Just checking out the old ‘hood:

The escaped Wild Man of 96th St. has been caught — where else? — on 96th St.

Larry Hogue, a drug-addicted wacko who terrorized Upper West Siders in the 1990s, strolled away from the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens on Thursday.

The notorious hell-raiser was arrested “without incident” in his old stomping grounds Saturday morning after being spotted on 96th St. between Broadway and Amsterdam, cops said.

Before he was put away, Hogue, now 65, menaced the neighborhood around 96th St. He was big and he was bad, regularly mugging people to support his drug habit.

He set fires under cars, heaved rocks through stained glass church windows, masturbated in front of kids, stalked seniors and threatened children with nail-studded clubs.

Cops would arrest him and take him to the psychiatric ward, where he would be cut off from his crack supply.

After a few weeks his demons would disappear and he’d be back to his old tricks on W. 96th St.

That is, had Baltz lived on beyond a miraculous 26 hours after initially surviving the 1960 United Airlines-TWA plane crash over Staten Island and Brooklyn:

On Dec. 16, 1960, 11-year-old Stephen Lambert Baltz became the sole survivor of the horrific midair crash of a United Airlines jet and a TWA plane over Staten Island near Miller Army Field.

Millions of today’s baby boomers and their parents prayed and hoped against hope that the boy from Wilmette, Ill., would survive.

But despite the best efforts of 10 doctors, he succumbed to his injuries after 26 hours.

Had he lived, Stephen Baltz would be celebrating his 60th birthday today, Jan. 9, 2009.

. . .

Surviving the crash was Stephen’s 65 cents found in his clothing or wallet; his father put the coins in a charity box at the hospital. The fire-tinged collection of four dimes and five nickels remains in a memorial plaque displayed to this day at Methodist Hospital.

A $1,000 anonymous donation from an elderly lady and $38 from a chaplain on duty at the hospital on Dec. 17 were combined with other donations to begin funding a pediatrics section at Methodist to honor Stephen’s memory.

The article catches up with some of the remaining family — his sister and brother — as well as one of the nurses on duty. (Advance, use permalinks! This is an interesting story!)

I don’t know that they’ll be missed actually and, to tell the truth, I hadn’t really considered the consequences:

The men who invented the goofy looking, double-zero glasses that have commemorated every New Year’s Eve over the past decade are retiring the specs with the 2009 version.

“It doesn’t look very good for 2010. You wind up with a ‘1′ in front of one of your eyes,” said maker Richard Sclafani.

The Brooklyn native, who lives in Seattle, said his company could create a new mold to craft glasses for next year, but it would cost tens of thousands of dollars.

“There are lots of knockoffs on the market. Business isn’t what it used to be,” Sclafani said.

Sclafani and a pal, Peter Cicero, came up with the New Year’s specs idea over beers in 1990.

“We knew it was a good one. I could picture the people in Times Square wearing them,” he said.

Business boomed, and doubled every year, said Sclafani. The peak year was 2000, when they sold more than half a million pairs of millennium glasses.

Scores is set to shut down:

Once the highest-grossing strip club chain in the world and a hangout for Madonna, Howard Stern, Russell Crowe, Jason Giambi and countless others, Scores will shut down before the new year, company officials said.

“It’s over; it is what it is,” said Scores lawyer George Weinbaum. Co-owner Elliot Osher confirmed the closing.

A weak economy, the loss of the W. 27th St. Scores’ liquor license and the possibility the E. 60th St. joint would lose its booze ticket all helped do in the flesh factory.

. . .

Founded in 1990 with one club at 333 E. 60th St., Scores grew into a national chain of seven clubs, including Scores West on 27th St., which took in as much as $400,000 a night, according to sources.

In its heyday, the East Side club was a mecca for sports stars like Giambi and Mark Messier, actors like Crowe and of course Stern, who talked up the club on his radio show. The Knicks held parties there, and eventually Scores became a publicly traded company.

The clubs were honey traps for out-of-town businessmen, who blew expense accounts on lap dances and champagne magnums, only to have their hangovers worsened by mind-boggling tabs.

. . .

On Wednesday night, at the E. 60th St. location, a lone customer downed a half-price beer as club employees kept promising dancers would take the stage “any minute.”

Interesting:

Newsday recently reported that the New York Police Department is phasing out “The Thug” and replacing it with a target that looks more like Mr. Clean, a visage apparently inspired by no one. Not so with “The Thug,” which, depending on who’s doing the talking, is any number of people, from actor Ernest Borgnine to boxing great Rocky Graziano to Fred Worell, a deceased sergeant who worked as an instructor at the range.

At least, that has been the prevailing wisdom since the scowling face made its debut. But after Newsday’s report, retired Det. Harold Schiffer stepped forward with a proclamation likely only to deepen the mystery.

“I know who that guy is,” Schiffer, 65, said. “It’s a guy named Jesse Oldshein. He’s 90 years old and living in Florida.”

When contacted, Oldshein, a retired lieutenant, didn’t make much of the mystery, probably because to him, there’s no mystery about it. “That’s me,” he said from his home in Boynton Beach. “I was up at the range one day. They asked to take my picture. They said, ‘Pose in a boxing stance.’ Next thing I know, my face is on the target.”

. . .

Officially, “The Thug” is known as Silhouette SP-83A. It portrays a bad guy — snarl on face, snub-nosed revolver in hand — out of a Cagney movie. But the NYPD says the shaded area covering the head and much of the torso makes it difficult for instructors to see from a distance the shot patterns left behind by an officer.

Mr. Clean is shaded differently, as is a second new target, a faceless silhouette that looks like a Martian. The new targets were designed by the Firearms and Tactics Section and have been in place as part of a pilot program since July.

Oldshein says he never gave much thought to the issue, but his wife, Francine, remembers other police officers for years teasing him about it.

“It was a big deal back then,” she said. “So many people came over to us: ‘Hey, Jesse, you should get residuals,’ or ‘Hey, Jesse, I shot at you today.’”

Earlier: “Cops’ Favorite Target Thug, but Just Who Was the Guy?” New York Times, February 17, 2005.

Who knew? I still don’t understand why it’s not in the zoo:

For decades, the proud seal of New York City, with its depiction of a sailor and a Manhattan Indian, of beavers and flour barrels and the sails of a windmill, has celebrated 1625 as the year the city was founded.

There’s just one problem: Most historians say the year has hardly any historical significance.

The first settlers arrived in what would become part of New York City on a Dutch ship as early as 1623; some say 1624. The Dutch “purchased” Manhattan in 1626. The first charter was granted in 1653.

And the most notable event of 1625? Dutch settlers moved their cattle to Lower Manhattan from Governors Island.

“It is simply wrong,” Michael Miscione, the Manhattan borough historian, said of 1625 as the city’s birth date. “The first founding settlers of New York City landed here in 1624.”

. . .

The story of how the city arrived at 1625 as its founding year, however, seems a uniquely New York narrative. It entails machinations to glorify the Dutch, humiliate the British and, some believe, outdo Boston, thereby underscoring how in New York even something as seemingly inviolable as the city’s birthday is subject to political manipulation.

I guess it’s not a nice thing to wake up one morning next to an IKEA:

When she moved to her apartment five years ago, Perian Carson’s small corner of Red Hook in Brooklyn looked much different. An abandoned Civil War-era warehouse sat a few blocks away on Van Brunt Street. Nearby, along the cobblestones on Beard Street, she could see the remnants of the old Todd Shipyards, where ships were repaired in a massive graving dock.

It was a drowsy neighborhood where one could smell the harbor, a close-knit community where people signed for one another’s mail. Ms. Carson tended a small garden on the sidewalk near her building.

Today, the graving dock and many of the cobblestones are paved over, and from her garden, Ms. Carson sees something else: an enormous blue and yellow Ikea superstore, all 346,000 square feet of it, rising along the waterfront. The old warehouse is now a Fairway supermarket, with luxury rentals above.

“I’m at the fulcrum here,” Ms. Carson said one evening, as she tended to the lilies and goldenrod in her garden. “It’s so much at once.”

In the end, it may have been a gracious but hollow measure to rename the Triborough Bridge to honor Robert F. Kennedy:

What’s in a name, anyway? Would that which we call the Triborough Bridge by any other name — oh, let’s skip the Shakespeare and get to the point. Would anybody call the Triborough anything but the Triborough?

The short answer seems to be, no.

“It connects three boroughs,” said Susan Breslaoukhov, the manager of a French Connection clothing store in Rockefeller Center. “That’s self-explanatory, I expect people will keep calling it Triborough for a long time.”

The what-will-they-call-it question came up after the State Assembly voted to rename the Triborough the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, for the former attorney general who was elected to the United States Senate from New York in 1964. He died 40 years ago Friday, after being shot in Los Angeles, just after he won the California Democratic primary.

Gov. David A. Paterson is expected to sign the bill making the name change official. His predecessor, Eliot Spitzer, suggested the bridge renaming in January. At that time, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland and the eldest of Robert Kennedy’s 11 children, said, “This has been a dream for quite a while.”

But some said the renaming could be confusing for commuters. “It’s been that way for a million years,” said Morton Mozzar, an automobile-service consultant in Queens. “If they had renamed it right afterwards, O.K., like they did with J.F.K. Airport.” (The airport was called Idlewild but was renamed after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. It only seems as if the Triborough has been around for a million years. Next month it will have been open for 72 years.)

Some New Yorkers pointed to name changes that did not take. Consider the Marine Parkway-Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge, as it has been known for 30 years in honor of the former Brooklyn Dodgers first baseman and Mets manager.

Or what about renaming the Miller Highway the Joe DiMaggio? Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Gov. George E. Pataki agreed to that in 1999, soon after DiMaggio’s death.

The Miller Highway? Nobody called it that in the first place (except, perhaps, relatives of Julius Miller, the Manhattan borough president when the first section was opened in 1930). It ran from West 72nd Street to Battery Place and was not to be confused with the Henry Hudson Parkway, which runs north from 72nd.

“And what about the Thruway?” asked Mimi Marenberg of Airmont, N.Y. “Its name is the Thomas E. Dewey Thruway, but who calls it that? No one. How about Newark International Airport? No one calls it Liberty. We spend money on big signs, renaming these things, but all it does is generate money for the sign people.”

What about RFKTB? Like NKOTB, only more reverent . . .

Earlier: Few Will Have The Greatness To Bend The Span Between Queens And The Bronx.

Location Scout: Triborough Bridge.

The Vermontization of the Lower East Side:

The National Trust for Historic Preservation designated the Lower East Side of Manhattan as one of the 11 most endangered in places in America on Tuesday.

But for some people, the designation only makes explicit the obvious: that the wide swath of Manhattan well known for its immigrant communities and countercultural vibe has long ago given way to rampant real estate development and gentrification.

In a news conference at Seward Park High School, the National Trust warned that construction of new hotels and apartment towers threatened to efface the area’s immigrant past.

“The community, with little recourse for protection,” it said, “is reeling from the recent destruction of its cultural heritage, including the defacing of several historic structures and the loss of First Roumanian Synagogue. Slapdash and haphazard renovations have led to the destruction of architectural detail, while modern additions to historic buildings sharply contrast with the neighborhood’s scale and character.”

Now that Red Hook has passed its prime, it’s ready to be Wyominged*:

A reborn Cheyenne Diner could be serving up bison burgers, French fries and chocolate egg creams on Brooklyn’s Red Hook waterfront by the summer.

Preservationist Michael Perlman said Monday a contract has been signed to move the Cheyenne, one of the city’s last rail-car-style diners, to the Borough of Kings.

The Cheyenne, a landmark at 33th St. and Ninth Ave. in Manhattan for more than 50 years, closed April 6 to make way for a nine-story residential and commercial development.

Perlman, who formed a committee to save the diner, said Mike O’Connell of O’C Construction, the son of noted Red Hook developer Greg O’Connell, is the buyer.

*As in.

1847’s Rural Cemetery Act notwithstanding, it is still possible to be laid to rest in Manhattan:

Former Mayor Edward I. Koch said on Monday that he planned to stay in Manhattan — for good.

Mr. Koch, who turned 83 in December, said that he had purchased a burial plot in Trinity Church Cemetery.

“The idea of leaving Manhattan permanently irritates me,” said Mr. Koch, who represented the East Side in the City Council and in Congress before being elected to the first of three terms as mayor in 1977.

Trinity Church, part of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, operates a nondenominational cemetery at Broadway and 155th Street. Trinity describes the uptown cemetery as the only active cemetery in Manhattan that is still accepting burials.

. . .

The cemetery is on the site of one of the fiercest battles of the American Revolution. Trinity describes it as a grassy retreat, dotted by century-old elms and oaks, and “a special place of peace and tranquillity far from the chrome and glass towers of central Manhattan.”

Those buried include Clement Clarke Moore, who wrote “A Visit From St. Nicholas”; the artist and naturalist John James Audubon; the actor Jerry Orbach; and Mayor Fernando Wood, who proposed that the city secede from the Union during the Civil War and was later elected to Congress, where his colleagues censured him for intemperate remarks.

. . .

A mausoleum at the cemetery offers above-ground niches and crypts, but only a few below-ground burial plots remain vacant. Cemetery officials said they were reserved for special citizens.

Mr. Koch chose a plot on what he described as a “small mountain” overlooking Amsterdam Avenue, and he researched the propriety of being buried in a non-Jewish cemetery.

“I called a number of rabbis to see if this was doable,” he said. “I was going to do it anyway, but it would be nice if it were doable traditionally.”

He said he had been advised to request that the gate nearest his plot be inscribed as “the gate for the Jews,” and the cemetery agreed.

He was also instructed to have rails installed around his plot, so he ordered them.

Being buried in Manhattan, Mr. Koch said, would also make it easier for former constituents to visit.

“I’m extending an open invitation,” he said.

If you have a sick sense of humor, you can put Mom and Dad up there next time they come to visit:

Guests at Bellevue will soon be given bathrobes instead of straitjackets, if the city can convince a developer to turn its most famous nut house into a luxe hotel.

City officials yesterday said they’re confident the hospital’s old psychiatric ward, which until the mid-1980s provided something short of four-star accommodations to countless kooks and criminals, would help fill a void in Manhattan’s East Side medical corridor.

Originally, officials considered turning the 1931 Italian Renaissance-style building on First Avenue between 29th and 30th streets into condos, but oddly, the layout of a mental institution is better suited to a hotel, Melissa Konur, vice president of the city’s Economic Development Commission, told The Post.

“There are long corridors, and the rooms aren’t very big,” she said.

Even though officials expect the hotel and convention center would be marketed toward medical professionals and families of patients at nearby hospitals, it would be up to developers to deal with the building’s sordid past.

Not many hotels can claim Norman Mailer, Edie Sedgwick and Charlie Parker all spent the night, but the psych ward housed fewer sax players than ax murderers, said Dr. Frederick Covan, who for 14 years was its chief psychologist.

“Our patients were not normal New York neurotics, but very sick people – otherwise known as crazy,” Covan said.

“Most of the names were not recognizable, but we had one guy who bashed his mother’s brains in with an iron and then did gynecological surgery on her,” he said.

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

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

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

Location Scout: Gowanus Canal.

The BQE is historic, but not in a good way:

A state agency has lifted a puzzling bureaucratic roadblock that significantly delayed a long-awaited plan to replace the traffic-choked Kosciuszko Bridge.

The Historic Preservation Office last week abandoned its push to preserve the deteriorating bridge, thus ending an inter-agency squabble that delayed final approval of the project by at least six months, the Daily News confirmed Wednesday.

The state Transportation Department had originally anticipated receiving federal authorization for the roughly $700 million project — the final regulatory hurdle — by the end of last year.

However, as The News first reported last month, the DOT was forced to shelve the project last November after Historic Preservation objected to final design plans that call for the Kosciuszko to be demolished and replaced by two new parallel bridges.

Preservation officials deemed the aging span “a significant and unusual variation of the Warren truss type bridge” and argued that a rehab was “a prudent and feasible alternative to demolition,” according to a letter obtained by The News.

In response, DOT officials presented Historic Preservation with a report justifying replacement of the 1939 bridge, which carries the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway over Newtown Creek between Maspeth, Queens, and Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

The report addressed safety concerns, such as its steep grade and substandard merging lanes — factors responsible for bottlenecked traffic and a high accident rate, according to the DOT.

In a written response on Friday, Historic Preservation officials threw in the towel.

“We concur that there are no prudent and feasible alternatives to the demolition of this historic bridge,” an official wrote. “We find that correction of many of the substandard safety features would significantly alter character-defining features of the bridge.”

Well, I guess it’s better than a bus station, right? But Washington has a lot of stuff named for him. Just off the top of my head, there’s Washington Square Park, Washington, D.C., Washington State. But some cherry tree-cutting wooden-toothed sycophants want even more:

In a bid to rewrite a wrongly re-written history, a group of Park Slopers wants to change the name of J.J. Byrne Park so that it re-honors its original namesake — the one and only George Washington.

The park, which is bounded by Fourth and Fifth avenues and Third and Fourth streets, is currently named for an obscure Depression-era borough president.

The Beep vs. the Father of our Country? That’s about as fair a fight as Ron Paul vs. John McCain.

And J.J. Byrne is the loser in that metaphor, said Kim Maier, executive director of the Old Stone House, the recreated 17th-century Dutch farmhouse in the park.

“J.J. Byrne usurped the park,” Maier said, explaining that the current site had been Washington Park, the first professional baseball field in the country, since the 1800s. The site earned the name because it was near a pivotal moment in the Revolutionary War.

Thanks to the heroic efforts of a group of Maryland soldiers under the command of General William Alexander (don’t worry, he has a junior high school named after him nearby), Washington and the rest of the rag-tag American army was able to flee across Gowanus Creek and to safety in Manhattan.

“We’re merely changing the name of the park back to what it originally had,” said Maier.

Perhaps, but let us take a moment to praise J.J. Byrne before he’s buried forever.

Byrne was appointed to the borough presidency in 1926, after the death of legendary Beep Joseph Guilder. Byrne completed the term and was re-elected in 1929, but himself died in office the following year.

He’s credited with initiating or completing construction of the Municipal Building on Joralemon Street and the Central Court Building (now Brooklyn Criminal Court) on Schermerhorn Street.

His proclivity for grand construction was foreshadowed by his previous work as Brooklyn’s Commissioner of Public Works.

In that context, Maier’s support for the return of George Washington is particularly ironic, given that Byrne was the borough president who rebuilt the Old Stone House in 1930.

Now that I think about it, who is Nathanael Greene and why should we care?

. . . meanwhile, this guy collected the crap-ass burnt bits from the bottom of the oven and made a bagel out of it:

As is often the case (Post-its, the microwave), the genesis of the everything bagel was a “fluky-type thing,” [David] Gussin said the other day. When Gussin was fifteen, he took a part-time job at a takeout place in Howard Beach run by a guy named Charlie. It was a simpler time for bagels: you had plain, poppy, sesame, onion, salt, garlic, and — on the exotic end — cinnamon raisin. One of Gussin’s duties at closing time was to sweep up the burnt seeds that had fallen off in the oven during the day. Gussin developed a taste for them, and one afternoon — he guesses around 1980 — “instead of throwing them out, like I always did, I swept them into a bin and said, ‘Charlie, let’s make some with these!’ ”

Charlie, who was mildly enthusiastic about the idea, agreed to sell the newfangled bagels for a nickel extra. According to Gussin, the name “everything” came instantaneously. “There was no marketing meeting or anything like that,” he said. “It was a one-second thought process. Boom.” The flavor became popular “the next day,” and pretty soon Gussin’s brainchild — minus the burnt-seed concept — had spread to a bagel place over in Lindenwood. Within a year, Gussin said, “the everything bagel was everywhere.”

But then you’d be asking yourself Who is Ray Davies and why should I care? I can’t completely argue with you there:

He wore a trilby, Ray-Bans, a multicolored scarf, gray stovepipe jeans, and running shoes, and a skeptical expression that belied an affable mood. “The first time I came to New York, with the Kinks, in 1965, we stayed in the Hilton,” he said, heading north on Broadway, toward Columbus Circle. “I was too intimidated to go out. Everybody went out and partied, but I stayed in. I got my six-pack — well, they weren’t six-packs in those days — I got my crate of beer and just drank.”

The Time Warner Center was news to him — “This went up really quickly” — but of little interest. As he walked uptown he pointed out landmarks: the homes or offices of various collaborators or friends — the remastering man, the press agent, the Broadway arranger, the actress from “The Edge of Night” whose story of the cast’s singing its lines in rehearsals (out of boredom) inspired Davies to make the not-so-well-received concept album “The Kinks Present a Soap Opera.”

*Oh, OK, you really got me: “Your Mama And Your Papa And Fat Old Uncle Charlie Out Cruising With Their Friends”.

Brooklyn nostalgia reaches even more absurd heights:

Customers at Sahadi’s, Brooklyn’s primary stop on the Near Eastern spice route, are still fuming that the grocer has replaced the classic glass jars with generic plastic containers in the nuts, dried fruits and candies section.

“Everyone is talking about it,” said Charlie Sahadi, the second-generation owner. “No one likes change less than me,” but “my concern is about my customers, not about my jars.”

The jars were a big part of the shopping experience at Sahadi’s. The store, open since 1948, contained dozens of large, circular glass jars, each containing a different kind of nut, dried fruit or candy. Customers would take a number and wait for an employee to scoop out their order.

The shapely glass jars made a distinctive clinking noise when lid made contact with base, but that repeated clinking led to chipping, with bits of glass ending up in the food.

In other stores, a change like this would be insignificant, but like other recent changes to the Atlantic Avenue grocery, famous for foods of the Levant, anything that tinkers with the old-time atmosphere is sure to draw fire.

“I don’t like them,” said one longtime shopper who didn’t want to give her name. “The new ones look like any deli. I prefer to see broken glass because it has more identity.”

And Fats Domino is still around:

Keep your eye out. Fats Domino could show up anywhere in New York at any moment. He now has the “freedom of the city.” And an official, five-and-three-quarters-inch-long gold-plated pewter key to prove it.

To honor Mr. Domino’s fund-raising efforts on behalf of the struggling musicians of New Orleans, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg presented him with a key to New York City on Thursday night, following a municipal custom going back 305 years. (The key was presented at the Pink Elephant club in Chelsea, a municipal custom going back only to Thursday night.)

Mr. Bloomberg may be better known for his advocacy of the latest technology than his fondness for historical pomp, but he has managed to hand out 28 keys so far in his mayoralty; not a bad clip compared with his immediate predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who had presented 32 keys by this point in his second term.

“Even as times change and technology advances, the key to the city symbolizes how New York City’s gates will always remain open,” said Matthew Kelly, a spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg.

Except as David Dunlap’s article points out, the key isn’t all that symbolic and really hasn’t changed all that much:

Ashburns Engravers of 90 John Street, six blocks from City Hall, makes the keys. They cost $100 each. A supply is always kept on hand in the mayor’s office. They are presented in black velour-covered boxes with a small plate on top saying, “Facsimile of key made in 1812 for the door of City Hall, New York.”

In fact, a jumbo skeleton key about nine inches long and bearing notches similar to the mayoral key is still used to unlock the rear door of City Hall.

And A-Rod has one, too (a gift from Bloomberg). I’m just saying . . .

The Landmarks Commission stokes, er, fans the, er, throws oil, er, should we say provocatively draws a link between the Greenpoint Terminal Market Fire and current preservation efforts around the neighborhood:

A city panel has landmarked Greenpoint’s Eberhard Faber pencil factory and several surrounding buildings — just in time, one commissioner remarked, to protect the building from “development fever [and] fires.”

In addition to the most famous of the Eberhard buildings — the factory at 61 Greenpoint Ave. with its distinctive pencil-shaped adornments . . . — the Landmarks Preservation Commission also protected eight other 19th- and 20th-century factory buildings, placing them all in the “Eberhard Faber Pencil Company Historic District.”

The district abuts the Greenpoint Terminal Market, a warehouse complex that burned in a suspicious fire last year — an incident in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood that was evoked by Brooklyn Commissioner Elizabeth Ryan during Tuesday’s hearing.

“Development fever is raging through the neighborhood — as well as fires — so the sooner this is protected, the better,” she said.

The Second Avenue Deli is now a bank and the site of an infamous 1950s mob hit is — what else? — now a Starbucks:

The barista stood stock still, her cold eyes glistening off the cool metal of the espresso machine. She grabbed the handle, and bang! bang! a few quick hits to the side, and before anyone knew what was happened, a Macchiato, double-shot, lay steaming on the counter.

Fifty years ago Thursday, in the same spot that very espresso machine sat coldly whipping nonfat mocha lattes, perhaps the most notorious mob hit in history happened.

Albert Anastasia, the powerful leader of Murder Inc., a man believed to be have personally killed 36 people, stopped in what was then a barber shop in the Park Sheraton Hotel’s lobby on West 57th Street. As he dozed in the chair, two gunmen walked in and fired a barrage of lead into the crime boss.

. . .

It is difficult today to stand on tiled floor of the Starbucks and imagine the pool of blood where the man nicknamed “The Executioner” once lay.

Those ghosts are all gone amid customers sipping Tazo teas and leaning over laptops, oblivious to the murder that captivated most of the country five decades ago. Back where the barber stood before the gunmen barged past him, a sign advertises the Starbucks song of the day: Dave Matthews’ “Grace is Gone.”

“You think people care?” says one barista, out on a smoke break and checking her Sidekick, and who, as per company policy, would not give her name. “That was 50 years ago. Trust me. They just want their coffee and they want to get on their way.”

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.

Yeah, I suppose one could reach that conclusion:

During a crime wave in the winter of 1857, Harvey Burdell, a prominent dentist who lived at 31 Bond St. in Greenwich Village, was found in his office strangled and stabbed 15 times.

Suspicion soon fell on his mistress, Emma Cunningham, a 36-year-old widow who Burdell had taken into his home along with her five children.

“She needed a wealthy new husband willing to take on five children,” said Benjamin Feldman, author of “Butchery on Bond Street,” a new book about the case. “And she made a bad choice.”

Burdell, according to Feldman, “took ruthless advantage” of Cunningham\], routinely raping her, impregnating her two times, and twice performing an abortion on her with his hands.

Still, she needed the money and respectability a husband would bring, and so, when Burdell refused to do right by her, she hired an imposter to stand in for him at a wedding ceremony. When this ruse failed, she took to violence.

“I never in my life have heard a story that incorporated so much dysfunction and sociopathic behavior between a man and woman,” Feldman said.

. . .

Comparing the frenzy that trial produced to the O.J. Simpson case 135 years later, Feldman thought it was significant how little had actually changed in the relationship between the sexes in the big city.

“I don’t know if life is all that different today,” he said. “Take a look at Craigslist. The technology is different, but you still see women searching for sugar daddies and all that kind of stuff. The only difference is that in the middle of the 19th century it was OK to do that.”

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.

As St. Vincent’s midtown hospital closes, a lifetime of memories goes with it:

A recent block party to commemorate the closing of St. Vincent’s midtown hospital (until 2003, it was called St. Clare’s), at Fifty-second Street and Ninth Avenue, could have passed for any Labor Day cookout: hamburgers on the grill, beer in Solo cups, Italian ice served from the back of an ambulance. Then you caught a scrap of conversation: “Hey, Mike, remember the jumper at the Carter Hotel who got impaled on the fence? That was your guy, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Mike Rosenblum, a former paramedic who’s now a doctor in Springfield, Massachusetts. “He jumped off a building trying to kill himself, and got harpooned two floors below, like this.” (Rosenblum arched his back.) “So he was hanging off the side of the building, probably looking at beautiful downtown Manhattan and the Empire State Building in the distance. And when we got there he said, ‘You know, when you try to kill yourself you never expect something like this to happen.’ And we were like, ‘You’re right! It is unusual.’ ”

The hospital is itself an anomaly: the city’s first 24/7 paramedic unit, it managed, despite periods of bankruptcy, to see Times Square and Hell’s Kitchen through the heroin and crack epidemics of the seventies, eighties, and nineties. In 1998, Joe Connelly, a St. Clare’s ambulance driver, wrote a book based on his experiences there, called “Bringing Out the Dead,” which Martin Scorsese made into a movie. The hospital is the first of several to be shut down by a task force known as the Berger Commission, which aims to consolidate New York State’s health resources. (Fire Department paramedics will take up the slack.)

“Remember the night we picked up one of the musicians from ‘Saturday Night Live’?” Fred Kavanagh, a heavyset ex-medic who’s now a physician’s assistant, asked. “That was another drug-related one.” “And the one who married the millionaire?” Rosenblum said. “Anna Nicole Smith!” (Her mother was sick.) One partygoer said he knew the paramedics at the scene of Nelson Rockefeller’s death. Other famous patients: Stevie Nicks (slipped in the studio), Barry Manilow (allergic reaction), Henny Youngman (pneumonia), Roger Moore (fainted), Shawn Bradley (basketball injury), Tennessee Williams (swallowed the cap of his pill bottle, fatally), and Ian Schrager — who collapsed in a hotel next to Studio 54 while getting fitted for a tuxedo. “He’d been standing still for a long time, and he was getting hot,” Rosenblum said. Kavanagh added, “He was not too happy to see us.”

The obvious follow-up question is who these five people are:

Con Ed is no longer AC/DC.

The utility has won state permission to switch off its direct current service, which Thomas Edison powered up in Manhattan 125 years ago yesterday. It now provides DC power to just five customers in Manhattan.

The Public Service Commission order is the last gasp of a century-old war between Edison, a direct-current proponent, and Nikola Tesla, who invented alternating current.

The phrase “too soon” begins its third life as irrelevant pop culture reference:

Again it comes, for the sixth time now — 2,191 days after that awful morning — falling for the first time on a Tuesday, the same day of the week.

Again there will be the public tributes, the tightly scripted memorial events, the reflex news coverage, the souvenir peddlers.

Is all of it necessary, at the same decibel level — still?

Each year, murmuring about Sept. 11 fatigue arises, a weariness of reliving a day that everyone wishes had never happened. It began before the first anniversary of the terrorist attack. By now, though, many people feel that the collective commemorations, publicly staged, are excessive and vacant, even annoying.

“I may sound callous, but doesn’t grieving have a shelf life?” said Charlene Correia, 57, a nursing supervisor from Acushnet, Mass. “We’re very sorry and mournful that people died, but there are living people. Let’s wind it down.”

. . .

David Hendrickson, 56, a computer software trainer who lives in Manhattan, said he began being somewhat irritated by the attention to the commemoration on the third anniversary. “It seems a little much to me to still be talking about this six years later,” he said. “I understand it’s a sad thing. I understand it’s a tragedy. I’ve had my own share of tragedies — my uncle was killed in a tornado. But you get on. I have the sense that some people are living on their victimhood, which I find a little tiring.”

On a different note, here’s one of the more interesting ways everything changed on 9/11:

Where you were, your proximity to the attack — these things shade your tie to the anniversary. On Sept. 11, Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history and education at New York University, was crossing Washington Square in Greenwich Village and was approached by a panhandler, whom he brushed off. The panhandler then said, “The World Trade Center is on fire.”

Dr. Zimmerman didn’t even look. Not until he got to his office did he find out it was truth. “I now pay more attention to what homeless people say,” he said.

If this were today, we’d have a YouTube video to confirm:

Edith Shain, long thought to be the woman in the famous V-J day photograph of a nurse and a sailor kissing to celebrate the end of World War II, reasserted Tuesday that it was in fact her in the picture.

Monday, Glenn McDuffie, an 80-year-old Houston retiree, cast doubts on the true identity of the woman, telling amNewYork, “I know the woman I kissed, and she ain’t it.”

Nonsense, she insisted. “This latest man, no way. I ask all of the men who claim it was them what was going on around us, what they said to me, and this one didn’t know.”

. . .

Reached Tuesday at her home in Santa Monica, Shain said she doubted McDuffie’s claim that he’s the sailor.

“There is no way of knowing who it actually was,” she said. “A lot of men over the years have claimed to be the sailor and there is now way to negate them — I bet they all kissed a lot of women that day.”

Whoever locked lips that day was no matter to the estimated 300 people who showed up at Times Square yesterday to re-enact the iconic photograph. Veterans from World War II and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were on hand along with couples from around the country for the annual Times Square Kiss-In.

“I was here when it happened,” said Abner Greenberg, 83, of Manhattan, who remembered kissing more girls that day 62 years ago than he ever had in his life. “People were hugging each other, men, women, it didn’t matter. I’d never seen anything like it.”

An estimated 2 million people, said to be the largest crowd ever assembled in human history, rushed to the square to celebrate the end of the war.

No wonder Shain denies it — the sailor sounds like a cad:

McDuffie, 80, of Houston, was identified last week by a forensic artist as the man in the famous Life Magazine photo — taken 62 years ago Tuesday — of a soldier and a nurse smooching in Times Square to celebrate victory over Japan in World War II.

McDuffie says he wants nothing to do with the annual “Kiss-In” celebration Tuesday or with Edith Shain, 87, who has long been believed to be the woman in the photo, until she submits to the battery of polygraph tests that he has undergone over the years to prove his identity.

. . .

In fact, McDuffie said he had tried to reach out to Shain through the years, but that she was far less receptive than she may have been on Broadway that day.

“She’s been a smart ass about it all the time so I hung up on her,” he said.

. . .

McDuffie said he was in the city that day to see his girlfriend, Ardith Bloomfield, who lived in Brooklyn, when word came that the war was over.

“I went over there and kissed her and saw a man running at us,” McDuffie recalled. “I thought it was a jealous husband or boyfriend coming to poke me in the eyes. I looked up and saw he was taking the picture and I kissed her as long as it took for him to take it.”

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.

I know it’s a good deal, but you never want to get to the point where you become “that guy”:

For twenty-two years, the photographer Josef Astor (no relation) has had a studio above the stage at Carnegie Hall. It’s on the eighth floor, although technically the eighth is below the seventh; to get to it you take an elevator to six and walk up half a flight of stairs. The Carnegie Hall Studio Towers, as these quarters over the concert hall are known, contain many such oddities, but they also harbor one Manhattan commonplace: a band of artist-occupants whose tenancy is venerable, tenuous, and probably doomed.

Astor is one of the leaders of the tenants’ association, which is fighting the landlord, the Carnegie Hall Corporation, which wants them all out. It intends to gut the building and make space for its own offices and programs. It has recently commenced eviction proceedings. The fifty or so artists who occupy the studios — most of them have been here for decades — contend that a provision in the lease between the corporation and the city, which owns the property, guarantees their right to stay.

Astor’s studio, with creaky wood floors, faces north; the indirect light, from a giant skylight, twenty feet overhead, is ideal for photography and painting. There is a balcony, with room for a bed, and a kitchenette. Last Wednesday, he’d arranged a dozen chairs—no one like the other — in a circle, in anticipation of a meeting, that evening, between some tenants, their lawyer (a woman named Ms. Boop), and local politicians, whose vaguely articulated sympathies they hoped to convert into tactical support. A Senegal parrot named Zoltan flew freely about the place. Astor ticked off the names of some of the studios’ former residents (Isadora Duncan, Agnes de Mille, Leonard Bernstein, Marlon Brando, Norman Mailer) and current ones (such as the ninety-five-year-old photographer Editta Sherman, known as the Duchess of Carnegie Hall, and the Times photographer Bill Cunningham, seen occasionally in the hall on his way to the showers) and evoked the days when the corridors were filled with the sounds of piano and clarinet.

. . .

Astor led the way up some stairs to the fourteenth floor, then across the building and down some more stairs to the eleventh, to a studio occupied by the writer and radio host Jonathan Schwartz, who was eating an avocado, under a framed print that read “AVOCADO.” He’d been in the space since 1970, having inherited it from his father, the composer Arthur Schwartz. “I represent Carnegie Hall when I’m out in the world,” he said. “I hope that’s not presumptuous.”

He lives here with his cat, Nelson (named after Nelson Riddle), and occasionally with his wife, whom he married in the building in 1984. The wedding was in Studio 906, which had belonged to Joe Raposo, who wrote music for “Sesame Street.” Wilfrid Sheed and Jerzy Kosinski had been there. “The party spilled out onto the landing,” he said. “We had a big glass bowl of caviar.”

The studio, full of books, CDs, and not much else, gave rise to that old misguided desire for a prison sentence that would afford a man the time to catch up on his reading. “That’s one of the points here,” Schwartz said. “There are dozens of studios like this in the building that have, if not this essence, then another like it. It’s not a conceit — it’s a feeling. To dislodge us is insulting.”

(Exit question: should a rent-control parasite admit that he’s also a “die hard Red Sox fan”? We’re coming for that songbook, Schwartz!)