Hizzoner wanted a blue-collar house in Queens for his newest TV ad — and paid an eye-popping Manhattan rent to use it Thursday for just seven hours.

Bloomberg’s campaign shelled out $3,000 to a Forest Hills homeowner to shoot scenes in the garage, living room and bathroom of his 2-1/2-story, single-family residence on a tree-lined block.

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[The homeowner] wouldn’t say how much he was paid. But location scout Robert Chemtob, who was hired by Epand Media to find a working-class home for the mayor’s ad, estimated the fee at $3,000.

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[The homeowner] insisted he didn’t know the content of the ad.

Chemtob would only say it included a scene with a man singing in the shower. He said the spot is expected to hit airwaves in a few weeks.

When a homemade bomb constructed from fireworks explosives, a plastic bottle and electrical tape was set off outside a Starbucks coffee shop on the Upper East Side early on May 25, the police initially thought the explosion might be linked to three others with similar profiles.

But on Wednesday, after the arrest of a Chelsea teenager in the Starbucks attack, the police said there was no connection between that attack and the three others. Instead, the Starbucks bomber had his own agenda, the police said: to emulate the assaults on corporate America planned by a character in the movie “Fight Club.”

The teenager, Kyle Shaw, 17, was arrested Tuesday night and charged with first-degree arson and first-degree criminal possession of a weapon, the authorities said.

“His statements indicated he was launching his own ‘Project Mayhem,’ ” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said at a news conference on Wednesday, referring to a plan hatched by the protagonist of “Fight Club,” played by Brad Pitt, to sabotage corporations by destroying property. Mr. Shaw had told a friend to “watch the news on Memorial Day,” May 25, Mr. Kelly said.

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Mr. Shaw’s affinity for “Fight Club” was well known.

“He saw the movie and he read the book,” Mr. Lewis said. “He wanted to watch the movie in our English class in the 11th grade. We were discussing existentialism in class, and he suggested we watch the movie as an example. We ended up watching ‘I Heart Huckabees.’ “

The only thing Mayor Bloomberg’s new tough-on-crime ad is missing from “Law & Order” is that goofy noise you hear when they change scenes.

Bloomberg’s new commercial features him chatting up authentic-looking police officers whose insignia and patrol car identify them as members of the NYPD’s 27th Precinct.

The NYPD has no 27th Precinct — except on the long-running crime show.

Bloomberg spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker says the officers in the spot are off-duty cops — although not in official uniforms — who volunteered to appear in the ad.

Government workers and property can’t be used for political purposes, she said, so the campaign rented the fake NYPD uniforms and squad car.

Similarly, Bloomberg’s new ads touting his support of public schools were actually shot in the private Xaverian High School in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

Awakened residents thought it was a gas explosion, maybe a sonic boom. Others figured an espresso machine inside the Starbucks had blown up. One woman, walking by the dozens of official-looking law enforcement folks inside the crime-scene tape, explained to her young daughter how similar shows like “C.S.I.” are filmed before realizing the asphalt was no stage.

“This is the real deal?” she said with a gasp. “I’m explaining it like it was a movie.” She grabbed her daughter’s hand and hurried away.

The growing realization that the commotion at 92nd Street and Third Avenue on Monday morning derived from a small explosive device rather than a script left nearby residents stunned, curious and ultimately frightened.

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Some noted how much it looked like television, while others experienced an odd collision between fiction and fact.

“It sounded like a bomb, to the extent that I know what a bomb sounds like,” said Casey Mallinckrodt, who was awakened with her family in their apartment one block north on 93rd Street. “It’s confusing. Obviously we don’t live in a bomb-riddled city most of the time. And bombing a Starbucks doesn’t seem like a terrifically pointed act of terrorism towards a community. It seems as though it might be a statement towards Starbucks.”

Critics are calling foul on a plan to rent the fabled West Fourth Street Courts today for a private gala.

Clothing designer Joseph Abboud is paying the city $14,100 to rent the Greenwich Village playground, affectionately known as “The Cage,” for the private launch of a fashion line with JCPenney and the NBA.

. . .

The Cage is widely known for hosting hardcore playground basketball games and helping the pro games of Hall of Famer “Dr. J” Julius Erving and other NBA greats

Paul Lerner, a Joseph Abboud spokesman, said “the setting of the legendary street basketball court really helps us depict” the designer’s new JOE collection — which is tailored for the regular guy.

A movie chase scene got too realistic early today when a car jumped a curb during a film shoot and smashed into the entrance of a Times Square restaurant, injuring two people, police and witnesses said.

The action scene gone awry unfolded at the Sbarro at 47th Street and Seventh Avenue shortly before 1 a.m.

Street closing notices posted by the police indicated the shoot was for the Nicholas Cage film, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

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Mark Watkins, a tourist from Birmingham, England, watched the live action chase from the top of the new TKTS booth.

“A black Ferrari and a silver Mercedes were chasing each other,” he said.

“The Ferrari took a route down the center of the road, swerving between cars. The Mercedes took the outside lanes.

“The Ferrari took a sharp right to the left and lost it, swerving across the lanes, taking out a lamppost and a news stand.

“One lady was knocked to the ground and a lamppost landed directly on top of a chap.”

Horrifying video at link.

Erick Pulido, 29, who lives in a condominium three buildings down, said he measured his shock over the killing with the realities of city life. “Things happen all the time, it’s a big city,” Mr. Pulido said.

Mr. Pulido said that while on his way to work on Monday morning he noticed the police swarming around Ms. Lee’s building.

“I thought they might have been filming a movie so I just left,” he said.

Laid off in December from a private equity firm downtown, Trent Calabretta, 26, found himself last month within a cubicle’s length of Angelina Jolie on a Manhattan set for the movie “Salt.”

“I’m not one to get star-struck, but it was a bit surreal,” Mr. Calabretta said. “There were thousands of people there, and we were going up and down Park Avenue for this one parade scene. People were playing military officials and past presidents, and everyone was in different uniforms, and we were all trying to come together to shoot this one scene. When I saw Jolie, my first thought was, ‘Well, she’s definitely not ugly.’ ”

The $8 an hour Mr. Calabretta earned as a nonunion extra — more recently, he was on the set of the CW’s “Gossip Girl” — will not cover the $1,750-per-month rent on his Upper East Side apartment, but he hopes the money he saved during three and a half years in finance will last until he finds a similar job.

“I’ve gotten a few paychecks as an extra, but I haven’t even looked at them yet,” Mr. Calabretta said. “My intention is to get back into finance, and in the interim, I’m going to keep doing these fun little side jobs.”

Managers at casting agencies around New York said they were seeing increasing numbers of people like Mr. Calabretta who have little experience in, or even aspirations for, acting, but are filling hours they used to spend at office jobs with gigs as extra, also called background, talent.

At Extra Talent Agency, a Manhattan firm that casts extras for commercials, television shows and documentary films, the actor database swelled to 9,680 in March from 6,850 in December. Fleet Emerson, assistant casting director at Sylvia Fay/Lee Genick and Associates Casting, has seen correspondence from aspiring extras triple over the past several months, something he called “quite a phenomenon.” And Grant Wilfley Casting, also in Manhattan, had open calls for new background talent in February and March that yielded 1,500 and 1,300 people, respectively.

*Location Scout: Old Tucson.

Television shows shot in New York will be going the way of the Betamax if lawmakers don’t allow for film and television industry tax breaks in the new state budget, industry folks say.

“If this program is curtailed in any way, it will force shows to re-evaluate their future in New York,” said one industry executive.

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

The opening of a new Indian restaurant in Jackson Heights may not raise eyebrows — that is, unless it does not actually serve food and its owner is “Daily Show” correspondent and actor Aasif Mandvi.

For several weeks, the Tandoori Palace has been open (and closed) for business along a busy strip of 37th Avenue in Jackson Heights as Mandvi and director David Kaplan (who shot the 2007 Sundance Film Festival entry “Year of the Fish”) filmed “7 to the Palace,” an independent Tandoori comedy in which the diverse neighborhood acts as a character.

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Producer Lillian LaSalle said the film’s crew set up shop at neighborhood eatery Ashoka, at 74-14 37th Ave., one month ago, designing a sign for the film’s fictional restaurant and using local businesses as office space.

“If you’d drive by, you would see our awning,” she said. “The locals kept wanting to go into the restaurant and check it out, so we had to put a sign on the door that said, ‘This is not a restaurant, it’s a [movie] set.’ But we’ve been honored to shoot here. The business owners have been very enthusiastic and incredibly accommodating. On one day, I used a hair salon as my office and, in days prior, we set up in an Afghan kebab house.”

LaSalle, also Mandvi’s manager, said the film completed shooting the Jackson Heights scenes last weekend and would next film sequences at Bayside’s Fort Totten before wrapping in early August.