The City Section takes on spirituality and nail salons in one article:

As noon approached on a recent Sunday, the mostly Jamaican congregation of New Life Tabernacle gathered in its small storefront on White Plains Road in the Wakefield section of the north Bronx. Women in elaborate, wide-brimmed hats and men in dark suits filled six rows of pews and two dozen wooden chairs. The pastor’s wife, Paulette Randall, wearing a violet dress and holding a microphone, stood before the congregation.

“Is your soul right with God?” she asked the crowd of about 60, her voice exploding into the microphone. “That is the question.”

. . .

If this were not enough spiritual fervor for one block, worship at three more storefront churches was also about to begin. As the afternoon wore on, the worshipers became increasingly ardent, cries of hallelujah turned to shrieks, and White Plains Road between 239th and 240th Streets, home to seven houses of worship in all, throbbed with the ardor of believers readying their souls to meet their maker.

The abundance of churches in Wakefield is not limited to this block, which sits opposite a desolate strip of auto body shops. Amid the retail stores on the two-mile stretch of White Plains Road that runs from 240th Street south to East Gun Hill Road, there are about 30 storefront churches.

While the faithful often attribute the proliferation of churches to the will of God, a few earthly factors help explain their numbers in this particular part of the Bronx.

Starting in the 1970s, in a trend echoed throughout much of the city, Wakefield was plagued by crime that drove many of the neighborhood’s residents, among them large numbers of Italian and Irish families, to the relative safety of the suburbs. In response to their departure, many of the butcher shops, travel agencies, pharmacies and other small businesses along White Plains Road closed, leaving behind empty storefronts.

During the 1980s, immigrants from the Caribbean began replacing residents who had left. The immigrants brought with them faiths like Pentecostalism, and they established fledgling churches in the cheapest and most convenient places they could find, the White Plains Road storefronts widely available at low rents.

The houses of worship do not, however, inspire praise from all quarters.

. . .

While the churches offer their members spiritual reinforcement that helps them endure life’s trials, some neighbors view the sheer number of houses of worship with exasperation.

“There are too many churches,” Mario Ferrante, the gray-haired owner of Fairbanks Lumber and Home Center, said one recent afternoon as he stood outside his lumber yard, flanked on either side by a church. “How many gods are there?” he asked with a shrug. “How many popes?”

Donna Stewart, owner of Salon Express, a business sandwiched between two storefront churches, would agree. “Business could be better,” said Ms. Stewart, who was working near four hair dryers that sat dormant. “If we had other kinds of businesses around, we’d have more people walking by.”

According to Ingrid Gould Ellen, a director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University, there may be some truth to this claim. “They fail to attract the 24/7 street traffic so critical to urban retail,” she said of the churches, which are typically shuttered most days. “Retailers want to be around other retailers.”

Yet there are other reasons business could be better here. Nail and hair salons, seemingly immune to laws of supply and demand, are in oversupply on White Plains Road, and shoppers seeking more options head north to malls in the nearby suburbs. And on this particular block of White Plains Road, auto body shops and a New York City Transit yard add to the desolate mood.

I guess storefront churches are to the Bronx what banks are to Manhattan . . .

Next we can start talking about those service delays that brought this on in the first place:

It was nearly hidden on a New York City Transit public service placard exhorting subway riders not to leave their newspaper behind when they get off the train.

“Please put it in a trash can,” riders are reminded. After which Neil Neches, an erudite writer in the transit agency’s marketing and service information department, inserted a semicolon. The rest of the sentence reads, “that’s good news for everyone.”

Semicolon sightings in the city are unusual, period, much less in exhortations drafted by committees of civil servants. In literature and journalism, not to mention in advertising, the semicolon has been largely jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism.

. . .

Louis Menand, an English professor at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker, pronounced the subway poster’s use of the semicolon to be “impeccable.”

Lynne Truss, author of “Eats Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation,” called it a “lovely example” of proper punctuation.

Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, praised the “burgeoning of punctuational literacy in unlikely places.”

Allan M. Siegal, a longtime arbiter of New York Times style before retiring, opined, “The semicolon is correct, though I’d have used a colon, which I think would be a bit more sophisticated in that sentence.”

Sooner or later everything can be landmarked:

When New Yorkers talk about landmarking, they often think of genteel townhouses on tree-lined streets or distinguished cast-iron buildings. But concrete high-rises built in the 1960s?

Tuesday, the Landmarks Preservation Commission is expected to schedule hearings on preserving I.M. Pei’s Silver Towers, a modernist courtyard of concrete high-rises that towers above Greenwich Village.

“Even though this tower in the park superblock model was for the most part a failure, this was one of the most sensitive and well-designed ones,” said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, which has pushed for protecting the structures for five years. “The complex weaves itself more sensitively into the neighborhood than most, and it is one of the few superblocks in the country designed by one of the greatest architects of his era.”

. . .

“A landmark is something that was built years ago, that is historical,” said a longtime local resident who would only give her name as Dorothy. She added that she has lived in tenements in the neighborhood “for 80 years.”

“They look presentable enough, sure, but what were they built, 30, 40, years ago? That doesn’t sound like a landmark to me.”

One way to make people feel stupid is by forcing them to look up five-dollar words you use in a lede*:

Look for Mayor Bloomberg’s limerence with running for president to fade away as Super Tuesday’s votes are counted tomorrow night if they show Senator McCain as the presumptive Republican nominee.

I’ll save you the trouble:

You are not just in love, you are limerent. This is a brand-new word made up by a University of Bridgeport psychologist, Dorothy Tennov, in her new book on romance, Love and Limerence. If you haven’t guessed it already, limerence is the ultimate, near obsessional form of romantic love. (Time Magazine, January 21, 1980)

But that’s not really the worst thing, which would be that apparently Bloomberg doesn’t have to actually decide not to run for several months, prolonging the citywide nightmare:

For those who believe they will wake up the day after Super Tuesday to hear Mayor Bloomberg making an announcement about his presidential plans — not so fast.

The billionaire independent may not make a decision for months and may even launch early-state petition drives to get his name on the ballot before fully committing to running, an associate says.

Doug Schoen, who was Bloomberg’s pollster in his mayoral campaigns, said Bloomberg operatives have spent the last several months preparing a nationwide ballot-access movement.

. . .

“This can play out over the next two to three months before he has to make a decision,” Schoen said.

*And if you’re going to use them, please at least use them correctly — Bloomberg may have a supersized billion-dollar ego, but I don’t get the sense that he’s obsessively infatuated — like a teenager — with the idea of being president . . .

Every so often it’s good to be reminded how self-obsessed people in Manhattan are. For example, Borough President Scott Stringer drawing a comparison between NYU’s occupation of Greenwich Village and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank:

Eager to cool its often rancorous relations with its neighbors in Greenwich Village — and to pave the way for its next 25 years of expansion — New York University has agreed to try to push some of its expansion farther from its central core, to consult the community when it designs new space and to develop policies to relocate tenants when they must be moved because of university construction.

The agreements are part of an unusual accord that the university has hammered out over the past year with many of its fiercest critics, including public officials and community leaders. The planning principles, which are aimed at making the university’s growth smoother and less disruptive, are to be unveiled on Wednesday by university officials and other members of a task force that drew them up.

“The county and N.Y.U. have been in turmoil for well over 20 years,” said Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president who led the task force that shaped the accord. “This is the first joint announcement ever. Like the Israeli peace plan, I can’t guarantee that there will be peace. But this is definitely N.Y.U. changing direction.”

In case you ever doubted your parenting skills, there is new reason to worry:

The Goldbergs live on the top floor of a rent-stabilized building on Broome Street. The loft is airy and neat, with tall ceilings and skylights. Alex’s father, Richard, gut-renovated the place himself when he first moved in, in the early seventies. He now works as a wine consultant and has just uncorked a bottle of Côte du Rhône. He pours a glass for Alex’s mother, Robin, dressed in skinny jeans and a designer blouse, as they sit down to talk about their son.

Alex is “a phenomenon,” says Robin. “A self-made man.” She’s constantly surprised by how many people he knows. In California, a man recognized Alex from the salad line at Peasant. In the Hamptons, people ask, “Is that cool little kid your son?” Her trainer at the gym knows Alex; he bought shoes from him at NikeID. Occasionally, she even thinks about asking his help to get into places. “It’s cool,” she says. “He’s master of a universe that he’s created for himself.”

Richard credits Nolita for Alex’s development. “Look around,” he says. “Look at what and who Alex has at his disposal.” This is why Robin has worked to help keep the corporate intruders out of their neighborhood, at least as much as possible. Peasant will show him how to cook a goose; Starbucks won’t. “It’s hard to imagine Alex growing up the way he has anywhere else,” she says.

Robin worries, of course. She worries about “maintaining his childhood.” She worries that he’ll develop an inflated ego. And she worries that all the attention he receives for playing grown-up could lead to problems with other kids. While Alex does have friends his own age, like Julian Schnabel’s twin boys, Cy and Olmo, he can be a bit of a schoolyard bully. And earlier this year, Alex was temporarily suspended from school for calling his teacher a “dick” under his breath. His teacher needn’t have taken the comment personally. Alex curses at everyone, even his parents. “Like, he’ll be in the middle of the restaurant and say, ‘Fuck you, Dad.’ I mean, it’s crazy,” says Frank DeCarlo, the Peasant owner.

Richard and Robin try to discipline Alex about his language, but overall they’re lenient. In Miami, instead of grounding him for sneaking out, Robin let him hang out with the Delano crew all weekend. (At one point, Alex found himself chatting up three topless women on the beach. “He was literally surrounded by six grade-A Miami titties,” says Fernando Gil, a former “Page Six” reporter who met him there. “He was like a kid in a candy shop.”)

The Goldbergs don’t consider themselves a traditional family, and they’re proud of Alex’s precociousness and ingenuity. Richard is impressed when he goes to Knicks games with Alex and watches his son chat up Jay-Z and Beyoncé. He feels the same way when Alex calls from the golf course near his camp in Maine, asking him to send Cuban cigars by FedEx so he might bribe his counselors. Richard was never like that as a kid. He never had that uninhibited ability to create these kinds of opportunities. “All you really have to do is let him loose,” he says.

And for those of child-bearing age, a cautionary tale: Manhattan is better earned than learned.

Is Long Island City big for its britches? How about just big and it bitches? Battery Park City on the East River is starting to get picky about who it wants in the neighborhood:

A plan to build a six-story grad school dormitory and a 13-story residential tower across from the massive Queens West development in Hunters Point is meeting with stiff opposition from the local community board.

This month, the land use committee of Queens Community Board 2 unanimously voted to reject a Board of Standards and Appeals variance application for the dorm, which would house 220 CUNY Graduate School students, and the apartment tower, with a planned 169 units and ground floor retail.

“Dormitory housing in itself is transient housing at its best and offers no stability to the community. We believe that it is a detriment to the growth of Hunters Point,” said Board 2 Chairman Joseph Conley in a letter to the BSA.

But Howard Goldman, attorney for O’Connor Capital, the developer, said it is the dorm that is driving the project, which is slated to be located on 47th Ave. at Fifth St.

“Like many other institutions in the city, they [CUNY Graduate School] have a need for affordable housing for their graduate students,” he said.

The site, said Goldman, “seems like a good candidate because it is just across the river [from the Manhattan-based grad school] and relatively accessible by subway.”

Saying that he understood the community board’s “concerns about the size and density of the project,” nevertheless, the attorney said, the project’s neighbors are much bigger.

“The project is basically across the street from Queens West, where you have 30- to 40-story towers, and is one block south of a proposed high-rise development, Anable Basin, that has been in discussion for a couple years now,” he said.

Unfortunately, there are lies, damn lies, and elitists:

The Sunnyside Arch, on Queens Boulevard at 46th/Bliss Street, below the No. 7 elevated station, is perhaps an object only Sunnyside could love; therefore, Sunnyside might be forced to defend it against the Municipal Art Commission of the City of New York, which evidently wishes it would fall apart or be torn down.

At the November luncheon meeting of the Sunnyside Chamber of Commerce, Joseph Conley, chairman of Community Board 2, told the chamber members he had recently attended a commission hearing that looked into the case of the arch. Those who would preserve it have money in abeyance for needed repairs, but the Art Commission, which has existed since the consolidation of the city in 1898, must approve of such repairs. Conley said that the Art Commission had nothing but disdain for the arch, and suggested that those interested in preserving it should get an artist to redesign it. Somebody from the commission told him the arch should be more “kitschy” — a term he said he could not understand. And though the arch may be shabby at the moment, it is not dilapidated; the Department of Transportation inspected it, Conley said, and declared it “overbuilt”, so its basic structure is sound.

(They want more kitsch?)

Location Scout: Sunnyside Arch.

As Lady Macbeth might say, “Unsex me here”:

A production of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” will replace a hip-hop festival next summer in a DUMBO venue controlled by the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy — and organizers of the rap show believe that race played a role.

The Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival — which brought thousands of people and big-name rappers to the park-and-condo waterfront development site in 2006 and 2007 — had already scheduled its 2008 production for the weekend of June 22.

But organizers were shocked last month to discover that the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy had given those days to St. Ann’s Warehouse to stage a Polish rendition of that Scottish play.

Festival organizers believe the move was racially motivated.

“Hip hop brings a lot more brown people to this neighborhood, and people who live here are not comfortable with it,” said Wes Jackson, whose Room Service Production founded the festival in 2005.

“[People have told me that residents say], ‘The festival should be in Commodore Barry Park between the projects and the BQE, not next to my $2.5-million condo.’”

Whether racially motivated or not, the rejection of the hip-hop festival sounds very much like the scenario long imagined by critics of Brooklyn Bridge Park, where condo and commercial development will finance greenspace along a 1.3-mile stretch from DUMBO to the foot of Atlantic Avenue. Opponents believe that public events will not be public at all, but subject to the whims of the wealthy condo-dwellers whose maintenance fees will pay for the park’s upkeep.

Again, lay off the “sixth borough” talk — spare hard-working Philadelphians your evil scheme to turn their city into the next Ridgewood:

“The vibe here,” said Shawn Hennessey, “is the jawn.” The 27-year-old musician gestured at the neon sign for Silk City, a club-cum-restaurant housed in an old dining car in the gentrifying Northern Liberties neighborhood.

“The jawn is a Philly word,” said Brian Nadav, Mr. Hennessey’s friend and bandmate. “It means ‘a good thing.’ It can be a noun, like you can say, ‘Yo, pass me that jawn’ or ‘I’m the jawn.’” But, he cautioned, “It is never a verb. You never say, ‘I jawned.’”

A pre-9/11 take on the Mets’ ineptitude:

As mortified fans watch the Mets fritter away their once-commanding grip on first place in the National League East, dread infects the city that it might be witnessing a collapse of unprecedented proportions. Even those who far prefer the Yankees can’t escape the fact that such a nose dive would be downright humiliating to New York.

How could they? How dare they?

John Glendinning, 53, a retired laborer from Brooklyn who goes by Whitey, is so agitated he can’t watch the games without losing his sense of civility. “I get too nervous,” he said. “I start throwing things at the wall.”

But, hey, calm down. Collapses happen.

Indeed, where would the city be without its grandiose collapses? The all-out falls from grace or riches or first place, or even a simple upright position, are a familiar and infuriating and perhaps even necessary part of the New York experience. And while collapses smart, they can also be spellbinding.

These breakdowns, of course, aren’t confined to baseball teams that suddenly forget how to hit or pitch, not to mention catch fly balls. They materialize in every aspect of life.

Roads collapse, stores collapse, financial markets collapse, egos collapse. They’ve all happened throughout New York’s history, again and again. During the 1975 fiscal crisis, in fact, the entire city just about collapsed.

Collapses can be aberrant or telling. They can reveal something about larger societal verities. Or they can be vacant of meaning — simply perversely breathtaking to watch.

Part of what makes these sour episodes so intriguing is the velocity at which they can happen. Part of what makes them so frightening is that they can upend our world, even cause us to root for a different team. People and institutions that we thought we knew and trusted to always be there are — poof — gone just like that.

Then again, one of the worthwhile things about collapses is that they allow the often pleasing challenge of recovery, which isn’t always that hard.

. . .

Infrastructure Collapses are pretty common: Walls go, roads go, especially when no one takes care of them. Thus in May 2005, a 75-foot-high retaining wall collapsed onto the Henry Hudson Parkway in Upper Manhattan, burying parked cars in mounds of debris and dirt. The road, at least, held. Not so in 1973, when an 80-foot section of the West Side Highway fell onto West Street near Canal Street.

No one was seriously injured in these collapses, but many New Yorkers worry a lot about pieces of the city falling apart.

Then again, Dan Doctoroff’s big reshape-the-untamed-city-like-Robert-Moses moment was always really more about getting rid of those pesky downmarket nail salons*:

The City Council overwhelmingly passed the largest rezoning in New York City’s history Monday, voting to radically reshape Jamaica in eastern Queens.

The 368-block plan, which spans across four councilmembers’ districts, allows for hotels and office towers in downtown Jamaica, permits six-story buildings along Hillside Avenue and restricts development in some residential areas.

“To have the biggest rezoning in the history of the city not be in Manhattan but be in Queens sends an important message,” said Council Speaker Christine Quinn, a major backer, along with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, of the new rules.

. . .

Supporters of the rezoning hope to transform Jamaica into a transportation and retail hub, taking advantage of its close proximity to the AirTrain and the Long Island Rail Road.

The neighborhood was once the city’s fourth largest shopping district, but has been transformed during the past three decades into vacant strip malls, discount stores, and nail salons.

*Or are nail salons not entrepreneurial enough for you?

Baseball people may be superstitious, but baseball writers are just out of control:

If a scholar of Norse mythology had been in the stands of Yankee Stadium on Tuesday night, he or she probably would have advised Yankees fans to not make too much out of the 5-3 victory against the Red Sox.

The result, after all, still left the Yankees trailing Boston by an imposing seven games in the American League East. But more significant, perhaps, was the pesky and distracting squirrel that scampered up and down the right-field foul pole during the game and that, according to Norse mythology, just might have foretold that the Yankees will not prevail over the Red Sox this season.

Believe it or not, the squirrel’s actions closely resembled those of Ratatosk, or “gnawing tooth,” a squirrel in Norse mythology that climbed up and down a tree that represented the world. Snorri Sturluson, an Icelandic scholar and poet, recorded the story in his 13th-century work “Prose Edda.”

As the story goes, Ratatosk carried insults as it traveled to opposite ends of the tree, fueling a rivalry between the evil dragon residing at the bottom of the tree and the eagle perched at the top.

. . .

The Yankees said the squirrel came down about 20 minutes after Tuesday’s game and was allowed to go on its way. It joins a cast of baseball creatures that includes the black cat that crossed in front of the Chicago Cubs’ dugout during their ill-fated pennant-race battle with the Mets in 1969 and the bird that Dave Winfield killed with a throw in Toronto in 1983.

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

Thank goodness consumers are still shallow enough to care about a Midtown Manhattan address:

Small business owners who want the cachet of a Manhattan address but can’t afford the real estate prices are increasingly looking to virtual office plans, forgoing big rents for small spaces in favor of leasing a mailbox, receptionist, and conference room when needed, all for about $300 a month.

When a public relations executive, Shirar O’Connor, wanted to start her own firm, she didn’t have the capital to find, furnish, and fully wire her own office, so she looked into a virtual plan. Within 24 hours, Ms. O’Connor had a Midtown Manhattan address, administrative support, and a desk should she need it.

“The Manhattan address was the logical decision for us,” Ms. O’Connor, whose firm, the Pont Group, specializes in economic development, said. “All the media is based in New York.”

The average price per square foot for commercial real estate in Manhattan is nearly $60, up from $44 last year at this time, according to the brokerage firm Cushman & Wakefield. Those high prices can quickly add up, forcing small businesses to think more creatively about maintaining their urban presence. As a result, firms that offer virtual office plans, such as the Regus Group, are sprouting up across the city.

. . .

Another firm, ManhattanVirtuals.com, advertises an assigned 212 area code phone number as part of its package deal. The traditional New York City code makes companies appear as if they were established in the city before 212 numbers became scarce, the firm’s managing partner, Kareem El-Heneidi, said.

To Ms. O’Connor, the virtual office setup has been a “godsend.” Her business cards advertise her Midtown address, even if her mail ultimately goes to her Putnam Valley home.

On the 30th anniversary of the 1977 blackouts, the City section buys a first-person account on the bootstrapping ethic of looting — otherwise known as “stealing”:

In Spanish Harlem back then, when I was 11 and living in a tenement on East 111th Street and Lexington Avenue, too many families were hungry, and too many fathers were unemployed and angry. And so when the lights went out that evening three decades ago this Friday, many of us were going to take what we wanted, and what we wanted most was what we needed.

Lucky G’s father did not have a criminal record, but like the looting housewives, he understood the needs of the neighborhood. I don’t remember his real name, but I knew his 12-year-old son Gilberto. Everyone called him G until one day Yvette Sanabria, one of the most beautiful girls in Spanish Harlem, fell in love with him, and from that day on he became known as Lucky G.

During the blackout, Lucky G’s father and his brother hot-wired a van to carry stuff away. But unlike most of the looters, who went after jewelry or electronics stores, Lucky G’s father and uncle followed the housewives and made for supermarkets.

If the housewives hadn’t gotten there yet and broken through the gates, Lucky G’s father would smash the hot-wired van right through supermarket windows. They loaded the van with entire aisles of Pampers, including the diapers in the stock room. They hit most of the supermarkets in Spanish Harlem, stopping only long enough to dump their booty before heading to their next target, hoping the housewives hadn’t yet cleaned out the place.

The following morning, there was not a diaper to be bought in the neighborhood. Word spread quickly as to who had Pampers and who didn’t. For weeks Lucky G’s father sold Pampers at discount rates. He made a killing.

But Pampers are just a gateway to Yemeni-esque ransom plots:

In the days following the blackout, I took a cue from Lucky G’s father and the other looters and began searching for an opportunity. There were no jobs for adults, let alone for a scrawny wannabe tough guy like me, so when the chance arrived in the name of dog-napping on the Upper East Side, I took it.

During the blackout of ‘77, the Upper East Side was left unscathed. With a bustling economy of its own, it was the destination for the mothers of many of my friends, who woke up every morning and took a bus to the Upper East Side to clean apartments for next to nothing. As a teenager, I’d see Upper East Siders walking down Fifth Avenue, young girls in summer dresses, young men in khakis and crisp white shirts. I dreamed of living their lives, in their buildings, in their neighborhoods. I wanted to know where they were going. What doorman building did they call home? What smoothly operating elevator carried them to lofty and wonderful heights?

Back then, I felt that the only advantage I had over the Upper East Siders was that I sensed their fear that the damage we had done to our neighborhoods during the blackout we would one day do to theirs.

Yet I knew one of their weak spots: Furry creatures they treat like children. As good as gold. We’d call our dog-napping forays hunting. “You want to go hunting?” I’d ask a friend. We would take a laundry bag and a folding knife with a six-inch blade and roam the swanky streets of the Upper East Side. We were on the lookout for small dogs leashed to lampposts while their owners were running an errand or inside a cafe drinking coffee. We would unleash the dog or cut the leash, stuff the dog in the laundry bag and run as if the devil were behind us.

We would take the dog home, feed him, walk him, groom him, and two or three days later, we would prowl the street where we had stolen the dog in the first place, looking for the reward fliers. When we found them, posted to a bus stop or lamppost or the window of a beauty salon, we would return to Spanish Harlem to get the dog and my 6-year-old cousin. I would practice the word “aimlessly.” My cousin’s job was to be the cute, innocent child who had become attached to the dog.

Then we would all dress up, comb our hair and return the dog. The dog usually lived in a doorman building, and the owner was usually a woman.

“Lady, is this your dog?” I would say. “We found him aimlessly wandering around. My little brother loves him, but when we found out he was lost, we brought him back.”

The woman would be so happy and would reach out to take the dog from my cousin, who in turn would hold onto the dog and start crying as if his mother had died in his arms.

“I’ll get you another one, one that looks just like that one,” I’d tell him. And right then and there, the woman would fork over the reward.

I ran this scam to get money to buy stuff I wanted — Pumas, jeans — and sometimes, if there was money left over, I’d help pay the phone bill. I ran this scam with precision and skill.

The period during the blackout and its aftermath was the most dishonest in my life, but I will never shy away from what I did in El Barrio.

In the ’70s, the city was a cold place, but its residents were far from defeated. In the ghettos we waited for daylight, and when that first luminous ray broke through the crack on the wall, like the restless people that built this city, we saw an opportunity and we took it.

We built this city on stolen pets!

All I know is that it’s taken far too long for O.J.’s “If I Did It . . .” conceit to catch on in popular culture:

Street artists have speculated for months about the identity of a mysterious figure who has become known as “the Splasher” because he or she hurled colorful blobs of paint at prominent pieces of art on exterior walls in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan.

The only clues left behind in the paint assaults were bold manifestoes — phrases like “destroy the museums, in the streets and everywhere” — that appeared to critique the commercialization of art.

Now it appears that there may be more than one Splasher, and those claiming responsibility for the attacks have offered additional information about themselves.

One hint came Saturday night, when several people showed up at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery in Chelsea during a reception for the artist Shepard Fairey, who is known for his stenciled images of the wrestler Andre the Giant. They distributed a 16-page newsprint tabloid with the title, “If We Did It, This Is How It Would’ve Happened.” The cover was illustrated by a photograph of a piece of art by Mr. Fairey that had been splattered by paint.

Evidently Tom Finkelpearl still harbors some fantasy that MoMA will one day return:

When discussions ranking the boroughs of New York come down to numbers, Queens is near the top of many lists.

At 109 square miles, it is geographically the largest, and it is also the most diverse; 54 percent of residents speak a language other than English. Although second to Brooklyn in population, it is also home to the city’s tallest tree (the Alley Pond Giant at 133.8 feet), the most stations on the Long Island Rail Road (22) and the most historic chrome diners converted into Punjabi buffet restaurants (one).

But in recent months, a phrase has appeared in The Queens Tribune, a weekly newspaper, that suggests that Queens occupies only a fair to middling place in the citywide pecking order. The phrase is “third borough syndrome,” and the implication is that in terms of buzz and cachet, Queens is forever resigned to third place behind Brooklyn (recently hot) and Manhattan (traditionally hot).

In response, Queens boosters insist that the borough has other, less obvious charms.

“We feel like Queens is real New York,” said Tom Finkelpearl, executive director of the Queens Museum of Art, who is believed to have been the first person to use the phrase when he uttered it last year in a Tribune interview. “That middle-class aspect of Queens is one of the things that gives us that less exciting image.”

Mr. Finkelpearl does not accept the notion of Queens as a third-place place. His museum has emblazoned the borough’s name on T-shirts and infants’ onesies, for sale in the gift shop, to counter those shirts from elsewhere that say “Brooklyn” or “New York.” (Ideas like “Queens: We’re Number 3!” and “Come for the Airports and Stay for the Food” were considered but rejected.)

New Yorker profiles aside, it’s possible that Will Goldfarb is overestimating the public’s fascination with the way he desconstructs dessert:

Last week Will Goldfarb, who has a sliver of a restaurant in SoHo called Room 4 Dessert where he manipulates desserts the way Magneto does metal, said he was angling to take to the streets in a plexiglass-walled truck armed with a whirring fleet of high-tech Pacojet ice cream makers churning fresh batches every few minutes.

. . .

In addition to his see-through ice cream laboratory on wheels, Mr. Goldfarb has plans to open a virtual pastry shop called Mama Sugar in the online community Second Life. He also has plans for a children’s cooking show (his daughter, Loulou, will turn 3 this fall) and plans to write a cookbook on how to use Willpowders — his line of basic chemical building blocks of modern cooking, like sodium alginate and calcium chloride — at home.

We have looked into the eyes of the enemy and . . . found him refreshingly non-offensive, completely unlike the profination we expected:

And so it is now that Toll Brothers is making its presence known in at least three of the five boroughs, Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan. Until recently their name had not often been mentioned among the usual ranks of New York City developers. But outside of the city, where their presence approaches ubiquity, they are best known for creating luxury one-family residences.

A Google search of this firm, whose 2005 revenue was nearly $5.5 billion, turns up what amounts to a high-tech, digitized groan. Type in McMansion and chances are you’re only a few keystrokes away from a reference to Toll Brothers. They are to houses what Martha Stewart is to interiors — and you know what she’s like! Just in case you don’t: She endeavors to bring a whiff of spurious style, a soupçon of upwardly aesthetic aspiration, to the newly moneyed middle classes who raid her various ventures to fill their newly minted McMansions. Toll Brothers has been similarly assailed for cheapening the fabric of the hinterlands with the debased simulacra of true taste.

. . .

As such, it would be pleasant to dismiss [Toll Brothers' One Ten Third] as worthless and unimaginative, but that, I fear, is not the case. True, a high-rise does not look especially apposite amid the generally lower building-stock. But Third Avenue doesn’t look especially good along most points of its career, so this new addition cannot be seen as a major profanation.

(Thanks, Brian.)

Some bold plans to remake Governors Island refuse to shy away from the important debates — stem cells and Al Gore, for example:

The Philadelphia firm WRT, teamed with Urban Strategies, from Toronto, mixed its inspirational metaphors. “We were looking at forms in nature like oysters and pearls and stem cells,” says WRT partner Margie Ruddick. “Things that have a forgiving architecture, and where one thing is nested in another.”

Her team’s plan carves a series of interlocking ovals into the flat southern landscape, nesting a play lawn inside a larger great meadow, and an artificial hill inside a new wetland at the southern end. Rather than building up the center, the WRT scheme builds up the edge, stringing a series of structures that could house a spa and retreat center on a rocky promontory, plus a working waterfront along the Brooklyn side. These buildings, however, would not pop up out of the landscape but be part of it: Green roofs would slope up from the interior toward the water at one or two stories, turning the center of the island into a protected bowl.

“I have been reading Last Child in the Woods,” Ruddick says. “It is about how those of us who connected very closely to nature as children have a sense of responsibility for it. I thought at one point of calling it Gore Island.” To this end, the team envisions a camp in a new forested ravine and a sustainable farm and garden. The southwest side of the island has evolved into a sandbar beach and reef. The plan has a hotel on the west side (perhaps one of the new Starwood eco-hotels), but not for the business traveler: “It should be considered a retreat.”

Location Scout: Governors Island.

With all this health department attention going around, maybe they should send an inspector over to the Waverly Inn after the Observer catches E. Graydon flouting New York’s smoke-free workplace laws*:

And while the once ubiquitous after-dinner cigars have vanished from Elaine’s thanks to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s smoking ban, Mr. Carter continuously puffs away on a cigarette when he’s in his restaurant. Other diners at the Waverly only light up when they see Mr. Carter doing so, as if on cue.

As for the Waverly’s air of exclusivity and good taste, don’t worry — it’s basically your average bridge-and-tunnel crowd:

“About two weeks ago, my fiancée, some friends and I were stupidly singing E.L.O. and Cat Stevens songs — not quietly — at one of the middle-zone dining tables,” recalled BlackBook magazine editor Steve Garbarino. “Ellen Barkin and her group across from us joined in with equally dorky but fun fervor, shouting requests. It’s sounds pretty corny, but it was a good ‘moment’ that went on into the night.”

“Karaoke Monday” can’t be far behind . . .

*Something he’s already received several tickets for over at Conde Nast.

What is it that the Times doesn’t “get” about $2 nips of Georgi? Like it’s so fucking complicated:

Paretti’s Liquor Store sits opposite the Queensbridge housing project, amid the warehouses that line 21st Street in this part of northwest Queens. A red and yellow banner above the front windows proclaims a “Blow Out Sale,” and steel capital letters spell out the word “Liquor,” but the neon tubes within the letters no longer glow.

Inside, several rows of tiny airplane-type bottles of vodka, whiskey and gin, called nips, are stacked against the inch-thick bulletproof glass that separates clerks from customers.

In a city famous for extravagant and showy drinking — consider the rainbow-colored cosmopolitans of “Sex and the City” — this liquor store, in the shadow of the city’s largest public housing project, with upward of 7,000 residents, caters to a decidedly less glamorous end of the alcohol market.

. . .

A few days later, on a slow Sunday, the store was in the hands of a 26-year-old clerk named Martin Sladek, who wears his blond hair in a faux hawk and speaks with a thick Czech accent.

“Drug dealers buy Hennessy, and drug users buy Georgi,” Mr. Sladek announced at one point. “Crackheads get Georgi nips.”

. . .

The customers trickled in.

Two women who looked barely old enough to buy a legal beer peered through the bulletproof glass, mulling their options before choosing Smirnoff vodka. When they asked for glasses, Mr. Sladek handed them two green plastic cups, which they took with them when they left.

A middle-aged woman hobbled in on a cane.

“What time you closing up, Marty?” she asked. “Give me that $2 bottle of Georgi.”

But seriously — color pieces on liquor stores in shitty neighborhoods are much fresher now than they were two years ago, right?

No one realized just how exclusive the Waverly Inn is:

“Graydon is the only person who has a fixed table,” reveals one of the handsome waitstaff members (all of whom are men), who is neatly decked out in white shirt, black tie and big dreams outside the restaurant.

“But the banquettes are all considered the priority seats, and that’s where we put the biggest names.”

. . .

Waverly Lesson No.4: If you do somehow manage to score a main dining-room seat, just sit back and prepare to learn from the masters.

Parties of three, four, five and six are hustled in and out quickly. When you really crunch the numbers, the average patron can end up spending about $1 to $2 a minute at the restaurant (a $14 glass of wine here, an $85 seasonal fruits-of-the-sea plate there).

Meanwhile, it really is a view that’s priceless. While sitting near Banquette Row one night, we see Belinda Carlisle and Sandra Bernhard sweep into a table behind us to talk about whether certain friends do or do not have money.

What first appeared to downtown observers to be an influx of chunky Midwesterners on some sort of semester-abroad program turns out to be employees of the new Googleplex:

From lava lamps to abacuses to cork coffee tables, the offices may as well be a Montessori school conceived to cater to the needs of future science-project winners. The Condé Nast and Hearst corporations have their famous cafeterias designed by, respectively, Frank Gehry and Norman Foster; but Google has free food, and plenty of it, including a sushi bar and espresso stations. There are private phone booths for personal calls and showers and lockers for anyone running or biking to work.

The campuslike workspace is antithetical to the office culture of most New York businesses. It is a vision of a workplace utopia as conceived by rich, young, single engineers in Silicon Valley, transplanted to Manhattan.

. . .

Food is a major perk at the Manhattan Googleplex. Every Tuesday afternoon, tea with crumpets and scones is served. In the cafeteria a dry-erase board lists local purveyors of the ingredients in the meals like a sign at the Union Square Greenmarket. (Dry-erase boards are big in Google culture; ideas flow quickly).

All the free food has created a problem familiar to college freshmen. “Everyone gains 10 or 15 pounds when they start working here,” said James Tipon, a member of the sales team, who actively contributes to the four pounds of M&Ms consumed by New York Googlers daily. “I definitely gained that when I started working here, but I think I shed some of it,” Mr. Tipon said. “I try to be disciplined but it’s really hard.”

The Styles section attempts to write a story about “urban” “street styles” without referring to race, with varying results:

Scouring street-wear shops in downtown Manhattan on Saturday, Dimitri Viglis zeroed in on a hoodie he hoped would put some cool in his wardrobe. Mr. Viglis, a 23-year-old construction worker from Brooklyn, chose a black and purple style with a kinetic computer-graphic pattern by the label Orchard Street, a garment splashy enough, yet insulating enough, for a night on the town.

“Wear this,” he said contentedly, “and I won’t have to put on a heavy jacket while I wait on line at the clubs.”

He paid about $150 for his hoodie but would have parted with twice or even three times the price, he said. “Look at the quality,” he said, turning the cuff inside out to show its meticulous construction and stitching. Better yet, he said, he felt reasonably assured that he would not be seeing it on every Tom, Jamal and Harry.

Old genital face Will Self eschews the $45 flat rate and the AirTrain and decides to hoof it from JFK to Manhattan:

When Mr. Self recently traveled to New York . . . he did not take a taxi from his house in South London to Heathrow. He walked the whole 26 miles. Upon arriving in New York, he walked from Kennedy Airport to the nearby Crowne Plaza Hotel — a journey more perilous than he expected, because it involved a nighttime traverse of expressways with no curbs.

The next morning Mr. Self, who is unusually tall and very thin and has a long, melancholy face that he once described as looking “like a bag full of genitals,” packed his knapsack, rolled a cigarette and, puffing from a Hunter Thompson-style cigarette holder, set off on foot for Manhattan.

. . .

Proceeding along Eastern Parkway, Mr. Self studied the streetscape carefully, eager to discern the exact point when it turned from a black and Hispanic neighborhood to an Orthodox Jewish one, and was delighted when he spotted a guy in a yarmulke talking to two coffee-colored men.

“There!” he said. “There’s the interface!” A little later, after pausing briefly near the Utica Avenue intersection to inspect, in vain, a curbside book table for Will Self titles, he caught a whiff of subway. “Ah,” he said. “The afflatus of the city’s bowels — now we’re getting into the real body of the city.”

. . .

He added, “Actually, instead of looking at individual buildings, it makes more metaphorical sense to think of New York as one enormous chunk of masonry that has been cut up and carved away. It says, ‘This is the ultimate polis, through which humans move like nematodes.’”

On that note, still striding briskly, he walked down into Manhattan and across Little Italy to his hotel, where he freshened up a bit before walking to the National Arts Club that evening for a reception announcing the inauguration of a writers’ retreat on the Scottish island of Jura. Mr. Self is to be the first writer in residence there, and having written in his novel “Cock and Bull” about a man who develops a vagina and a woman who sprouts a penis, plans to work on a new project about unruly growth: a short story called “Haydn’s Nasal Polyp.”

The psychological principle of hating in others what you most see in yourself, writ Sunday Styles:

For status-conscious New Yorkers, Saturday has become synonymous with hordes of pleasure dilettantes wearing gelled hairstyles and quaffing Red Bull, creating hourlong lines at clubs that city dwellers may line up for on Thursday or even Monday, but will not get within five stretch-Hummer lengths from on Saturday. Instead, Netflix and Vietnamese takeout sounds good, or maybe that new Bond movie. It’s a night that people accustomed to quoting Andy Warhol or Diddy may summarize by invoking another New York luminary: Yogi Berra, who said, “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.”

. . .

Of course, the Saturday-shy New Yorkers who do go out on the town that night often do so with reservation — and reservations.

Last Saturday, four Manhattanites in their early 30s were huddling over a low table downstairs at Buddakan, the cavernous pan-Asian restaurant in the meatpacking district. “During the weekends, you get a lot of clutter, if you will,” said Brian Kirimdar, 30, an investment banker. He and his wife, Ashley, tend to hide out in restaurants on Saturdays, avoiding all but a few of the Chelsea clubs. “You don’t find too many bridge-and-tunnel people at Cielo or Marquee,” he said. “You really have to pick and choose.”

Indeed, it is no accident that clubs like Marquee, its upstairs V.I.P. room packed with models even on Saturdays, and Stereo, known for its Nikes-only sneaker policy, are more outsider proof.

“No cologne, earrings or hair gel,” said Michael Satsky, an owner of Stereo, standing outside the velvet rope of his club on West 29th Street around 1 a.m., explaining his weekend door policy.

Despite the fact that it’s now stuck there, why would you keep the Intrepid around? To support the idea of the military without having to touch that whole Iraq business! And you assumed it was because they cared about the country’s proud military history . . . silly you:

As a Navy salvage team works to free the World War II aircraft carrier Intrepid from a mound of mud in the Hudson River, the cost of fixing up the floating museum and its dock is rising to more than $60 million.

And even though the museum is privately run, virtually every dollar for the overhaul will come from taxpayers. Before the Intrepid’s operators sent an S.O.S. call to the Navy two weeks ago, the renovation project had already received pledges of $31 million from the federal government, $23 million from the city and $5 million from the state. Now the Navy is joining in to spend about $3 million to dig the ship out.

This level of government largess for a private museum, though not unprecedented, is rare. But the Intrepid offers elected officials in New York something other museums do not: an opportunity to show their support for the military regardless of their positions on the war in Iraq. Some have been sympathetic to the Intrepid’s plight because the foundation that runs the museum has also provided aid to wounded veterans and their families.

. . .

“The local officials are not for Iraq, but they were for World War II,” said Henry J. Stern, a former city parks commissioner who serves on the board of the Hudson River Park Trust, which controls the Intrepid’s pier. “This is a way of showing their commitment for America’s troops in a manner which is politically correct. It’s almost as if they want a throwback to the good wars, the wars when the country was united.”

Christine C. Quinn, the speaker of the City Council, acknowledged as much. Ms. Quinn, who opposes the war in Iraq, has been one of the Intrepid’s staunchest backers. “Supporting the Intrepid is a way of supporting the men and women in the military,” she said. “It’s even more important for those of us who stood in opposition to be supporters of our troops.”

Everyone agrees that there is more than enough advertising in the city, some of which is actually illegal:

Patience and Fortitude, the lions that guard the New York Public Library, have beheld many things in their 95 years: numberless readers coming and going, great generals and brave troops passing by, legions of marchers celebrating St. Patrick’s Day and Pulaski Day, organized labor and gay liberation.

Now they behold two giant Scotch bottles.

In the sea of advertising that seems to have washed over construction scaffolding around New York City, the new six-story Chivas Regal billboard on 475 Fifth Avenue stands out because it dominates the landscape around the library’s colorful lawns, ample terraces and majestic staircase.

It is also illegal, the city says.

The Department of Buildings inspected the scaffolding this week and found six violations, three involving the sign, which faces Fifth Avenue and 41st Street.

(Wow, after yesterday’s howler, even more totally wacky, out-of-left-field David Dunlap prose!)

This, however, seems like a little bit of an overreaction:

The Institute of Classical Architecture is an educational organization dedicated to fostering the classical tradition, as epitomized by the library. Its office is two blocks from the library. And its president, Paul Gunther, said his blood boiled when he saw the Chivas sign.

“In open defiance of a law still without the teeth of enforcement,” he said in an e-mail message, “these glaring, scaffold-held billboards not only degrade this public — even sacred — space, but openly mock it, as if to announce, ‘Thanks for the broad, unbroken and ideal sight lines.’”

The best part: the violations only carry a $2,500 fine . . .