More tourism:

Authorities say a resident of the Netherlands who came to New York as a “graffiti tourist” has been indicted on charges of spray painting a subway car and leading police on a dangerous chase.

Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown said Thursday that 23-year-old Robbert Boxem of Zwolle, Netherlands — who uses the graffiti tag “KRAE” — faces charges including criminal mischief and reckless endangerment. If convicted, he could get up to four years in prison.

Part of the police chase occurred on subway tracks.

Brown says it’s believed Boxem, who was arrested on Sept. 9, came to New York for an international graffiti event known as Meeting of Styles.

The tourism board luvs u in the Bronx!

Time was, you’d inflate the rat and people would notice, they got disturbed. Now, things are different, and in ways I just don’t understand:

More than just a symbol of labor grievance, the giant inflatable sidewalk protest rat has apparently also become a symbol of New York City for out-of-town visitors. By and large, it is safe to assume, there’s nothing quite like it back home.

Take this cigar-chomping, money-bag-clutching behemoth, stationed last week in front of the Lincoln Building, across East 42nd Street from Grand Central Terminal.

His handlers — Laborers’ Local 78, on this particular day — intended to convey the message that only responsible contractors ought to be permitted to perform the hazardous work of asbestos removal.

That message, however, seemed entirely incidental to the groups posing for snapshots in front of the rat every couple of minutes. Radek Korek, one of the Local 78 members on the scene, said the creature seemed popular with foreign visitors, especially those from China, where the Year of the Rat is being observed.

See also: Union Rat.

Or make that “Tijuanans” . . . or “Andorra on the Hudson” — New Yorkers get slapped down, now that Manhattan resembles a very large outlet mall:

This summer, New York is awash with visitors from abroad, who are expected to top last summer’s record number, tourism officials say. Thanks in part to home currencies that are holding strong against the dollar, even middle-class vacationers from Hamburg, Yokohama or Perth can afford to scoop up New York style — the clothes, the hot restaurants, the nightclubs — at bargain prices.

But for New Yorkers trapped on the other side of the currency imbalance, it’s easy to feel ambivalent about the invasion. An infusion of foreign money is welcome in a city faced with a wobbly economy and a possible budget gap in the billions. But even some locals who consider themselves cosmopolitan and internationalist confess to feeling envy, not to mention territorialism, in watching a outsiders treat their city like a Wal-Mart of hip.

Their party is raging just as the hangover has started to set in for Americans. Frictions do arise — especially in a summer of looming recession, where many locals do not feel rich enough or secure enough to travel abroad themselves. (And let’s not even get into their weeks of summer vacation).

“It’s Psych 101 — jealousy,” said Randi Ungar, 30, an online advertising sales manager who lives on the Upper West Side. “I’m jealous that I can’t go to Italy and buy 12 Prada bags, but they can come here and buy 18 of them.”

Steven Schoenfeld, a 45-year-old investment manager who lives near Lincoln Center, said that he welcomes the influx of visitors, in theory, as a boost to the local economy, but “sometimes you feel like it’s going to become a situation where they stop and take picture: ‘Look at that endangered species — a native New Yorker, with a briefcase, going to work.’ ”

Polly Blitzer, a former magazine beauty editor who now runs a beauty Web site, said she believes that a turf war is going on this summer between free-spending Europeans and locals over the chic bistros, spas, boutiques and department stores that she, a native New Yorker, used to consider her playground.

She said the point was driven home to her on a recent trip to Bergdorf Goodman to help her fiancé select a pair of shoes to go with his tuxedo for their wedding.

Wearing the sort of outfit that usually acts as a siren for department store salespeople — a Tory Burch shift dress and Jimmy Choo slingback heels — she instead found herself waiting behind a European couple in sneakers and bike shorts who “had made such massive purchases that we couldn’t get anyone to give us the time of day for our size 11 ½ Ferragamo party slippers,” recalled Ms. Blitzer, 32.

The Europeans, she said, “brought over bags and bags of shoes” while the salesman wrapped their orders and chatted them up about restaurants and travel. “I didn’t want to do the ahem-I’m-sitting-here thing, but we had to sit there for 5 or 10 minutes while these big spenders small-talked.”

She was always used to first-class service, she said, adding, “But now, there’s an ultra-first.”

. . . stay for the Joni Mitchell trivia:

When the ferry docked at Staten Island, a wave of tourists funneled down the ramp and made a U-turn to board the same boat they had just gotten off.

Few seemed to have heard of anything worth sticking around for in New York City’s southernmost borough. Only a handful ventured over to the makeshift tourist kiosk at the ferry terminal.

“Yes, can you tell me where is Alcatraz?” one woman asked.

Andrew Yuen, 22, who was on duty at the kiosk, maintained a chipper demeanor in the face of such demoralizing questions. He cheerfully handed out maps and brochures, and directed a few people to the red faux trolley outside.

“There’s a tour bus that just opened three weeks ago,” he told one couple from England.

A man in a red vest picked up on Mr. Yuen’s cue and rushed to hand out a flier that begged, “Don’t hurry back on the ferry! New! Discover Staten Island Tour.” The salesman pointed to three small photos of unrecognizable tourist destinations and promised, “You’ll see this, this and this.”

The tour, Staten Island’s newest year-round attraction, is operated by Gray Line New York Sightseeing, which also runs bus tours of Manhattan and Brooklyn. In an hour, visitors get an overview of the island’s north shore. The $15 tour stops at places like the Snug Harbor Cultural Center; the house of Alice Austen, a pioneering photographer in the 19th century; and the Staten Island Zoo. Riders have the option of getting off at any of these places and catching the next trolley an hour later, but one tour guide said that most choose to stay in the bus.

“We’ll just wait to see the Bronx Zoo,” Karim Pacheco said.

. . .

What Staten Island may lack in breathtaking skyscrapers, it makes up for in historical tidbits, most of them involving celebrities. The tour drove by the cream-colored stucco building of the Mandolin Brothers guitar shop, which has been visited by the likes of Jimmy Buffett, George Harrison and Suzanne Vega.

“Joni Mitchell wrote a song called ‘Song for Sharon’ that starts, ‘I went to Staten Island, Sharon, to buy myself a mandolin,’” Ms. McGann said into the microphone.

After passing Wagner College, where Joan Baez’s father taught, the bus merged onto the Staten Island Expressway. Later, Ms. McGann pointed out the Stapleton station of the Staten Island Railway.

“That’s where Madonna filmed her music video for ‘Papa Don’t Preach,’” she said.

. . .

Gray Line declined to say how many people had taken the tour so far, saying it often takes up to five years before a new tour catches on. But the company is optimistic that the numbers will grow as Staten Island — once reputed for its enormous Fresh Kills landfill, which has closed — earns some credibility in the tour books.

“It’s a huge market,” said Eva Lee, Gray Line’s tour guide manager. “And they should be educated that Staten Island is important.”

. . . stay for the soy milk:

In 2006, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that he was filing suit against 27 out-of-state gun dealers. He called the gun sellers a “scourge on our society,” and claimed that they were illegally selling weapons that kept ending up on the streets of New York.

Most of the dealers Bloomberg sued quietly settled their cases, agreeing to allow the city to place monitors in their stores to oversee transactions. Others shut down their operations or had their cases tossed out of court. But one man, Jay Wallace, owner of a 12,000-square-foot firearms supermarket outside Atlanta, decided he was willing to pay any price to keep New York from sending someone to monitor his store.

So he borrowed $700,000 and moved to New York — a city he’d never been to before.

In May, Wallace, his wife, and three grown sons rented an apartment in Brooklyn, determined to wage war against the city’s lawsuit right from the belly of the beast itself.

And then two strange things happened.

First, on June 2, the very morning that his case was to be heard in court, Wallace threw in the towel, convinced that he wouldn’t get a fair trial from a judge he considered too biased.

And second, even more surprisingly, by the time he decided not to show up in court, Wallace — a gun-loving, rock-ribbed, Second Amendment–quoting Georgian — had fallen in love with the city he’d vowed to fight to his “last breath.”

He’s even thinking of moving here permanently.

“When you sneeze on the street, five New Yorkers say ‘Bless you’!” Wallace says, wearing a satisfied smile. To his surprise, none of the negative things he’d heard about the city conformed to reality.

On a blazing Sunday afternoon, he’s distractedly picking at a chicken sandwich at the Smoke Joint, a Southern-style barbecue place in trendy Fort Greene. The 51-year-old is wearing a green plastic “Save Our Troops” bracelet and an NYPD baseball cap, a gift from a sympathetic police officer who’d contacted him after reading about the case in the news. The cop had even driven the Wallaces out to Long Beach the day before.

Wallace’s wife Cecilia, a blonde in a bright-pink top and wearing a silver necklace with a cross, eats barbecue pork at his side. After three years of obsessing over the lawsuit, the couple would soon be heading back to Georgia, having given up their day in court. But at least they’d always have New York.

. . .

Now that the Wallaces are no longer preparing for trial, they’ve had time for some sightseeing: Times Square, Central Park, Broadway shows, two pilgrimages to Ground Zero. But Wallace wanted more than a tourist’s perspective; he wanted to experience the city the way the locals live it. And he found that some of the best spots were right in Brooklyn. At Red Bamboo, a vegetarian restaurant, Wallace sampled fake meat in the form of “chicken” Parmesan. He also tried soy milk: “I came here, and I noticed New York had a lot of soy milk. I’d never had it before, but I tried it — first the sweetened kind. It was good!”

Even the nursing staff at the hospital on DeKalb Avenue, where Wallace spent Memorial Day weekend because of chest pain, proved to be some of the loveliest health-care professionals he’d met. (He’s composing a thank-you letter to the hospital director. As a small-business owner, he says, he knows the value of a customer’s kind word.) And despite being somewhat “mustardy,” the barbecue sauce at the Smoke Joint deserves an A, he points out.

Wallace is so impressed, he says he could actually consider living here one day. Not that some things don’t need improvement. He and Cecilia are worried about the destruction of the old Coney Island — where they’d eaten a Nathan’s hot dog — and about the taxi drivers who can’t afford the price of gas. Mostly, Wallace finds it unfortunate that such a wonderful city is suffering under a despot-in-chief for a mayor, one who is turning New York into a playground for the rich. “Living here, I know how New Yorkers feel — overtaxed!” Wallace exclaims, half-furious, half-smiling. But nothing seems to detract from his down-to-earth Southern charm.

The Bad Old Days or a Law & Order set? What the MOFTB hath wrought:

Times Square tourists were stunned yesterday when a 23-year-old Manhattan man was stabbed, leaving a blood-splattered crime scene that had some wondering whether it was real or a movie set.

Police said the victim, Juan Garcia of Riverside Drive, was stabbed in the back on 46th Street at about 7:20 a.m. Garcia managed to get away, but his knife-wielding assailant pursued him on foot to 45th Street and Broadway, where he stabbed Garcia again.

Witnesses said they saw Garcia collapse to the ground and then saw police running to the scene where they quickly handcuffed Antoine Poprilo, 37, of Manhattan, who they said was still holding the knife.

. . .

Scattered on the corner of 45th Street was blood-stained medical gauze, the victim’s breakfast sandwich and coffee, as well as his broken headphones and shirt. Confused tourists walking by did double takes, and some stopped when they realized they were walking by a real New York City crime scene that was cordoned off by yellow tape and uniformed police officers.

Marianne Wedgeworth, 43, of Lake Charles, La., said she heard emergency vehicles’ sirens as she was leaving her hotel.

“I wasn’t sure. I thought they were shooting a movie,” said Wedgeworth, who stopped to take a closer look at the scene.

Hmm. Doubtful. I say milk it for all it’s worth:

Mayor Bloomberg is balking at a proposal by City Council members to increase the hotel tax to 8% to avoid budget cuts to public schools.

“We don’t want to have more taxes that would hurt the economic well-being of this city. For example, a tax on tourists is a terrible idea. We desperately need tourists from around the world,” he said yesterday. “International tourism is down throughout our country something like 17%. It is up 9% in New York. Killing the golden goose is not a smart thing to do.”

A council member of Queens, John Liu, said the hotel tax increase is a serious proposal that some members find more “palatable” than cutting $450 million from the Department of Education budget.

Fewer hot-sheet motels, more places you can put up Mom and Dad:

The people who published AAA’s 2008 New York tour book had a hard time recommending any hotels in the Bronx. They could find only one, in fact, a rather bland-looking building a mile north of Yankee Stadium by a service road to the Major Deegan Expressway.

The hotel fared better than restaurants, since the automobile club’s guide does not list a single place to eat in the Bronx.

It is an odd distinction for that lone hotel in the guide, a Howard Johnson of no particular architectural significance. And given the borough’s long battles against hot-sheet motels that rent rooms by the hour, a casual observer might assume this place was no different.

But it is a real hotel catering to real tourists. One day last week, the parking lot was filled with cars from out of state, most belonging to guests who had come to see the Yankees play Cleveland. Retirees from Oklahoma and families from upstate New York eagerly hauled suitcases upstairs as they prepared to change into baseball jerseys and take in a game.

Chadd Morris and Brandon Bebout had driven eight hours from Cleveland to buy game tickets. They asked a local police officer for the nearest hotel and were directed to the HoJo, at 1300 Sedgwick Avenue just north of 167th Street.

“We got to New York with no idea where we were going to stay,” Mr. Morris said. “I had heard negatives and positives about the Bronx. We’ll see what happens.”

. . .

The hotel itself has Yankee pinstripe wallpaper in the lobby and a breakfast nook dominated by a photo mural of the stadium. The rooms and windows are tiny, but clean and well appointed, with Wi-Fi access (and plasma screen televisions coming soon, too). A southbound highway ramp is nearby. The garage even has a waiting area labeled “High Class Passenger Pick Up and Drop Off.”

“High Class” is not (necessarily) referring to the passengers, but to High Class Bronx, a livery cab service that takes guests to the stadium or back and forth to the subway.

Gaurang Parikh bought the 45-room hotel two years ago when a friend told him the previous owner was having a hard time making a go of the place.

“I came to see the property and fell in love with it,” he said. “It has a river view of the Harlem River.”

Not to mention it was a 20-minute walk to Yankee Stadium. It was his idea to redo the décor in a baseball theme.

“I am from India, but I have always been a diehard Yankees fan,” he said. “For me to have a hotel next to Yankee Stadium is a dream come true.”

. . .

He said that about 40 percent of his guests are baseball fans, and that the place is packed when Boston or Baltimore comes to play. The rest are people who want to visit Manhattan but do not want to pay Manhattan hotel rates. At most, his rooms go for $139 a night.

[Heart] the brand, lest things get out of control:

This year, state officials plan to introduce new tools — like a difficult-to-reproduce hologram — that will assure consumers that a product is officially licensed by New York State.

For those who sell unofficial “I ♥ NY” products, officials plan to warn and then penalize offenders.

Thomas Ranese, 37, chief marketing officer at Empire State Development, admitted, “We haven’t always invested in protecting the brand as much as we should have.”

Trademarks were allowed to expire in the 1990s in the United States and abroad, leading to the widespread perception that the heart symbol was in the public domain and did not require a license, he said. The trademark registrations have been renewed, he said, but the damage had already been done.

New York State has lost millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars in licensing fees since the symbol was introduced in 1977, Mr. Ranese said.

The result, visible all over New York City but especially in Midtown Manhattan, is a vast alternate universe of “I ♥ NY” products, almost all of which are unlicensed fakes.

Is there any way for a public-spirited tourist to detect a fake? “The simple answer is no,” Mr. Ranese said. Even the registered trademark symbol is easily counterfeited, he said.

Still, the products are fun.

In need of something sartorial? There is a “I ♥ NY” men’s tie (with Statue of Liberty) for $4.99 and a Betty Boop “I ♥ NY” T-shirt for $19.99. Crave something culinary? There’s a dinner bell for $3.99, salt and pepper shakers for $8.99, a beer can holder for $4.99 and a dinner plate for $12.99. And a kitchen towel, $8.99, to clean up.

Need something for the children? There are teddy bears ($9.99 small, $19.99 large) and baby clothes for $9.99. Need authentic New York tchotchkes? There’s a computer mouse pad for $8.99, a thimble for $3.99, a glass paperweight for $14.99.

Feel the need for exercise? There is a baseball for $9.99, golf balls for $12.99, and a fur football for $9.99.

Only one of the above is an officially licensed product.

Come for the tall iconic buildings, stay for your eventual self-inflicted death:

Recently, however, researchers stumbled on a striking fact about suicides in New York: A surprising number of people who kill themselves in the city come here from out of town, and many appear to come expressly to take their own lives. In a report published last fall called “Suicide Tourism in Manhattan, New York City, 1990–2004,” researchers at the New York Academy of Medicine and Weill Cornell Medical College found that of the 7,634 people who committed suicide in New York City between 1990 and 2004, 407 of them, or 5.3 percent, were nonresidents. More strikingly, nonresidents accounted for 274, or 10.8 percent, of the 2,272 suicides in Manhattan during that time (the numbers did not include college students, who were considered residents for the purposes of the study). The researchers didn’t look at comparable data from other cities, but, says the study’s lead author, Charles Gross, “One in ten people that commit suicide in Manhattan don’t live here. That’s a big chunk.”

. . .

New York, with all of its tall buildings and bridges, makes a perversely attractive place to kill oneself. Through suicidal eyes, the skyline can appear to be “a lot of opportunities to die from heights,” says Gary Spielmann, the former director of suicide prevention for the New York State Office of Mental Health. “A lot of windows and doors and balconies that can easily be negotiated by a jumper.” And jumping, says Kay Redfield Jamison, a Johns Hopkins psychiatry professor and the author of An Unquiet Mind, has the twisted appeal of being “practical, final, and irrevocable.” It can also seem dramatic. Gary Gorman, a retired policeman who was assigned to the NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit, which responds to suicide calls, says that some people who jump from bridges or buildings may want people to look up at them, to know about them, to notice them in death in a way they hadn’t been noticed in life. According to the NYAM study, nonresidents who kill themselves in Manhattan are less likely to have done so by methods commonly used in the home, such as overdosing or hanging, and are 30 percent more likely to have died from a long fall. They’re also almost three times as likely to have died by drowning and twice as likely to have died after being hit by a train or other moving object, a function of New York’s subways and waterways. The two neighborhoods where the most nonresidents kill themselves are midtown, with its dense concentration of tall buildings and hotels, and the Washington Heights area, home to the George Washington Bridge.

More NYC & Company overreach:

Tree-lined Henry Street was briefly turned into one long billboard, but Brooklyn Heights residents erupted after seeing commercial banners on the mostly residential street, so the city removed them.

On Monday, banners reading “Brooklyn loves to shop” were hung on lampposts from Clark to Montague streets — and locals slammed the commercialization of the strip.

“I absolutely detest them,” said Veronica Rylander, 48. “They’re so out of place here above all these houses. I feel like it cheapens the look of the neighborhood.”

For Liana Schwartz, 36, it wasn’t the aesthetics, but the practicality of the banners that provoked her disdain.

“I just don’t even get why they’re hanging here,” said Schwartz. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to put them Downtown or on streets where there are actually places to shop?”

After The Brooklyn Paper started asking local officials about the appropriateness of posting ads in a residential corridor, the banners were taken down and relocated to commercial Court Street on Wednesday morning.
Brooklyn Bridge Realty

The banners — which are sponsored by Greek natural skincare company Korres, which just opened on Montague Street, and NYC& Co., the city’s tourist board — also annoyed people who think tourism officials don’t get Brooklyn — or maybe get it too well.

“They put those signs on Henry because they know there are lots of cars speeding through here,” said one man.

Blame NYC & Company, blame a weaker and weaker dollar for why Sex and the City is premiering in London:

Is Carrie Bradshaw fooling around on New York?

Absofrickinlutely not! say the makers of the “Sex and the City” movie after news broke Monday that the flick will debut first across the pond.

“Sex and the City: The Movie” will show in London’s Leicester Square on May 12 — two weeks before its much-anticipated debut in New York.

“London will be much smaller,” a New Line spokesman said. “The whole cast isn’t even going.”

Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis all will make the trip, but other big names, including Mr. Big himself, Chris Noth, and Jennifer Hudson, will not.

. . .

Overseas premieres are hardly a new concept when it comes to blockbuster movies with large casts and lots of planning. “Spider-Man 3,” “Lord of the Rings” and “Wedding Crashers” all had world premieres outside the U.S.

There’s also hope the British debut will stoke overseas obsession with all things Carrie - and all things New York.

“It creates additional buzz for our U.K. customers,” said Cathy Epstein, marketing directing of New York-based On Location Tours, which runs a daily “Sex and the City” Hotspots tour.

“Anything that brings more tourists to New York is good for our restaurants,” said Chuck Hunt, executive vice president of the New York State Restaurant Association.

And even though The News has learned that Mayor Bloomberg’s cameo has been cut, a City Hall spokesman said the film, which employed more than 1,750 cast and crew over the 50 days of shooting in the city, will “draw even more tourists to our city and pump more money into our economy.”

And I’m assuming that’s a typo at the end there:

As one might imagine, security is extremely tight in both Washington D.C. and New York City. With Pope Benedict XVI’s much-anticipated landing Tuesday at Maryland’s Andrews Air Force Base, the NYPD has already begun beefing up its police presence underground.

“Mind if we check the train?” That’s the question NYPD officers will be asking hundreds of train conductors when the pope arrives in NYC on Friday morning.

Over the course of the pontiff’s three-day visit, the NYPD will have round-the-clock coverage of high-profile MTA stops starting as soon as the pope arrives in the city. Officers will take a peek inside every train that comes through the station.

“It’s probably necessary,” one passenger said. “The pope is a big worldly figure so he needs that kind of security.”

With hundreds of thousands of people expected to flock to the pope’s motorcade route through Manhattan on Friday and pack Yankee Stadium for his mass on Sunday, police expect the subway to be extremely busy. The NYPD’s presence, cops say, is all about letting the public know they are around. Police are hoping commuters will stay vigilante.

And you don’t really need tourist offices on every continent to attract them:

New York City has started to slide into the economic downturn that is enveloping much of the country. But the city has a counterbalance against recession that few other American cities share: a rising tide of free-spending foreign visitors.

After a record year of tourism and business travel in 2007, the influx has continued to grow this year, city officials said. About one million more visitors came to the city — more than one fifth of them foreigners — in the first three months of 2008 than in the first quarter of last year, according to a preliminary estimate from NYC & Company, the city’s marketing arm.

Foreign tourists are filling up the tables at the city’s pricier restaurants. Danny Meyer, who operates several highly rated restaurants in Manhattan, said that he added the Euro equivalent to prices on the wine list at the Modern, the restaurant in the Museum of Modern Art, to impress upon tourists what bargains the bottles were.

The device worked: “We have sold more wines and more expensive wines,” Mr. Meyer said.

. . .

Mike Stengel, who oversees five full-service Marriott hotels in the city, said that guests were coming from all over the globe, attracted by a weak dollar and New York’s polished-up image overseas. On Tuesday morning, Mr. Stengel ate breakfast at the Marriott Marquis with 15 travel agents from China, only five of whom had been to the city before.

After breakfast, the group was going to go shopping at Woodbury Common, an outlet mall an hour north of the city. To get there, Mr. Stengel said, the group planned to walk, unescorted, the six blocks from the hotel to the Port Authority Bus Terminal and catch a public bus, a venture around Times Square that he said a tour group would not have considered four or five years ago.

. . .

On Broadway, attendance and revenue are off only slightly from last year, even after a three-week strike by stagehands last fall, according to the Broadway League. But some shows, including “Wicked” and “Jersey Boys,” are still filling all of their seats at average ticket prices of more than $100.

Stoop culture, alive and well and un- and underemployed:

Last summer, two young girls appeared on Charles Street between Bleecker and West 4th Streets. They perched themselves on the front steps of the brownstone at No. 90, and they’ve stayed there, nearly every day, chatting and smoking and playing with their dogs from late morning to early evening, even in the bitter cold. Block residents are used to celebrities — Sarah Jessica and Matthew live there, after all — but they’ve been flummoxed by these new ladies of leisure, who’ve inspired a flurry of intra-block e-mails with titles like “The Girls” that report sightings as late as 4:30 a.m. Few Charles Streeters seem to know who they are or why they’re there.

You can learn a lot by asking. Haley, the brunette, is 23 and from Alabama; blonde Rebecca is 22 and from Pennsylvania. (They declined to provide their last names.) They grew up spending vacations together with their best-friend grandmas before moving to New York last year, basically for kicks. Haley, who dropped out of premed in Alabama, just started English-lit classes at Hunter. “I don’t like to write, but I like grammar,” she says. Rebecca basically does nothing, nor does she know what she wants to do. They share an apartment a few blocks west; their parents paid months of rent in advance. But even in the dead of winter, they prefer the stoop to their living room — although they chafe at their status as block icons. “We’re not into the fame thing,” Haley says. “But this is what we do.”

Add Nikola Tesla tourism to the ever-expanding list of reasons people want to visit New York:

According to Joseph Kinney, the chief engineer and unofficial archivist of the New Yorker Hotel (an ancillary enterprise not of this magazine but of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church), three types of inquisitive visitors regularly make pilgrimages there: (1) electrical engineers and technology enthusiasts; (2) people interested in U.F.O.s, anti-gravity airships, death-ray weapons, time travel, and telepathic pigeons; (3) Serbs and Croats. (A guest last year, Bozidar Djelic, the deputy prime minister of Serbia, inscribed for Kinney a copy of his book “Serbia: Things Will Get Better.”)

What these callers have in common is a wish to pay homage to Nikola Tesla, the tragically underappreciated Croatian-born ethnic-Serb immigrant visionary who lived at the hotel, at Thirty-fourth Street and Eighth Avenue, for ten years and, in 1943, died there, at the age of eighty-six. Despite having conceived — but, inconveniently, not necessarily having perfected patents for — dozens of revolutionary devices, Tesla during his lifetime failed to receive proper credit, or royalties, for theoretical work that made possible wireless power transmission and X-rays. It’s generally agreed that Tesla was an earlier inventor of radio than Guglielmo Marconi, who won the patent and a Nobel Prize. At the time of his death, Tesla was nearly destitute, having been bamboozled by, among others, Thomas Edison. He was undone as well by his own impracticality, deficient business acumen, and a predilection toward delusion.

Lady, if you can’t figure out something else to do in this town . . . really:

As if the Grinch really had stolen Christmas, children cried and parents were crestfallen. Confusion, surprise and anger played at box offices, and dispossessed theatergoers shared the sidewalks with grim pickets yesterday as the stagehands’ strike shut down most of Broadway’s plays and musicals.

Up and down the Great White Way, and in the side streets where Broadway’s theaters are clustered, marquees fell dark and the electric playland of Times Square — normally pulsing with anticipation for Saturday matinees — was a canyon of gloom in Midtown Manhattan’s petrified forest.

Crowds of American and foreign tourists, busloads from suburbia, throngs who had come by train or cab with children or grandchildren were caught off guard by the walkout and abruptly drawn into chaos: scrambling for refunds, seeking tickets to the few shows that remained open and looking for other attractions to ease the disappointment.

. . .

“It’s very disappointing,” said Linda Partner of Port Royal, Pa., who rode four hours on a bus with her three sisters and their two children to see “The Little Mermaid” at the Lunt-Fontanne at Broadway and 46th Street. “We don’t have a clue where to go or what to do.”

Definitely something all New Yorkers can take pride in — a bunch of upscale chainstores drove up rents and turned Fifth Avenue into one giant overvalued loss leader for retailers:

Rodeo Drive? Puh-leeze!

The country’s far-and-away leader in elite retail remains Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, by a $7 million mile.

Real-estate firm Colliers International ranked the most expensive shopping streets in the United States by price paid per square foot, and Fifth Avenue took top honors, with an average rent of $1,350.

Rodeo Drive, by comparison, ranked third with a relatively bargain-basement price of $480 per square foot.

“Retailers, and in particular luxury retailers, continue to desire prime street-front locations,” said Ross Moore, senior vice president at Colliers.

And more than anywhere else in the country, “prime” means Fifth Avenue.

“Fifth Avenue is iconic. It’s synonymous with fashion and shopping,” said Tiffany Townsend, communications director at the city’s marketing organization, NYC & Company.

. . .

The influx of such global brands as Apple, Hugo Boss and others has dramatically driven up prices along Fifth, rising from an average of just $1,000 a year ago.

Gucci last year agreed to a record retail price of $1,500 per square foot for the right to bring back their flagship store to The Trump Building.

“Fifth Avenue is by far the greatest retail street not just in the nation but, in my opinion, the world,” said Stephen Siegel, chairman of Global Brokerage at CB Richard Ellis, who brokered the Gucci deal.

. . .

Fifth Avenue, however, just misses being the priciest stretch on Earth, with London’s Old Bond Street taking the top spot at $1,400.

Apparently they assume that people go there for the ambiance and good service:

Mayor Bloomberg is giving a wedding gift to lovebirds who tie the knot at the city chapel — a multimillion-dollar Marriage Bureau makeover overseen by Hizzoner’s personal interior designer — in a bid to make New York the nation’s coupling capital, The Post has learned.

“It’s going to be fabulous,” said one source of the planned revamp, which will move the City Clerk’s Office — where a major function is issuing marriage licenses and performing weddings — from its current, dingy digs at 1 Centre St. to the first floor of 80 Centre.

It will occupy the offices that once housed the Department of Motor Vehicles, with a fresh look designed by society decorator Jamie Drake.

Drake adorned Mayor Bloomberg’s Upper East Side townhouse with Egyptian marble, and also was tapped by the mayor to give Gracie Mansion a face lift five years ago.

The city will use the new chapel as part of a worldwide marketing effort to lure marriage-minded visitors, sources said. It’s part of a goal to bring 50 million tourists here by 2015 and contribute to the economy.

“Vegas might be one location where people go” to get married, the source said.

“But a lot of Europeans, if they go somewhere romantic and are coming to America, one of the first things they think about is New York City.”

The goal is to replace Las Vegas and make New York “the premier marriage location in America,” the source added.

. . .

The Marriage Bureau, now on the second floor of the Municipal Building, has sterile marble, and the door to the wedding chapel is painted deep red.

Couples sit on plastic chairs lining the walls in the hallway until their names are called; there is graffiti scratched into the walls; and, worst of all, there are no bathrooms nearby.

Sources said Drake, who also decorated the billionaire mayor’s London townhouse, will work at a reduced rate on the project, which has a $13 million budget and should be finished by spring 2008.

The new space will be about 6,000 square feet larger, and will have proper seating areas, attractive marble floors and columns, as well as bathrooms and vanity rooms where brides and grooms can primp.

It will be a storefront, with a streamlined security system. As of now, brides dressed in white must walk through a magnetometer to get hitched.

“I feel like I’m at the DMV,” said one man, who was at the clerk’s office to witness a friend’s wedding.

The bride-to-be agreed, saying, “It’s so institutionalized — not really what you picture your wedding day” to be.

Location Scout: City Clerk’s Office.

. . . you really are best seen and not heard:

“I have never had such a nice bathroom,” said Nastya Zhelkovskaya, a 17-year-old Russian fashion model who was in town for fashion week. In August 2006, the slender blonde was standing outside her school in Moscow when a modeling agent approached. Now she was giving The Observer a tour of her new, temporary digs — a two-bedroom, second-floor apartment on West Broadway and Prince Street which she was sharing with five other models. (Three Russians in one bedroom, two Brazilians in another bedroom, one Romanian in the living room.) It was one of the many so-called model apartments that crop up this time of year. “In my city, in my apartment, I don’t have such a bathroom,” she said.

. . .

So what goes on in this cramped little room in the wee small hours? Pillow fights? Endless boy talk?

“No, we don’t talk very much about boys, we have enough problem of our own,” she said.

Political discourse?

“No, we’re girls, we are not talking about politics,” she said. “Sometimes we talk about shows we have done. Every morning, we talk about what clothes to put on.”

Nastya recalled that on this morning, “Maria put on her jeans and a white shirt with a belt. Tanya, a black dress. And me, jeans and this gray shirt.”

“Actually, usually we don’t like each others’ outfits,” she added.

. . .

Nighttime activity centers around the Internet and telephone. They don’t have a TV. If Nastya is not surfing the Web, she’s chatting with friends on instant messenger or talking to her mother.

“She misses me a lot,” Nastya said. “She wants to know all about me, actually. What I’m doing here? What do I eat here as well?”

Nastya said she usually buys her own food at the “little Chinese market” (it’s a bodega) across the street. Mostly apples and strawberry ice cream. “I like ice cream very much,” she said.

On a bed in the living room Alexandra Sandor, 17, of Romania, was engrossed in her laptop and a bottle of Coke. She is rod-skinny, with pouty lips, perfect baby skin and wavy brown hair. She wore Hello Kitty pajamas. She had come down with a lung infection but had been a trooper and suffered through the Lela Rose show.

. . .

She took a swig of Coke. “I love Coke,” she said. On her headboard rested a giant log of Toblerone and a carton of Marboro Lights. There was a Titanic DVD on the floor amongst pairs of high heels. “I could live on chocolate and Coca-Cola only, I think.”

“I found a very good sandwich from Starbucks,” said Maria. “So usually I’m eating that one in the morning, if I have time. If not, I’m just taking something from the shop — like chocolate.”

Why do models like chocolate so much?

“Because it’s good, it has a good taste.”

Over on the couch sat Tanya Chubko, the oldest girl in the house at 20. She wore all black and was chain-smoking while playing solitaire on her laptop. Her red hair was pulled back, exhibiting those big blues Nastya so admires.

. . .

In the year and a half since, she’s traveled much of America and Europe. Her favorite place so far is Italy’s Amalfi coast. Her favorite food in America is McDonald’s. “I really love Big Mac. I know it’s not good. I used to love chocolate, I was crazy about chocolate when I was younger, but not as much any more.”

This should be easy to monitor because it’s not like the Staten Island Ferry is one of the three top tourist attractions in New York City or anything. Yup, right:

Taking pictures aboard the Staten Island Ferry? Watch where you’re pointing that camera, bub.

The recent scare in Washington state — two men, apparently of Middle Eastern descent, were spotted photographing sensitive areas of the ferryboats that ply Puget Sound — has triggered heightened sensitivity to shutterbugs.

Photography is officially permitted onboard and in terminals here, and with so many tourists enjoying the views of New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty from the boats each day, “picture-taking is a part of the experience,” acknowledged city Department of Transportation spokeswoman Molly Gordy.

An official memo sent to ferry staff in 2005 indicated that crew members were “not to prohibit anyone from taking photographs in any areas open to the public,” while remaining vigilant and informing security and supervisors if anything seems unusual about a passenger’s photo op.

“If pictures are being taken that seem suspicious, just as if a person is acting suspicious, NYPD on board would be alerted and the parties would be questioned,” Ms. Gordy said.

The dollar is like the weakest it’s been since the Civil War, they’ve turned our housing stock into pied à terres . . . what more do we have to give them? Oh right — a milfy Julianne Moore:

Speaking at the newly constructed American Airlines terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport, the mayor said that international tourists complain that American immigration officials are “rude” and “disrespectful.”

“This is one more of those things that is diminishing our competitive edge,” Mr. Bloomberg told a crowd that included more than 45 international journalists. “Poor customer service is not what this country needs. We have to welcome people from around the world. We have to change this at the federal level.”

But the city, he said, is not going to wait for Washington. To improve New York’s competitive edge in the race for international visitors, Mr. Bloomberg unveiled a campaign to make them feel welcome.

The initiative, which is being called “Just Ask the Locals,” will feature billboards throughout the five boroughs with advice from celebrities — including Robert DeNiro, football star Tiki Barber, and others — on where to go and what to do in the city. Movie star Julianne Moore, for example, is pictured in a café with the caption “Even if your kids say they want to walk, bring the stroller.”

Beats the heck out of State College, College Station, or College Park — that’s for sure:

Freshman orientation used to be about language placement exams and finding the way to the dining hall. But as thousands of freshmen at private colleges and universities in New York City begin orientation today, they are embarking on what may seem to outsiders like an extravagant eight-day vacation.

First-year students arriving at Barnard, Columbia, and New York University have many activities to choose from this week, including: yoga classes, exclusive tours of the new Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, chartered Circle Line cruises to the Statue of Liberty, mini-manicures and aromatherapy at on-campus spas, Coney Island beach parties, scavenger hunts in Times Square, walking tours of the East Village and Park Slope, shopping expeditions to SoHo, outings to popular local eateries such as Magnolia Bakery, and a chance to compete for free tickets and reservations to the city’s hottest shows and hard-to-get-into restaurants.

The emphasis at orientations in New York City is as much on introducing students to their new urban surroundings as it is on preparing them for class. School officials are billing the multimillion-dollar “welcome weeks” as one of the high points of the college experience.

. . .

While college freshmen enjoy all the culture, food, and sightseeing Manhattan has to offer this week, not all residents are entirely pleased with their arrival.

“My first thought this morning was — ‘oh my god, they’re back,” a Greenwich Village resident of 31 years, Michelle Calise, said. “It keeps the neighborhood youthful and contemporary, but they don’t know how to walk, they take up five abreast on the sidewalk, it’s nerve-racking. They should have a class on how to live in the city.”

(”You can only be young once. But you can always be immature,” is attributed to Dave Barry.)

Oh, please — as if you don’t understand what’s inherently cool about lucite Twin Towers trinkets:

The other day on the E train, a woman asked me how to get to “umm, Ground Zero.”

I was a little bewildered, and not because I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to go there. What gave me pause was trying to decide how to proceed.

I always like to give detailed, friendly directions to out-of-towners, if only to counteract the stereotype that all New Yorkers are rude. But of all the things to see and places to go on your first trip on a subway — as she said this was for her — why go there?

I wanted to ask her if she’s been to the Met, the Empire State Building, Chinatown. The SoHo Apple store, perhaps?

Instead I gave her detailed, if not quite friendly, directions. I made her work for it.

“You don’t want to see that,” I said.

“Yes, I do,” she replied.

“It’s just a big hole in the ground, a construction site. Why go?”

“To pay my respects, I suppose.”

. . .

That woman, respectful in her slumped shoulders and doe eyes, was one of a projected six million people who will visit Ground Zero this year, according to the Downtown Alliance. That’s six million out of a total 40 million tourists annually. These are people who, for the most part, we can assume, knew none of the thousands of victims.

In 2007, the fetishization of New York is a symbiotic effort. I’m sure Ms. Astor would understand:

It’s not every red-blooded college student in the Midwest — Mr. [James] Kurisunkal, 18, is a sophomore considering a major in English or sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — who knows and appreciates who Ms. [Tinsley] Mortimer, an Upper East Side socialite, is, let alone can tell that she is wearing Dior. “I recognized it instantly,” he wrote.

Mr. Kurisunkal is something of an obsessive about New York’s young socialite set and everything that a hobby like it tends to include — bone structure, bloodlines, boyfriends named Bingo.

In March, he anonymously started Park Avenue Peerage, a compendium of party pictures, society updates, and, once in a while, family histories he put together mostly by culling wedding and death announcements. The next day, he began hearing from readers — and subjects. “I think a lot of people have Google alerts sent to them every time their name pops up on the Web,” Mr. Kurisunkal said. They sent new photographs and, on occasion, something approaching news.

He guarded his identity, filing posts under the name “68thandpark,” until May, when he revealed himself to a New York magazine reporter who was sleuthing around.

“I really am a freshman at the University of Illinois updating this Web site from my dorm room,” he wrote on his blog that week. “I live next to fields of corn and soybeans and my desktop is open with party pictures from Anchor and Marquee. I know.” Not long after, he applied for, and was offered, a paid summer internship at the magazine. This is his last week.

Beyond his evening with Ms. Mortimer, however, his social calendar racked up far more blank spots than engagements and invitations. He said his overall assessment of his time in New York was that “it’s been surreal.”

Over a poulet de grain rôti at La Goulue, on Madison Avenue, he added: “I’d always loved New York and felt like I knew it, but I’d never actually been here. My main exposure to it came from ‘Sex and the City’ and ‘Friends.’”

Mr. Kurisunkal’s unmasking came as the resolution to a parlor game that had been playing out for a while — in some parlors, anyway. Park Avenue Peerage had immediately established itself as the primary competition to Socialite Rank, a catty anonymous blog that saw fit to give the city’s leading “socials,” as they’re called, quasi-mathematical evaluations. New York magazine reported that Socialite Rank was run by a Russian-born brother and stepsister, one of them a former reporter for Fashion Week Daily.

But Socialite Rank folded, and Park Avenue Peerage stands now as peer of the realm. Mr. Kurisunkal said that his site receives an average of 8,000 page views per weekday. “I don’t ever put anything salacious or mean,” he said, explaining why the socialites send in so many pictures of themselves cavorting at functions and private events (trips to the beach, parties at somebody’s parents’ house). “Why put people purposefully in a vulnerable position? What’s the point?”

Let the Richard Daley/Michael Bloomberg comparisons begin:

Throughout his five-and-a-half years as mayor, Mike Bloomberg has come across as something of a revolutionary in pinstripes, tearing down the old ways of doing things and replacing them with methods based on reason, data and cool calculation.

He consolidated all of the city’s customer service numbers into 311, centralized the school system and came up with a plan for New Yorkers to breathe the cleanest air of any big city by the year 2030.

The true inventor of these policies, though, was not the Jewish boy from Medford, Mass., but rather an Irish pol from the near south side of Chicago. Back in 1995 — when Mayor Bloomberg was just a glimmer in CEO Bloomberg’s eye — Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley got rid of his Board of Education and soon after started holding failing kids back. In 1999, Mr. Daley implemented 311 (yes, the same number New York has). By 2001, he had declared his intention to make Chicago the greenest city in the country and started planting flowers on top of City Hall to prove it.

“When the C-40 summit came, I gave the opening night’s reception speech and I unabashedly said we have stolen from cities all over the world,” said Dan Doctoroff, Mr. Bloomberg’s deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding, referring to the C-40 Large Cities Climate Summit held in New York in May. “Chicago, as the city in many ways the most similar to New York in the U.S., is the prime target.”

Is there a happy medium between those who want New York grittier and those who are quite satisfied with Fifth Avenue’s status as a chain store loss-leader? Yes, and it’s in the form of a Virtual Lower East Side:

Lingering in filthy bars, listening to obscure music and talking to beautiful strangers while wearing hip T-shirts is de rigeur for the Lower East Side.

Only now, you don’t have to be there physically to do it.

The Virtual Lower East Side, a new project by online-world specialists Doppleganger Studios, attempts to recreate every nook of the neighborhood.

While VLES is still under wraps — except for those lucky enough to infiltrate the earliest test stages — hipsters and closet-hipsters alike will soon be able to create a miniature version of themselves and wander through the digital streets. The aim, according to Doppleganger, is to create an online meet-and-greet, where music fans can watch concerts and swap tips without having to complain about the price of beer or extortionate rents.

“The idea is to create the atmosphere and vibe of the Lower East Side as it stands today, and give people an opportunity to experience bands they wouldn’t find in their hometown,” said Andrew Littlefield, founder of Doppleganger, in an interview with Metro.

“We tried to create the venues as you see them, and that’s where the VICE guys came in,” Littlefield said, referring to VICE magazine, who are also involved with the project. “They kept saying, ‘Make it darker, make it darker, make it grimier, make it grimier.’”

Top law firms single-handedly prop up New York’s economy in the slow summer months:

Each May, thousands of second-year law students from around the country descend on New York’s largest and most prestigious corporate firms for two-plus months of eating, drinking, Web-surfing and perhaps a little casework — a sacrifice they solemnly accept for the sum of more than $3,000 a week. This is the life of the summer associate.

It all culminates in The Offer, when the firm formally invites its summer associates back for real work the following year. Offer rates at most of the top firms hover around 100%, a statistic that leads many summer associates to wonder what, exactly, they would have to do to blow it. More than a few have attempted to find out.

. . .

The polished Davis Polk & Wardwellians have a swish dinner at the Rainbow Room — cutting loose is highly discouraged — and associates can even petition for reimbursement for joint manicure/pedicure bonding sessions with summer associates. “We get people who are very nice and pretty conservative,” said one associate of Davis Polk. “It’s full of people who know what’s appropriate and what’s not. I know a lot of people who wouldn’t survive here.”

. . .

Hard to believe it’s been two summers since Aquagirl made her waves [by drinking too much at a fundraiser at Chelsea Piers, taking off her dress -- maybe handing it to one of the firm's partners -- and jumping into the Hudson]. But she was only one in a long line of boundary-pushers. Before her in the Summer Associate Hall of Infamy is Jonas Blank. While a summer at Skadden in 2003, he accidentally sent 40 fellow lawyers an e-mail intended for a friend. Just making dinner plans, right? Not exactly. “I’m busy doing jack shit,” he wrote. “Went to a nice 2hr sushi lunch today at Sushi Zen. Nice place. Spent the rest of the day typing e-mails and bullshitting with people.” Mr. Blank worked at Skadden until this spring.

The summer is still young, but a fellow Skaddenite has already emerged as this year’s legendary associate. According to blog posts on AboveTheLaw, the unidentified summer successfully charged $3,000 worth of drinks at a firm after-party at the Lower East Side bar Libation. Like clockwork, gleeful colleagues forward the details of these hijinks to office inboxes citywide. New York thanks them.

. . .

“Crab cakes are only fun when you eat them once every few weeks,” says one associate. It may be time to dial it up a notch: What about Le Cirque? Jean Georges? The Four Seasons?

Come July, summer associates are pretty much the only diners cracking open the menus anyway. “The people next to us are from Davis Polk, the people across the room are from Skadden,” said one former associate, describing the midtown “power lunch” scene. “Many times you’re sitting next to people, they would be having the exact same conversation, and you’re thinking, ‘Are you a summer associate? I think I interviewed you.’”

. . .

Davis Polk and Kaye Scholer summer associates, with lunch budgets of $75 a head, seem to be in the best position to indulge fully. Still, going over budget usually results in little more than a gentle warning to be more careful next time.

When you come to New York, be sure to visit the Met. Because everybody loves the Met:

The group had swelled to 20, including a handful of New Yorkers who had missed the previous day’s meeting. Among them were a former Brooklyn schoolteacher, an Upper East Sider who called himself Boy Howdy, and a German immigrant who now lives in Park Slope. Kelso tried, with limited success, to get everyone’s attention as they gazed around the spacious lobby.

“We’re going to look at the sculptures, some of the most amazing work done by our race,” Kelso announced. Two nearby security guards exchanged worried glances, but said nothing. Kelso reminded the restless group to stay together and not to use flash photography. “We have no contingency plan if we get separated,” he added cheerily to a companion, and the group promptly split up in different directions.

The group made its way through the crowded galleries of European sculpture and decorative arts. Kelso, a self-proclaimed artist and art buff, occasionally paused along the way to explain that “this painting is worth $2 million,” and that piece of art, “is one of only 41 works by the artist.” The white supremacists didn’t stand out from the hordes of other tourists crowding the galleries, and their hushed comments, half-heard snippets about shooting Arabs or speculation about Muslims being thieves, were swallowed up with noise.

As he walked the halls, the man from Brooklyn told anecdotes from his days in the New York City school system. “It’s a zoo,” he said as a few others listened curiously. The animals, he implied, were all the black and brown kids who force schools to “teach to the lowest common denominator.” This, he said, was the problem with forced diversity. The discussion morphed into a brainstorming session on how to create public whites-only schools without being accused of outright racismperhaps, the ex-teacher suggested, by creating a charter school that specializes in something he believed that black kids wouldn’t be interested in, such as Latin. His small audience nodded in approval at the scheme.

The group continued its journey, pointedly bypassing the African, Asian, and Latin American wings. No one was interested.

In the European and American galleries, however, every object or image was interpreted as a symbol of white accomplishment, from sculptures of Zeus to paintings by Winslow Homer. Kelso paused in front of a tempera painting of a blond, blue-eyed woman wearing an opulent red gown and pearls in her hair. The artist was Piero del Pollaiuolo, a 15th-century Italian painter. Kelso called everyone over to admire the Aryan beauty, hinting that perhaps the artist was making a statement about racial purity, something the members of Stormfront are especially passionate about.

. . .

Kelso made sure to stop and admire the famous 21-foot-long oil painting, “George Washington Crossing the Delaware,” by Emanuel Leutze. (Online, Kelso calls it a “great white treasure.”) No one, meanwhile, pointed out the black oarsman pictured alongside the great Revolutionary War general.

The Stormfront tourists also paid particular attention to Civil War art, especially artist Winslow Homer. A favorite work portrays several oppressed but hopeful Confederate soldiers who, “continued to carry on a hopeless fight against overwhelming odds,” according to Kelso. The scene seemed to strike a chord with this group of white people who say they, too, are oppressed and carrying on a discouraging fight against a society corrupted by non-whites.

. . .

Eventually the group disbanded — one to the airport, a handful to Central Park, a few young men in search of Little Italy and some beer. Kelso, as always, headed back to his computer to spread the Stormfront message.

Some of the others posted their own remembrances. A 29-year-old Pennsylvania man claimed that he’d gotten lost during the field trip and had happily come across some Nazi relics at the museum. He only regretted, he wrote, that he’d been unable to insult any non-white people while he visited the city.

Definitely bad PR for an institution that has been criticized over the years for lacking diversity!

New York never had those nerdy duck tours . . . er, just don’t call it a duck:

The operators of the Gray Line tour buses and the New York Waterway commuter ferries teamed up to devise a peculiar version of the amphibious tours that have become tourist staples in Boston, Washington and other cities. The service, which they are calling New York Splash Tours, was scheduled for a launch in early June, but it began quietly picking up passengers on Seventh Avenue near 47th Street a few days ago.

For $29 a ticket and less than an hour of their time, passengers can ride one of these hybrids on a minitour of Times Square and Hell’s Kitchen, interrupted by a sudden plunge into the Hudson and a brief cruise. On the water, the AquaBuses loop northward past the most commercial section of the riverfront, offering a view of the skyline and the George Washington Bridge, but only a faraway glimpse of the Statue of Liberty.

. . .

Amphibious tours have been operating for years in other cities, originally using reconditioned surplus military vehicles known as ducks. But those old floating troop carriers are too weak and unstable to operate in the Hudson’s powerful currents. The Coast Guard has been reluctant to approve their recreational use since one sank in an Arkansas lake in 1999, killing 13 people, said Eric Christensen, a commander with the Coast Guard in New York.

. . .

Bonnie Young, a tour guide who identified herself as Barnacle Bon, tossed the occasional “Avast!” into her patter as she pointed out the high- and lowlights along the route, including the spot on the Palisades in Weehawken where Aaron Burr dueled with Alexander Hamilton.

But the best part of the tour was definitely the plunge. The bus had pulled off the West Side Highway into a garage-size tent at the end of 38th Street lined with video screens and filled with speakers. A brief video simulated a crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by Henry Hudson, ending with the bus being made to rock as it was virtually sideswiped by the Queen Mary. Seconds later it rolled down a ramp, its front end slapped the surface of the river, and the children aboard let out a collective yelp.

Graeme Clark, a visitor from Puerto Rico, rated the trip a pleasant surprise. “It wasn’t quite what I expected,” he said, “but then I really didn’t know what to expect.”