You’d think that garaging your Porsche in Manhattan was a fairly inelastic expenditure. Not these days:

Garage managers in the swanky 10021 ZIP code say the recession has driven away customers, and it’s little wonder with monthly fees hitting $800 or more. An extra $100 is often tacked on for exotic cars.

Rolls-Royce owner Jonathan Martin said he’s fed up with paying about $500 a month for the privilege of parking and recently started searching for free spaces with the masses.

“The garage rates keep going up around here,” he said.

Hahahahahaha. See ya, I wouldn’t want to be ya:

If you can’t get to the mountains or the shore on this last big weekend of the summer, a Central Park getaway can provide city habitués with nearly everything they might want for a weekend away at a fraction of the cost.

The Post does the heavy lifting, getting inside of the Standard Hotel and uncovering the horrible truth about the Standard’s viral campaign:

“We don’t discourage it. In actual fact, we encourage it,” a friendly bellhop told a pair of reporters as they checked in yesterday at The Standard, where randy guests cavort with abandon to the dismay — or delight — of parkgoers below.

After the hotel opened late last year, the bellhop said, naked and semidressed staff members were encouraged to pose in front of the windows. The point, he said, was to create a buzz with the unexpected peep show.

“One of the managers even got naked in a room, and filmed it — they were considering a live feed for the Web site,” the staffer said. “She’s an exhibitionist, too.”

Because of course nothing delights a parkgoer more than catching a middle-aged European tourist jacking off in the window . . . so edgy!

Location Scout: High Line.

And I guess he’s had a better year, so far at least:

Robert R. Hammond, 39, an artist and entrepreneur who had no experience in the world of public parks, has been paid about $1.2 million over the years of the High Line’s development — the vast majority of it since 2005. And his salary of $250,000 a year as president and executive director of the nonprofit he helped found, Friends of High Line, makes him one of the most generously compensated leaders of the 10 major park conservancies in the city.

. . .

Mr. Hammond’s salary, found in the organization’s tax filings, falls short of that of Douglas Blonsky, president of the Central Park Conservancy and administrator of the park. He earns a salary of $364,000 a year. But Mr. Hammond’s salary is considerably greater than his counterpart at the 526-acre Prospect Park in Brooklyn and about $45,000 better than the city’s parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe, who oversees approximately 1,700 parks, playgrounds and other recreation facilities.

. . .

The High Line said that Mr. Hammond’s compensation stems from the challenges of operating a park perched roughly 30 feet in the air with a fire code capacity, managing major fund-raising campaigns and working with the city to oversee the design and construction of the High Line, among other duties.

Wow, 30 whole feet in the air . . . maybe if you divide that by 15 feet, which seems to be how wide the thing is, and multiply that by 20 blocks long, you get some sort of formula that comes out to $250,000 a year . . . good thing they decided not to tax everyone within a mile of the place. But then again, you can’t get a peep show as easily in any other park in the city.

You could call it an elevated train track that was converted into a park. Or you could conceive of it as an “urban catwalk,” if you prefer:

Gaspar Libedinsky, one of the High Line park designers, was all for the voyeurism: “It is like an urban catwalk. It is a place to see and be seen.”

Location Scout: High Line.

Because of course when you open a nice new $150 million park, you want people coming out in droves to enjoy the view:

Grandparent Gwen Barrett said the neighborhood has always been edgy.

“That kind of stuff here is anticipated,” she said.

Still, “I definitely wouldn’t want to bring my grandkids here,” she added.

See Also: “Two Parks” . . .

Location Scout: High Line.

Of course people are going to want to take pictures:

The dirty and creepy character demanded money from people and, when he didn’t get it, swore and jostled them.

“No picture. No picture. You have to tip Elmo. You have to tip Elmo or Elmo gets angry,” the imposter shouted as he stuck a filthy red paw over a Texas tourist’s camera lens.

“What the hell, Elmo? Keep your hands to yourself,” shouted Victoria Vought, 47, pulling away.

Wide-eyed at the loud to-do, Vought’s son, Dylan, 4, asked, “What’s wrong with Elmo, Mommy?”

“That’s not the real Elmo. That’s a bad Elmo,” she quickly explained.

Tishman Speyer’s Stuyvesant Town resembles dorm now that leasing agents make it easier to convert one-bedroom apartments into two-bedroom dwellings:

A young, chirpy brunette showed us a model one-bedroom apartment that had a pressurized wall built in the living room so it could comfortably work as a two-bedroom. The unit had recently undergone luxury upgrades such as granite countertops, new appliances, posh lighting fixtures, a renovated bathroom and brand-new air conditioners. Even with the wall, the living room and both bedrooms were considerably larger and nicer than any apartment we had seen through Craigslist. We would have both a trendy East Village address and be surrounded by trees, green lawns, street hockey and basketball courts. It was the perfect surrounding to sit and study or play Wiffle Ball. Stuy Town felt like the college campus that NYU could never deliver.

The $170 million High Line project is a great way to raise property values, so it makes sense to find new ways to pay for all those thin wooden planks that will surely have to be replaced sooner rather than later:

Facing crowds that are much larger than expected and with the recession putting a crimp in fund-raising, the High Line’s founders are proposing a business improvement district that would tax nearby property owners.

“We want to make sure we can keep maintaining the High Line to this level that has worked so well,” said Friends of the High Line co-founder Robert Hammond. “We’ve been talking about it for a while, but now it’s becoming more of a necessity.”

Hammond said that weekend crowds have averaged 20,000 visitors a day, while weekdays typically draw between 6,000 and 10,000 visitors — about four times as many as predicted before the park’s opening on June 9.

With the added crowds have come higher maintenance costs, Hammond said.

. . .

A business improvement district would raise about $1 million a year, leaving Friends of the High Line to come up with the balance from donations and fund-raisers.

The annual fee for the owner of a 1,000-square-foot apartment would range from $30 to $90, depending on where they live.

“When we were planning the park, we didn’t know we’d be in the middle of a recession when it opened,” Hammond said, adding that the group has raised enough money to be able to keep up with the costs for the next year.

Do you ever wonder why the city took such an interest in a 15-foot-wide $170 million project? I do, too.

Location Scout: High Line.

I don’t know, but I doubt it would involve setting off firecrackers in front of Starbucks, as is alleged:

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.

. . .

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.’ “

So many salient details in such a short story — which one do you focus on? Is it A) That honeybees are back? B) That they’re taking over the Upper East Side? C) That the police department has a beekeeper? or D) That the story comes out suspiciously close to a bill being floated by the Council to legalize beekeeping? Mind reels:

Some 8,000 to 10,000 honeybees had surreptitiously moved into the neighborhood sometime in the past month and managed to build a giant hive in a tree between 80th and 81st streets without anyone noticing.

The queen decided to bust out at around 4 p.m., and flew south for a half-block before returning home.

She was followed dutifully on her outing by all of her subjects.

“It was a three foot column of bees,” said Doug Becker, 40.

Police Officer Anthony Planakis, the NYPD’s resident beekeeper for 30 years, said it was “one of the biggest swarms I’ve ever seen.”

He took all the bees into custody as a crowd of onlookers applauded, and said he’d bring them “to a farm in Connecticut to pollinate.”

This bees got loose only days after a swarm of amateur beekeepers buzzed around City Hall in support of a bill to legalize their hobby.

As if losing Hiram Monserrate wasn’t bad enough, now there’s this:

Rumors have been going around lately that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are making a big move to New York. We heard it for the first time from Nat Hentoff, who told us a few weeks ago that he’d heard it from doormen on his block of west 12th Street in the Village.

. . .

During another visit we talked to a doorman in the neighborhood who said: “Can’t tell you who lives there. I would lose my job. But you know, we doormen know everything that goes on around here. I can tell you the owner won’t be there much because he’ll be filming in LA a lot, and I can tell you he bought the house for his wife, who was in a Broadway show.” The doorman smiled, “But I can’t tell you who it is. I could lose my job.”

And then you remember where you are:

Organizers say the Greenmarket, held every Thursday, will further chip away at the terminal’s dingy, dirty reputation from yesteryear.

“This market is the next chapter in the terminal’s evolution,” said Susan Bass Levin, deputy director of the Port Authority, acknowledging it was once “a place you would hesitate to go.”

While signs posted on brick pillars still warn that “no person shall spit, urinate or defecate” on terminal property, some of the 210,000 people who pass through every day were delighted to see produce from upstate farms in midtown.

. . .

“I personally wouldn’t eat there,” said Ronald Goodie, 63, of Fort Greene, Brooklyn. “With all the dirt coming in and out of this place, no way, not for me. Why would they pick this place of all places to do that?”

Al Jean-Babziste, 38, also of Brooklyn, agreed, saying, “You touch the door handles and the booths, and it’s all so dirty, and then you sell fruit? I don’t know about that.”

Location Scout: Port Authority.

Because that’s what I would have assumed, being that the last “pimp” I saw in Times Square was probably Terrence Howard at the AMC Empire 25:

In a shooting that recalled the grittier days of Times Square, one pimp murdered another Tuesday just outside a swanky hotel filled with tourists, police said.

The two pimps got into a “business dispute” on W. 43rd St. in front of the glitzy Westin Hotel just before 5:30 a.m., police said.

“That’s what people on the street are telling us — that what they did for a living, and the dispute, had something to do with that business,” Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said.

Location Scout: Times Square.

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.

You can decide if that counts as a “sweeping vision” or just a series of small-bore Clinton-esque tweaks. As for the lawn furniture, the big so-called traffic-reducing Broadway pedestrian mall initiative apparently has met at least one of its goals:

While tourists and others enjoyed moseying around the traffic-free oasis on its first business day as a pedestrian mall, anyone making a delivery around Times Square fumed.

Drivers said streets surrounding the blocked-off areas were clogged with traffic — and pulling in front of a business to unload heavy boxes became a thing of the past.

“This is making my job more challenging,” said Steven McFadden, 48, a deliveryman for Citi Storage. “Longer walks to loading entrances, more competition for parking, more time for fewer deliveries and more parking tickets.”

John Gannon, 55, a mail carrier, predicted a long summer with traffic blocked off.

“For anybody who has to make a curbside delivery, it will be a problem. You’d have to park and walk a block or two,” he said. “If [Mayor] Bloomberg wants it to last, though, it’ll last.”

And you can amend the post title to include “Naked Cowboys” in the mayor’s sweeping vision:

Times Square and Herald Square vendors are cashing in on the car-free Broadway.

Everyone from food and souvenir hawkers to street performers said they were rolling in the dough yesterday thanks to the flood of pedestrians on the Great White Way.

“It is the coolest thing in the world. My business has quadrupled. It is like New Year’s Eve every day,” crowed the “Naked Cowboy,” Robert Burck.

[Introduce link here, perhaps by rewriting lede in stylish, snarky fashion]:

For the adult kickball teams battling it out in front of Public School 142 on the lower East Side this week, the game is about bonding with friends new and old, getting some open air exercise and reliving long-forgotten schoolyard exploits.

. . .

“It makes you feel like you are 10 years old,” said Ryan Stuczynski, 27, a banker and kickball player who also moonlights as a paid umpire for the league. He says the players take the game pretty seriously, even though they are on a playground.

“People are pretty adamant,” he said. “I try to run down the line and show everyone that I am into it, too.”

Apparently you can escape a five-story fall in a vehicle with only minor cuts and scrapes:

Shortly after 3 p.m. today a silver Mercedes fell out of the fifth floor window of the Hertz parking garage (12 E. 13th St.) behind NYU’s Fairchild building at 7 E. 12 St., landing on the courtyard behind the NYU building. The driver, a parking attendant at the garage, was transported to St. Vincent’s Hospital in stable condition, suffering from minor scrapes and cuts. The accident was reportedly due to brake failure, according to the NYU Office of Emergency Management.

. . .

Ninette Gironella, who works in the Registrar’s office on the third floor, was sitting in her office when she saw the car back out and fall. Recalling the response of emergency operators when she called 911, Gironella said, “They didn’t grasp the fact that a car had gone out the window.”

That said, the 24-hour window was beginning to attract the wrong kind of crowd:

The James A. Farley Post Office across from Penn Station will close its 24-hour windows to save money, starting May 9.

“That’s horrible,” said Jeff Garret, 25, a custodian from Manhattan. “When you need to get your mail off, you need to get it off.”

Location Scout: James A. Farley Post Office.

Wow, it goes from beleaguered dog owner to full-blown Charles Bronson in just five paragraphs:

She never had a chance.

A vicious pit bull belonging to Japanese hip-hop star DJ Honda made mincemeat of a fluffy Yorkshire terrier owned by a celebrity facialist when the pooches squared off on the Lower East Side.

The brutal attack — which left the smaller dog needing her face sewn back together — is part of a pattern of bullying by the musician’s three nasty canines, residents said yesterday.

The pit bull, Boss, was walking off his leash on Orchard Street the evening of April 3 when he pounced on Christine Chin’s 12-pound pooch, Bebe.

“My pet was almost shredded to pieces,” Chin said. “I feel so bullied and so helpless. I said to my husband, ‘Should we get a gun now?’”

But unless you’re a celebrity I think it’s supposed to be kind of difficult to get permission to carry a weapon around with you.

This is because of what now? Oh, what difference does it make:

They’ve sung about a place “Where the Streets Have No Name,” but Irish rockers U2 will have a street named for them in Times Square Tuesday.

Mayor Bloomberg is expected to rename part of W.53rd St. at Broadway “U2 Way.”

The temporary street renaming coincides with the release of the band’s new CD, “No Line on the Horizon,” and the kickoff last night of their five-night gig on “Late Show With David Letterman.”

*I knew I could use this later.

You know you need to get off the island when the subways start talking to you:

Just when the train is starting, as if the cars were screeching, “There’s a place.”

. . .

Once heard, it is unmistakable: an echo of “Somewhere” that rises from the ceaseless tide of shrieks and moans in the subways.

A revival of “West Side Story” begins previews next week, but this little piece of it has been playing nonstop beneath Broadway since 2000, when new cars began rolling with an innovative propulsion system. Most of them are on the 2, 4 and 5 lines, and fresh audiences arrive daily.

. . .

The sound is a fluke. Newer trains run on alternating current, but the third rail delivers direct current; inverters chop it into frequencies that can be used by the alternating current motors, said Jeff Hakner, a professor of electrical engineering at Cooper Union. The frequencies excite the steel, he said, which — in the case of the R142 subway cars — responds by singing “Somewhere.” Inverters on other trains run at different frequencies and thus are not gifted with such a recognizable song.

The playwright Tony Kushner told New York magazine last year that it was his favorite New York noise. Riders often ask transit officials about it, and readers still write to the City section of The Times to report their discovery.

Maybe you were wondering how the City will pay for the $2.1 billion 7 train extension to an undeveloped part of Manhattan. So are they:

Now that there are a handful of giant holes under Chelsea for the line, and soon to be two drills that are making tunnels, the likelihood that the project will actually come to fruition is increasing substantially (though no one has agreed to pay for cost overruns yet). But with the economy in shambles, the question becomes how quickly — or slowly — development will sprout up on the far West Side.

This is more than just an academic question. To fund the $2.1 billion budgeted for the extension, the city sold bonds that are to be repaid with the extra taxes expected from all the new development on the West Side. If development takes years to begin — or never happens — the city would need to use money out of its budget to pay the $100 million or so annually in debt service, adding to an already high debt burden.

At the announcement today, the mayor delivered what sounded like a slight plea to developers to get building again.

“If anybody’s a developer out there, and if you want to know a good time to start, I can’t think of a better time,” he said. “People are ready to take the jobs, you can buy concrete and steel a lot cheaper than you could have before, and you’ll have these buildings ready when our economy comes roaring back and people are going to need space.”

For $500 million President Obama better get a nice looking plaque:

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority expects to spend $497 million in federal economic stimulus money to complete the stalled and over-budget Fulton Street Transit Center in Lower Manhattan, the agency’s executive director said on Thursday.

The money would bring the project’s cost to as much as $1.4 billion, nearly double what was estimated when it was conceived in the wake of the terror attack of Sept. 11, 2001.

The additional financing would allow the authority to move ahead with plans to erect an architecturally dramatic glass building atop the transit hub, said Elliot G. Sander, the authority’s executive director. However, it was not clear if the final design would include the project’s signature feature, a conelike skylight, known as an oculus, that would channel daylight into the lower areas of the station. Mr. Sander said the oculus could add about $40 million to the cost.

“The pavilion has to be many things to many people,” Mr. Sander said, referring to the glass structure. “It has to be a building of vibrant design with as much new retail activity as possible.” He called it “a highly visible portal to a modern transportation complex.”

Mr. Sander, who spoke at a State Assembly hearing in Lower Manhattan, said that he estimated the authority would receive $1.5 billion to $2 billion from the economic stimulus bill that is working its way through Congress. He said he planned to spend $497 million of that to complete the downtown transit hub. He did not say how the remainder would be spent.

The Fulton Street project, which is a block from the World Trade Center site, was originally financed by the federal government with $750 million that was earmarked for the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan. The project was meant to simplify a tangle of subway stations, topping them off with an eye-catching building that would rival the iconic structures planned for the rebuilt trade center.

But costs kept rising, and last January the authority said that while work would continue on the underground portions of the project, it could no longer afford to move ahead with the above-ground structure. The announcement was met with dismay downtown, where residents and businesses feared they would be stuck with an unsightly hole, a site where several buildings had been torn down to make way for the transit work.

Earlier: Yet Another Reason Not To Extend The 7 Train To A Convention Center That Doesn’t Even Need It . . ., Between Simpler Transfer Or Fancy Roof, I Want The Roof!

Because if we don’t build low-slung two-story retail at Ground Zero then the terrorists will have won:

The long-planned skyscrapers at Ground Zero will have to wait, but two low-slung buildings that could one day serve as their bases may go up soon, officials disclosed Thursday.

The buildings would face each other along Church St., rising two to six stories and serving as stand-ins until towers can be built.

They could even house world-class retail shops if recessionary ravages force new construction delays.

“The last thing the Port Authority will do is to leave holes and pits in the ground downtown,” said Port Authority Executive Director Chris Ward after a state Assembly hearing on the status of lower Manhattan redevelopment.

“To avoid that, we will either build pedestals, which will allow some form of retail options and permit long-term subsequent construction, or build to grade.”

Each would be engineered to support the immense towers that World Trade Center developer Larry Silverstein intends to build on the 16-acre site.

They would be constructed later, when the real estate market recovers.

The pedestals would function as handsome, ultra-expensive stumps for the future buildings.

Mistakes happen, you just hope it doesn’t matter:

A staggeringly basic blunder is delaying the grand opening of the MTA’s first new subway station in 20 years, the Daily News has learned.

The platform at the $530 million South Ferry station is a wee bit too far from the train tracks, officials confirmed Tuesday.

Recent inspections found gaps between the platform and No. 1 train cars up to 1 inch wider than federal rules allow, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority confirmed.

Riders will have to wait another three to four weeks before they can use the station while workers make some $200,000 in fixes, the MTA said yesterday.

Location Scout: South Ferry Station.

And Mildew, Roaches and Bed Bugs!:

The Hotel Carter was named the dirtiest hotel in America Tuesday by TripAdvisor.com, marking the third time in four years that the W. 43rd St. dump has topped the list.

. . .

The hotel, used as a homeless shelter in the 1980s, gained infamy two years ago when a cleaning lady found a woman’s corpse stuffed under a bed.

A 17th-floor room rented by the Daily News was thankfully corpse-free. And while it was small and sparsely appointed, it wasn’t dirty. The bathroom was nearly spotless and the bed linens unstained.

The room’s most serious flaw was a lone picture frame, covered in a substance one can only hope was mildew. In the hallway outside, a garbage bag filled with used tissues, lay open on the dark-green carpet.

The hotel’s wretched reputation wasn’t news to one worker.

“Just Google ‘Carter and bed bugs.’ You’ll read all about it,” she said. “Roaches, bugs — you’ll find everything inside here.”

Hotel manager Erwin Lumanglas brushed aside its reputation.

“We are not bothered at all,” Lumanglas said. “Even when they tell us we’re the dirtiest hotel in the world, people are still interested in coming because of the price and the location.”

Location Scout: Hotel Carter.

The delivery van driver who left his vehicle in gear while double parked on East Broadway has not been charged in an accident that killed two small children:

Chao Fu, 52, was driving the van for the China Chalet restaurant and catering service and double-parked the vehicle on the east side of E. Broadway near Catherine St., police said.

Fu thought the van was in park when he stepped out to make a delivery, he told cops, but it was actually in reverse and began to creep backwards on the busy street lined with shops and restaurants, police said.

The children, gathered on the sidewalk with two chaperones outside the Chatham Square branch of the New York Public Library, were about to walk back to the nearby Red Apple Day Care on Market St.

They were lined up against the wall, their arms linked, when the 9,400-pound van hit them, surveillance video shows.

Fu, who had a clean driving record and valid license, was not charged, police said.

Another gentlemen’s club is reborn in the space formerly occupied by Scores:

“It’s like Yankee Stadium,” Antony, a security guard, said over his shoulder, leading the way through the thumping entrance of what used to be the original East Side location of Scores strip club.

Scores lost its battle with the state over its liquor license last year. Since then, the Las Vegas-based empire, Sapphire Gentlemen’s Club, has moved in, and last night was their official opening in New York.

Sapphire made sure to bring yards of neon sapphire blue back-lighting, a fluorescent, engraved pompadour-shaped ice-sculpture, plushier (much plush-ier, according to the dancers) leather chairs, new carpeting, a concierge service, and a new chef — Jayson Margulies from Robert’s Steak House at the Penthouse Executive Club.

Antony, like other security guards on Thursday night, wore a dark suit with an aquarium blue skinny-tie.

“Yankee Stadium,” he continued dreamily. “That’s what it’s like with this particular venue. This is the granddaddy of gentleman’s clubs, For years when I was growing up they were called strip bars or something else, some less politically correct kind of word, you know what I mean. But you walk in here and you are called ’sir’ or ‘ma’am,’ and you get the white-glove treatment from the minute you walk in the door. That’s how this franchise does the thing.”

Sapphire’s main room looks largely identical to the old Scores, largely because there were no actual construction renovations done. The layout, too, is similar: bar to the left, mirrored wall and couches on the right, the stage front and center.

Last we left “dognapping,” it was serving as a soft and cuddly reminiscence about dire economic conditions in East Harlem during the tumultuous summer of 1977. But now that we take out our monocle and inspect more closely it seems to have become one of today’s leading economic indicators:

[S]everal weeks ago, dog-napping terror hit the Upper West Side. E-mails began circulating (one subject line: “DOGNAPPING attempts in NYC with RAZOR and RANSOM — get dogs ON LEASHES — happening on West Side”), and flyers were posted at dog runs and veterinary offices and pet stores (”COMMUNITY ALERT: DOGNAPPING attempts on the West Side”). Dog owners, particularly women with small dogs — said to be the prime target — began to panic.

A survey of Upper West Side dog runs and pet stores turned up various versions of the same story. “There’s a two-man team, with one in a gray hoodie on a bicycle who comes by and slices the leash with a razor, then goes away with the dog. The other guy calls you up later on and says, ‘Hey, I found your dog! What’s it worth to you?’ ” said Charlie Allen, the owner of Gotham Pups pet services, who was glumly watching two of his charges (Beezus, a mutt, and Delta, a yellow Labrador) romp across the dog run on West Eighty-first Street the other day. “It’s completely unpleasant.”

Most people were saying that the dognappers made their ransom demands by calling the number on a stolen dog’s tags. Either that or they waited for a reward sign to be posted. “I think maybe in this neighborhood there would be more purebreds and more people who would pay a ransom,” Jason Frix (Billy Bob, bullmastiff) said. “Crime increases in tough times.” People said there’d been dognappings in other nice neighborhoods. “I heard Chelsea,” someone said. “Also Battery Park City.”