Then again, gentrifiers are used to recycling all sorts of things:

Tribeca beat out Park Slope in Brooklyn as the neighborhood that recycles the most garbage, according to Sanitation Department figures released Monday.

“I feel like people in Tribeca are more environmentally conscious. I see a lot of ‘Go Green’ here,” said Jessie Sung, 20, a receptionist at the Tribeca SoHo Animal Hospital. “We’ve been very adamant about it.”

Sung said she even asked her bosses to include more recycling bins at work.

“People here take it into consideration more,” she said. “When I worked in midtown, they ignored that idea.”

. . .

Tribeca and parts of lower Manhattan recycled 27.9% of their trash during fiscal year 2007, which ended last June 30.

Park Slope and parts of Carroll Gardens and Red Hook came in a close second place by recycling 27.1%.

. . .

The Mott Haven area of the Bronx got the lowest marks. Residents there recycled just 4.9% of their trash.

. . .

New Yorkers recycle about 400,000 tons of paper and about 275,000 tons of metal, glass and plastic each year, according to the Sanitation Department.

Paper, packaging and food waste make up the largest part of the city’s trash.

Half of the mixed paper collected by the Department of Sanitation goes to a number of private companies for processing. The rest goes to the Visy Paper Mill on Staten Island, where it is turned into linerboard for corrugated cardboard.

NYU no longer dream school for teens:

The dream is over.

New York University’s three-year run as the No. 1 “dream” school for college-bound students has been derailed, according to survey rankings released yesterday.

Harvard, Princeton and Stanford all vaulted ahead of NYU in the annual Princeton Review “College Hopes” list — relegating the downtown crown-wearer to fourth place.

Oh, so that’s what those people do all day at those coffee shops in Park Slope:

You’re creative? You’re self-employed? Brooklyn’s for you.

In the last six years, Brooklyn has outpaced the rest of the city in attracting creative entrepreneurs, according to statistics from the Center for the Urban Future.

“It really is quality of life. It’s not as expensive and it’s not as busy as Manhattan. Brooklyn is hip. It has reached that level,” said Scott Adkins, a playwright who opened two writer’s spaces in Park Slope. “You’re guaranteed to have a good coffee shop.”

. . .

About 375,000 workers in the city were self-employed as of 2006 — a 23% increase from 2000, the center found.

In Brooklyn, the number of freelance writers, artists, architects, producers and interior, industrial and graphic designers increased more than 33% in the same period, compared with 6.5% in Manhattan.

That means nearly 22,000 creative freelancers live in Brooklyn - mainly in Park Slope, Williamsburg and downtown, according to the Brooklyn Economic Development Corp.

. . .

“I moved to Brooklyn in 1990 to work for Spike (Lee),” said cinematographer/photographer Frederick V. Nielson II. “At first, I was reluctant to leave Manhattan. I was like, damn, they give you a 718 area code.”

He first settled in Fort Greene, but moved to Prospect Heights after the birth of his son.

“I like the pluralism of living here. I know the guy at the candy shop. People here really patronize the local artists,” he said. “Once they’ve seen me in the neighborhood, or the diner, they’ll come up and buy my work.”

Adkins said the borough has come a long way from only a decade ago.

“It has everything Manhattan has — good theater, good restaurants. People actually use the G train now. It used to be a terrible train,” he said. “The one thing I don’t like is the Mexican bakeries are closing down.”

Women in New York and other large cities are earning more than men:

Young women in New York and several of the nation’s other largest cities who work full time have forged ahead of men in wages, according to an analysis of recent census data.

The shift has occurred in New York since 2000 and even earlier in Los Angeles, Dallas and a few other cities.

Economists consider it striking because the wage gap between men and women nationally has narrowed more slowly and has even widened in recent years among one part of that group: college-educated women in their 20s. But in New York, young college-educated women’s wages as a percentage of men’s rose slightly between 2000 and 2005.

The analysis was prepared by Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College, who first reported his findings in Gotham Gazette, published online by the Citizens Union Foundation. It shows that women of all educational levels from 21 to 30 living in New York City and working full time made 117 percent of men’s wages, and even more in Dallas, 120 percent. Nationwide, that group of women made much less: 89 percent of the average full-time pay for men.

Just why young women at all educational levels in New York and other big cities have fared better than their peers elsewhere is a matter of some debate. But a major reason, experts say, is that women have been graduating from college in larger numbers than men, and that many of those women seem to be gravitating toward major urban areas.

In 2005, 53 percent of women in their 20s working in New York were college graduates, compared with only 38 percent of men of that age. And many of those women are not marrying right after college, leaving them freer to focus on building careers, experts said.

“Citified college-women are more likely to be nonmarried and childless, compared with their suburban sisters, so they can and do devote themselves to their careers,” said Andrew Hacker, a Queens College sociologist and the author of “Mismatch: The Growing Gulf Between Men and Women.”

You know you want to pluck that bad boy:

It’s official! No one in the world has a longer nipple hair than Doug Williams.

Last Saturday, Williams had his celebrated chest hair measured at a barbeque in his Wil­liamsburg backyard, complete with a grill, a keg, and even a DJ. A group of photographers and a videographer were also on hand, clustered around Williams to get the best shot of the astonishing strand.

The barbeque was the culmination of Williams’s quest to get the hair into the Guinness Book of World Records. He says he didn’t set out to break the coveted record, it just happened.

One morning, Williams was “taking stock” of his nipple hair and noticed one was “really long.” Curious to see what the record was, he looked it up and found out it was only four and a half inches, considerably shorter than the hair sprouting from his own vestigal mammary gland.

Those close to Williams thought it was, well, a little odd.

“Initially, I was a little bit surprised,” said girlfriend Malika Crutchfield. “But after checking out the hair, I realized he had a shot at the record. I’m thrilled.”

. . .

Measuring duties fell to Dr. Sagat Verma, who bent over Williams and carefully extended the strand, holding it against a tape measure. Appraising nipple growths isn’t Verma’s specialty; by day, he’s an internal medicine specialist at Wyckoff Medical Center in Bushwick.

It might seem excessive to bring in a medical doctor for a single hair, but the Guinness Book requires that the measurer is a licensed doctor with “standing in the community.” And that’s just one of many complex regulations imposed on the record-breaking event. Williams filled out pages of paperwork, the hair had to be measured three times and photographed, and it had to be wet during the process.

To meet this last requirement, Crutchfield squirted bottled water on Williams’s bare chest from a couple feet away.

“That’s good,” he said, but she gave it a couple extra squirts, just to be sure.

Then Dr. Verma measured the hair while the DJ stopped the music for dramatic effect, announcing “the world’s largest nipple hair!”

“How many inches?” somebody asked before a hush came over the crowd.

The official length came out to 129 millimeters — the Guinness Book uses the Euro-centric metric system — or a little longer than five inches, demolishing the previous record of 115 millimeters.

If you felt like being cruel by sending someone on an errand in Manhattan, we suggest doing it on what might be the single most crowded hour of the year:

Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance business improvement district, has a convincing answer. He puts the most crowded time at 5 to 6 p.m. on the Wednesday after Christmas, which will be Dec. 26 this year.

“You have, on the one hand, all the tourists who are here,” he said in an e-mail message. “Then you have people who have left the matinee and people who are coming to evening shows and eating dinner before or after the shows.” Add the commuters who are still pouring out of offices, along with people returning gifts or using their gift cards.

Finally, Times Square attracts onlookers curious to see where the New Year’s Eve ball will be dropped — if not the heartiest of revelers intent on camping out there for five days.

Research confirms just how annoying it is to stay stuck behind a Malawian while being trailed by a Singaporean:

Move out of the way! New Yorkers are a step ahead, walking at a pace 10 percent faster than a decade ago, a new study has shown.

But the pace of walkers in the Big Apple trails behind seven other big cities, including Singapore and Copenhagen.

The international study, which clocked the time it took for men and women to walk along a 60-foot stretch of pavement, revealed males generally walk 25 percent faster than their high-heeled female counterparts.

. . .

The average walking time in New York was 12 seconds per 60 feet, or about 3.4 mph.

Retirement sales worker Nichole Dougherty, 28, from TriBeCa, stepped up the pace, cutting through the crowds to reach a meeting on time yesterday afternoon.

“I walk in heels and I walk fast. I’ve traveled to Europe and we definitely walk much faster in New York,” she said.

Despite being famous for its bustling pace, the city that never sleeps ranked only eighth in the world.

The survey of 32 countries found New Yorkers were speedier walkers than people in London, Paris and Tokyo. Singaporeans were the fastest walkers, at 3.9 mph while residents in Blantre, Malawi, were the slowest surveyed, at 1.3 mph.

Researchers conducted the experiment by secretly timing thousands of pedestrians’ speeds in city centers around the world.

In each city, the survey was carried out on the same day, at the same local time on a busy street which was flat and wide enough for people to walk at their maximum speed. The survey monitored adults walking on their own and did not include people on mobile phones or struggling with shopping bags.

Identical research methods were used to compare the new study to the results of a survey in 1994, revealing the pace of life is now about 10 percent faster.

New federal census figures show that New York has a lot of work to do if it is to fulfill Mayor Bloomberg’s shocking 1 million-more-people figure. City officials are not happy about the disappointing fourth quarter growth:

New federal Census figures assert that New York City’s population grew by a total of 587 people between 2005 and 2006, a number the Bloomberg administration says substantially underestimates the city’s tremendous growth.

Before the numbers were even public — they were slated for release today — the city vowed to contest the figures, claiming that the methods the Census used aren’t the best way to get an accurate count in a city as dynamic as New York.

At stake are tens of millions of dollars in federal and state funding each year, as population in part determines the apportionment of aid for various programs. After the city successfully contested the 2005 figures last October, adding 70,000 to the initial estimate, Mayor Bloomberg said in a statement that an additional $23.1 million for affordable housing would come to the city.

Challenging the Census’s estimates has become something of an annual tradition for the Bloomberg administration, as this will mark the fourth year straight the city has contested the federal numbers as failing to capture thousands of New Yorkers. The Census Bureau put the city’s population in mid-2006 at 8.21 million, up 2.6% from 2000.

Late last year, the city released a report projecting that its population would grow by more than 1 million by 2030, bringing the city’s total population to 9.1 million, with an increase of nearly 400,000 people expected between 2000 and 2010.

Mr. Bloomberg routinely cites the figures as justification for various large projects and infrastructure improvements, as the city needs to make room for an extra million people.

It’s that time of year (again) when allegedly overlooked outer borough restauranteurs attempt to stuff their way into Zagat:

The Myrtle Avenue Business Improvement District is offering local caterer Jive Turkey assistance in the three-and-a-half-year-old business’s bid to get listed in a new Zagat guide.

On March 1, the BID’s Web site urged residents to “vote for Jive Turkey.”

“We encourage you to submit your vote and rank your other favorites in the coming week,” the entry continued.

Jive Turkey, on Myrtle Avenue between Clinton and Waverly avenues, serves up a wattle-dropping 15 flavors of deep-fried bird and is a candidate for entry into the new Zagat’s “Marketplace” guide, which will feature caterers, florists, and other stores “ranked” thanks to snarky reviews from actual patrons.

But in order to make the cut, Jive must accrue a minimum number of reviews. Zagat, whose highly unscientific ratings are based on votes by consumers, never reveals exactly how many are required.

“If you have a low vote count, unless you’re considered a really superlative place, you won’t be included,” said a former Zagat employee who would only speak anonymously. “[Encouraging people to vote is] frowned upon, but a lot of people do it. There’s no way to stop it.”

A new folksy-sounding quip is born:

New York City taxi drivers hail from more than 130 countries, and America is one of the five most common countries of origin, according to records for 2006 obtained from the Taxi & Limousine Commission.

Just two drivers indicated on their applications that they were originally from Switzerland, making them as rare a breed on the city streets as the new hybrid Lexus taxis. More than 5,200 drivers were originally from Bangladesh, making the South Asian country the most common country of origin among cabbies, followed by Pakistan, India, and Haiti.

America was fifth, with about 2,300 drivers, and New York natives made up more than half of the American-born drivers, according to the Taxi & Limousine Commission documents.

. . .

Many New Yorkers interviewed about their perceptions of cab drivers harbor stereotypes that do not necessarily reflect the diversity of taxi drivers. Tasheem Jones, who lives in Midtown and estimates that she rides in a taxi at least three times a week, describes her typical cab driver as a “rude Arab guy.” Kheeny Khan, a Pakistani who lives in Queens, said he has the impression that most cabbies hail from the same Punjabi districts of Pakistan he still calls home.

Even though it took years and years to fill up all that office space, the Empire State Building is the most popular architectural landmark in the country:

The Empire State Building, the famed marvel of steel and stone at Fifth Ave. and 34th St., was named America’s favorite work of architecture in a public poll released yesterday by Harris Interactive and the American Institute of Architects.

“It’s one of those places you have to go see,” Ian Molyneux, 26, of Manchester, England, said yesterday as he took in the sweeping view atop the 1,454-foot-tall skyscraper.

“When you go back home, everyone’s going to ask if you went to the Empire State Building.”

The fallen World Trade Center and 31 other city landmarks were also listed among the nation’s 150 favorite structures, making the city the top architectural destination in the U.S.

. . .

The Empire State Building, which was designed by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon Associates, beat out the White House and the Washington National Cathedral, which ranked No.2 and No.3 respectively, in the poll of 1,804 people.

Location Scout: Empire State Building.

The Queens Chronicle crunches the numbers and deems Councilmember John Liu grandstander of the month for December:

One of the modern personalities that accompanied the invention of e mail was the electronic chatterbox. Friends who forward every chain letter, relatives who send a new digital photo every time their child eats a new type of food, and dates of little consequence who keep sending text messages long after the initial spark is gone are all prime examples of this.

In the world of Queens politics, the leading electronic chatterbox is City Councilman John Liu (D Flushing). Over the past month, the Queens Chronicle has collected every e mail and fax sent by Queens representatives at all levels of government: city, state and federal. The paper tabulated the total number of communications and Liu came out ahead by a large margin.

Between Nov. 21 and Dec. 21, he sent 37 separate e mails and three faxes about his work on the council. He sent out advisories about his intentions to take part in rallies after the police shooting of Sean Bell, releases about his opposition to Rosie O’Donnell’s impersonation of Asians and announcements about his appearances on television. He also chronicled his participation as the council’s Transportation Commitee chairman and outlined his opposition to the expansion of a gas station in Flushing. On one day in particular — Dec. 1 — Liu sent five individual e mails on topics ranging from the announcement of new free Chinese language courses to the dedication of a new mobile computer lab in a local school.

If I hear “Shoomy shoomy pwetty Princess” one more time, I swear I don’t know what I’ll do:

Max, Lucky, Princess, Rocky and Buddy were the five most-popular dog names in 2005, according to a Health Department review of dog licenses that was released yesterday. The same names took thetop five spots the previous year.

Mixed breeds came out on top of the list of popular breeds, followed by Labrador retrievers, pit bulls and Shih Tzus.

Although the Health Department issued 101,274 dog licenses last year, that figure represents only a small portion of city dogs. Many owners never bother to get their dogs licensed, even though that’s required by state law.

In other dog-related news, Councilmember Peter Vallone, who is good at proposing excessive and/or unconstitutional legislation, is now looking to crack down on one of those top breeds:

Pit bulls will be an endangered species in the city if one lawmaker gets his way.

Calling them potentially lethal weapons, City Councilman Peter Vallone renewed his call yesterday to ban pit bulls from the five boroughs.

“I am an animal lover,” said Vallone (D-Queens). “But I have always thought they should not be allowed on our streets. They have been bred to be violent.”

. . .

Vallone, whose two daughters own a Bichon Frise, pointed to several incidents in which children suffered serious injuries after being attacked and bitten by pit bulls.

He wants the state Legislature to change the law so cities like New York can ban specific breeds. Although he wants to bar people from owning or breeding pit bulls in the five boroughs, current owners would be exempted.

Vallone said it’s too early to say how a ban would affect thousands of homeless pit bull mixes that end up in city animal shelters every year.

The Health Department reveals the fattest, skinniest and drinkiest neighborhooods in a new study:

If you live in Sunset Park, it might be time to get off the couch.

A new city report found people who live in the Brooklyn neighborhood are least likely to exercise of all New Yorkers. In fact, 57% admitted they are sedentary, while residents of Greenwich Village and SoHo hit the gym on a regular basis.

Meanwhile, Staten Island is still the smoking capital of the city, especially the South Shore and Mid Island sections, where 33% of residents smoke,

The updated Community Health Profiles released by the Department of Health use yearly phone surveys and other data to measure health indicators such as depression, asthma, diabetes and smoking in 42 neighborhoods.

Some conclusions:

East Harlem residents may exercise a bit more than those in Sunset Park, but they should lay off the fried foods — 31% say they are obese.

Binge drinking — defined as having five or more drinks in a night — is highest in Chelsea.

This year features borough-specific haunted houses:

Last Halloween, [Timothy] Haskell, a theatre director, staged a public haunted house on the Lower East Side, and so many people showed up that hundreds never made it inside. “We realized that we had to turn away a lot of local people,” Haskell said. So this year he put up haunted houses in all five boroughs, tailored to prey on the fears peculiar to each one.

For months, Haskell and his crew polled residents of the five boroughs to find out their worst nightmares. . . . People from the Bronx and Queens, they said, tend to fear things that might actually happen, like being mugged (harpaxophobia), while Manhattanites are frightened of fantastical and unlikely occurrences (flying sharks, riding in an elevator that rockets through the roof of a building). “In Manhattan and Brooklyn, we heard ‘fear of the homeless,’” [chief designer Paul] Smithyman said. “Then, in the Bronx, we heard ‘fear of becoming homeless.’” Staten Island residents apparently dread chemical spills and gas leaks.

. . .

The challenge of creating a tableau representing acrophobia, the fear of heights (and the seventh most common fear of Manhattan residents), almost stumped the designers. “One idea was that we’d have people walk up a staircase and onto a Plexiglas floor and see teeny-tiny furniture beneath them,” Haskell said. “But there were liability issues.” Instead, they paired a video of someone falling off a ledge with an evocative sound effect: vroooooom, splat. For illyngophobia (fear of dizziness, No. 11 among Manhattanites), the team installed a giant spinning tunnel; for entomophobia (insects, No. 3), they glued a thousand dead cockroaches onto a wall; and for musophobia (mice, No. 6), they ordered an essence of dead rat from an outfit in Chicago called Sinister Scents.

The New York Press’ Best of Manhattan for 2006 is out (it seems like every year they have to make some sort of half-assed apology for why it’s still called “Best of Manhattan”). This year includes “Best Worst Smelling Subway Station” (in City Life):

If you need a good reason to vomit, transfer from the V or the E train to an uptown 6 train at 53rd Street. The underground passageway between these two tracks either hosts a nightly pissing competition that gives bonus points for projectile sharting, or it captures the scent of a nearby chef who boils soiled toilet water. In any case, when you reach the top of the escalator off the E/V line, begin breathing deeply in preparation. Nevermind the salty taste of group body odor trailing from your fellow commuters; it pales in comparison to the soggy air trapped between the semen-coated walls that awaits you. At the top of the steps, hold your breath and run. Don’t walk. Don’t even walk fast. Run. And don’t be afraid to take out any hobbling meanderers up ahead. The smell is ruthless and so must you be.

Concur.

Most stations have a particular terroir — personally, I find the Lexington Avenue Express tracks at 59th Street a lovely musty odor evocative of an ice skating rink — but the stank-ass mop water miasma of the passage between the downtown and uptown 6 lines (If I’m understanding them, I think that’s what they’re referring to — meaning the passage commuters move through between downtown 6 trains and the E/V — of course, you probably only know this if you’re heading out to or coming from Queens . . . ha!) is one of the worst.

A new CBS/New York Times poll finds that New Yorkers are less self-involved than previously believed:

Nearly a third of New Yorkers said they thought about Sept. 11 every day. Nearly a third said that they had not gone back to pre-Sept. 11 routines and that they were still dealing with changes caused by the attacks.