their back yard. But they often spend their weekend nights acting like stereotypical students at a college surrounded by cornfields, tossing back drink after drink in what those who follow the situation say is a disturbing and dangerous epidemic of binge drinking.

A 2005 city survey found 28% of white students in the city’s public high schools had, within the month before the survey was taken, consumed the four or five drinks in one session necessary to qualify as a “binge.” White students have been shown to binge drink at much higher rates than their nonwhite counterparts. While no comparable statistics exist for the city’s private schools, interviews with students suggest such behavior is frequent.

. . .

A 16-year-old who lives on the Upper East Side, Hilary Shar, said her friends from the suburbs are incredulous when she complains of having nothing to do on weekends. “They say, ‘Oh, you’re so lucky you live in the city,’” Miss Shar, an 11th-grader at the Dwight School on the Upper West Side, said. “I say, ‘No, it’s really not that different.’ The movie theaters may be bigger, and there are more restaurants to choose from, but the activities are pretty much the same.”

Those activities often include attending alcohol-laden parties at their classmates’ homes.

10021, the 90210 of Manhattan, is set to be split into three new zip codes, confounding demographers*:

The U.S. Postal Service has plans to announce that the affluent neighborhood now identified by the 10021 zip code — stretching between East 61st and East 80th streets, from Central Park to the East River — will be divided into three zip codes in July, leaving 10021 for roughly a third of its original area.

“Too many people” is a reason for the change, Rep. Carolyn Maloney said, adding that was also why the Upper East Side needs the Second Avenue subway. She met with a postal district manager, Robert Daruk, on Friday. Ms. Maloney said, “Pretty soon the other two numbers will be just as honored and prestigious” as 10021.

Not everyone agrees. “This is a puzzle to me,” said the co-chairwoman of Defenders of the Historic Upper East Side, Teri Slater. Ms. Slater said 10021 was widely considered “the zip code” to live in on the Upper East Side. She joked that like Gaul, it was being divided into three parts. She said the post office would have to demonstrate a real need. “I don’t think this is going to sit favorably with many people,” she said.

An Upper East Side resident and president of a co-op on East 79th Street, Theodore Siouris, said people in his neighborhood have expressed concern over no longer being in the 10021 zip code.

. . .

A spokeswoman for the USPS, Pat McGovern, said the growth in the number of addresses and the volume of mail in the neighborhood are prompting the two additional zip codes.

Without describing exactly where the cutoff will be, she said the middle area would remain 10021; the area to the south would be 10065 and to the north would be 10075. She said the mail for all three zip codes would still operate out of the Lenox Hill Station on East 70th Street.

*E.g., “Post Office Politics: The Political Influence of Zip Code 10021 Residents”