How does a firefighter afford a Cadillac SUV? That looks like an Escalade. Prices start at $56,890:

A Cadillac SUV registered to Firefighter Christopher Santana was photographed parked just 3 feet from a fire hydrant on a Bronx street.

And in what seems to be a pathetic attempt to dodge a ticket for the gross — and potentially dangerous — parking violation, a handwritten note was placed on the dashboard alongside a worthless fire union parking placard. “I’m really a fireman,” the note read. “I work in Engine 46.”

“Ask Traffic Agent Maria Daniel,” the note continued. “Thank you for your courtesy.”

The black SUV — boasting the vanity license plate BRAVEST1 — was parked on Van Cortlandt Park South at the corner of Gale Place in Kingsbridge on Sunday afternoon. Neighbors said the car was frequently parked in that spot. It was stationed just 3 feet from the fireplug, far less than the 15 feet required by city law.

“Every firefighter in the City of New York knows not to park in front of a hydrant,” said one high-ranking FDNY source. “Don’t they teach that on the first day of the [Fire] Academy?”

“Could you imagine if a fire engine couldn’t reach the hydrant because of that guy?” the source asked.

Santana, 34, is assigned to Engine 46 and has been with the Fire Department for more than four years, according to an FDNY official.

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.

But really, when you throw around figures like $545 million for trees and $410 million for biometric punch clocks, $3 billion doesn’t seem like such a bad deal:

In a city of big projects, it ranks among the biggest. New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection is building one of the largest water filtration plants in the world in a 10-story-deep hole it blasted out of bedrock in the Bronx. When completed in 2012, the plant, capable of purifying 300 million gallons of water a day, will be buried there.

But the plant, which will filter water from the Croton watershed in Westchester County, is no Bronx treasure chest. Even as construction moves forward, questions about soaring costs and delays continue to plague the project.

The cost is now estimated at nearly $3 billion, a huge jump from the $660 million city officials estimated when they announced an audacious plan in 1998 to build the plant below the surface of Van Cortlandt Park. They vowed that the park would be made as good as new, even if that meant replacing whatever was lost during construction. They now plan to rebuild a driving range on top of the buried plant.

Some officials and others fear the final tab could climb even higher, and in the process push up water rates. On April 1, the city comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., announced that he was starting an independent audit to determine whether city officials understated the original price, to get the plant built in the Bronx rather than Westchester. Besides scrutinizing the complicated accounting, Mr. Thompson will have to sort through accusations by some residents and officials of deliberate distortions of costs, and intimations that the project has been tainted by mob influence, though nothing has been proved.

. . .

The city was forced to build the plant because water from the Croton watershed did not meet federal standards for safety and purity. Although the Croton system can supply nearly 30 percent of the city’s 1.1 billion gallons a day of drinking water, generally it supplies just 10 percent, mostly in the Bronx and northern Manhattan. The rest of the city’s water comes from the Catskill Mountains and the Delaware River, and is so clean that the city last year won a 10-year exemption from federal regulations requiring that all surface drinking water be filtered.

Opponents of the Bronx plant have also expressed concern about the federal indictment in February of a key manager for the Schiavone Construction Company, which was the principal contractor responsible for digging the pit and putting in the water tunnels. The company’s offices were raided by federal agents, who seized files, and the manager, Anthony Delvescovo, was charged with having committed extortion beginning in February 2005 — around the time that work was beginning on the Croton project.

Location Scout: Van Cortlandt Park.

Automobile use as “alternative transportation” . . . of course it is:

Another Manhattan luxury is making its way to the Bronx — and it’s eco-friendly.

Zipcar, the urban car share service, is bringing 12 cars to the borough that will be stationed in four parking lots. It has plans to have at least 20 more in three additional lots by summer’s end.

“We think New Yorkers everywhere need access to alternative transportation,” said Joel Johnson, general manager of the company. “Traditional services like rental car companies tend to shy away from areas underserved like the Bronx. We are open to serve the entire city.”

Zipcar already operates in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. It has 200,000 members nationwide.

Unlike rental cars, the 12 Mini Coopers and eco-friendly hybrid Toyota Priuses in the Bronx can be reserved by the hour or day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Members reserve the cars online or by phone whenever they want, and have automated access to the cars using a “Zipcard” to unlock the door and drive away.

The four lots to first have the cars are located at 1020 Grand Concourse, 3000 Third Ave., 1752 Morris Ave. and 250 E. 188th St.

Can’t you people quit using the Bronx as the movie set for your amateur Soprano murder plot? It’s unfair to the borough:

A dumped lover hired his cousin to kill his teenage ex and then tried to cover it up as a botched Bronx robbery — even screaming after his bumbling relative, “You gotta shoot me,” too, when he forgot, cops said yesterday.

Carlos Cruz and killer cousin Devon Miller appeared to be within a hair of getting away with their fiendish plot — until Miller’s dreadlocks did them in, sources said.

A woman looking out her apartment window just after the Sunday shooting saw Cruz chasing a man down the street and told cops the thug turned around and fired at his pursuer. She described the shooter as a hulking man with dreadlocks.

When Miller later showed up at Jacobi Hospital supposedly to console Cruz as he recovered from a minor gunshot wound to the thigh, an eagle-eyed detective recognized him from the description.

That set an investigation into motion that ended with Cruz confessing, sources said.

Cruz paid his 25-year-old cousin — a convicted murderer — $1,000 to shoot Chelsea Frazier, his on-again, off-again girlfriend and the mother of their 14-month-old, Elijah, police said.

The explosive end to the case came less than two days after Cruz told cops that he and Frazier, 18, were the random victims of a street robbery gone awry.

Cruz had allegedly lured Frazier to The Bronx from their home in Southbridge, Mass., for a shopping excursion as part of the plot.

An early start to looting at old Yankee Stadium:

Stealing and bunting are normally encouraged in baseball, but a pair of dumb Yankee season-ticket holders learned the hard way that the two do not go together.

John Bunjaporte, 41, and Keith O’Rourke, 39, both of Westchester County, allegedly tried to snatch a piece of the red, white, and blue bunting that hangs over the edge of the upper deck, police said.

The team took the highly unusual step of revoking their $55-per-game season tickets because the Yanks intend to auction off every last brick and grain of dirt in the stadium after the season, officials said.

Both were charged with petit larceny and criminal mischief. They face fines and up to a year in prison.

Location Scout: Yankee Stadium.

Better to decamp to Jackson, Prospect or even Morris Heights than whoring every detail of your life for clicks, according to the person who started it all (by portraying someone who started it all):

Budding Carrie Bradshaws better think about moving to Queens, says “Sex and the City” icon Sarah Jessica Parker.

Manhattan is bracing for another influx of Blahnik-wearing career girls after the film is released May 30. But New York is “a really hard city, and it’s very expensive and it’s not what it used to be,” Parker told me at the Cinema Society and Linda Wells’ screening of her new film, “Smart People.”

“That’s why the outer boroughs are so desirable,” she said. “The outer boroughs are pretty sexy. It’s just a matter of time before they have their own shows.”

But with congestion pricing . . .:

A shooting suspect blew his brains out after the Con Ed truck he had stolen to flee cops got caught in traffic outside Yankee Stadium just as last night’s game ended, sources said.

The unidentified man — who earlier had shot his girlfriend in the shoulder after a violent argument — killed himself as pursuing officers closed in on him.

The suspect had gotten into a fight with the woman near East 151st Street and Courtlandt Avenue, about 20 blocks from the Stadium, at about 10 p.m.

He suddenly drew a gun and shot her in the shoulder, a police source said.

. . .

The gunman then hopped into a Con Ed truck that was left with its engine running at a work site.

When a utility worker confronted him, the suspect pointed a gun at his head and sped off.

Shortly after, he smashed into a police car, but got away.

As he approached the Stadium, at East 161st Street near the Macombs Dam Bridge, he got stuck in traffic. When cops approached the truck, they heard a gunshot and found the driver dead with a bullet wound to the head, authorities said.

Make it a dozen long-stemmed, and fast:

Cops are hunting for an armed robber who hit a flower shop and a candy store in the Bronx.

The bandit held up Heavenly Treats Candy Bouquet in Morrisania about 2:40 p.m. on Feb. 28, flashing a handgun to rob the register and steal property from a 48-year-old woman, police said.

He struck again on March 2 at Diana’s Party Supply & Flowers in Longwood, holding up two teenage girls, 15 and 18.

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 . . .

No 311, no honey:

Next week, the city begins a series of seminars at venues all over town on avoiding bedbugs — except in the Bronx.

The reason isn’t that city officials don’t want to come to the Bronx - but rather that, apparently, the bedbugs don’t.

While some residents of Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens are in a near panic over the worsening citywide infestation, people in the Bronx don’t seem to be bugged by the critters — yet.

“The Bronx had the second-lowest number of complaints last year,” said Seth Donlin of the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which keeps track of such calls to the city’s 311 hotline.

“It’s the lowest total after Staten Island, which is statistically insignificant,” Donlin said.

Bronx residents called to complain about bedbugs just 1,117 times last year, and HPD documented only 347 actual infestations.

Brooklyn saw the most complaints by far, according to HPD, with 2,382 calls and 692 infestations — double the Bronx totals.

Manhattan followed with 1,729 calls, just ahead of Queens, which saw 1,602 complaints.

Infestations by the blood-sucking insects in the city have skyrocketed in recent years.

In fiscal year 2004 the 311 hotline received only 1,800 calls about bedbugs citywide, but by 2007 the number had more than tripled, to nearly 7,000 overall.

Bedbugs were all but eradicated in the United States decades ago. But with the banning of the powerful pesticides used to kill them and increased global travel there has been a resurgence.

The geographic quirkiness of Marble Hill has its advantages:

Vitalina Montesano lives in Manhattan, even though her Marble Hill neighborhood lies on the land mass everyone calls The Bronx.

But when she toppled down the stairs of her housing project in 2005, her lawyer decided to challenge that jurisdictional anomaly by filing her suit against the city Housing Authority in The Bronx — where juries are notoriously more sympathetic to plaintiffs and prone to award big settlements.

The Housing Authority then filed for a change-of-venue motion, saying that the case should be heard in Manhattan with its stingier jury pool.

Her lawyer argued that since Montesano has a 718 area code, a Bronx ZIP code and her children went to public schools in The Bronx, her place of residence is — for all intents and purposes — The Bronx.

“If you send a letter to my client, it goes to Bronx, NY. If you call her, it is a 718 number,” lawyer Ben Robinson told The Post. “It’s a very unique situation.”

Originally, Marble Hill was part of the island of Manhattan — cut off from The Bronx by the Spuyten Duyvil Creek.

But in 1895, the city dredged out marshland to the south of the neighborhood to connect the Harlem River with the Hudson. Later, the creek was filled in, and Marble Hill was made contiguous with The Bronx. When a lower court decided to allow the case to be heard in The Bronx, the Housing Authority appealed. On Tuesday, the state Appellate Division apologetically overturned the decision.

Location Scout: Marble Hill.

Sure, the project is a lot less “sexy” but it at least provides some useful purpose:

There are many longstanding, seemingly intractable shortcomings in the city’s family court system that might delay a parent in getting a child back from foster care: unprepared lawyers, overcrowded dockets and long waiting lists for drug treatment and mental health services.

But Bronx Family Court has added a new obstacle: broken elevators.

For about a year, the elevators at the courthouse have been a disaster, people who work there say. Breakdowns have long been routine. This year, repair work has only added to the problem.

Lines to use a working elevator can stretch around the corner. People sometimes wait for hours to get to hearings, which are held on the seventh and eighth floors. Frequently, hearings have to be postponed because clients and witnesses cannot get to them.

“It’s absolutely an outrage,” says Ava Gutfriend, a lawyer who often represents parents in child welfare cases. “But in the Bronx it happens all the time.”

In some cases, warrants have even been issued for people who are downstairs waiting for an elevator; judges know only that they are not in the courtroom, said Bill Nicholas, the assistant attorney in charge of the Legal Aid Society’s office at the court.

. . .

In a city full of aging towers, many people view elevator breakdowns as a common annoyance of life. But the scale of the waiting at Bronx Family Court, which often extends to an hour or more, is beyond what most New Yorkers face. And the potential loss is not simply that of time wasted, but of the quality of justice that is dispensed. Consider the case of a client of Ms. Gutfriend’s who was scheduled for a hearing in mid-November to determine whether she could get her daughter back from foster care, where the child had been for 10 months.

The hearing was set for 10 a.m., Ms. Gutfriend recalled, but it was a day when only two of the four elevators in the building were working. The lines to get on the elevator and up to the hearing rooms stretched back two city blocks. Her client phoned upstairs to let her know she was stuck in the line, but was not able to get upstairs in time.

The judge agreed to call the hearing again an hour later, but the client was still in line. So the judge, who had something like 70 other cases to try that day, rescheduled the no-shows for the next available date. For this mother, the next chance to plead her case and get her child back was in January.

*I don’t care if it’s a reductionist apples-oranges argument — this is horrifying.

One solution is to trade up:

Once a dumping ground for carcasses of animals sacrificed in Santeria rituals, the community board wants to use hilly 3.3-acre University Woods Park for an affordable condo complex.

But some local activists have been working to clean up and save the park.

Two years ago, Community Board 5 approached developer Andrew Lasala about swapping the park for his property on the waterfront just north of it, which would be ideal for a greenway, said District Manager Xavier Rodriguez.

The state was interested in buying Lasala’s waterfront property, Rodriguez said, and there was interest in swapping it for the University Woods acres, which have been a haven for drug addicts and homeless people and last year was ranked as the worst park in the city by an advocacy group.

Location Scout: University Woods.

Oh, and by the way, about all that new parkland:

The Bloomberg administration has always claimed more parkland will be created by the new Yankee Stadium project, which swallowed the 102-year-old Macombs Dam Park.

In recent months, the city has upped the numbers, saying 27.6 acres of replacement parkland will be built here, a clear gain of several acres for the community.

Yet 45 percent of these new parks — or 12.5 acres — already exist, either as mapped parkland or, in one case, as a schoolyard. Two of the replacement fields will be more than a mile away.

The replacement plan’s reliance on existing park parcels was acknowledged by Parks Dept. spokesman Warner Johnston, but “just because property is mapped as parkland, or Parks property, does not mean that it is fully developed into a dedicated park,” he said.

“They’re passing off park land the public’s been using for at least 70 years,” said Geoffrey Croft of NYC Park Advocates.

. . .

Johnston explained the city’s plan will “transform” similar park property surrounding Yankee Stadium. “The replacement parks will reconstruct the parkland with new amenities and landscaping,” he said. A new artificial turf field at the West Bronx Recreation Center, for example, will go down on what was an “empty lot.”

That lot is 1.2 miles uphill from the former Macombs Dam Park. A mile southeast of the old park, another acre of artificial turf is being installed on the asphalt playground of P.S. 29, built 45 years ago.

“They’re putting in artificial turf — that’s not replacing anything,” Croft said.

Earlier: That Was Fast.

With the foundation set, and the hourly rates are next:

There are no heralded restaurants or strobe-lit nightclubs nearby. The area has no tourist attractions. Finding a yellow cab would be akin to spotting a U.F.O.

Still, a hotel is in the final stage of construction in a remote stretch of Hunts Point, wedged between the Sheridan Expressway and the Bronx River. Neighbors of the four-story, butter yellow building, which will have at least 60 rooms, include a body repair shop, a boiler repair outfit and a junkyard.

But rather than hailing the hotel as an economic boon to the gritty industrial area, community leaders wish it would simply go away.

“Who in their right mind is going to come from Oklahoma and stay in a location like that?” demanded Francisco Gonzalez, the district manager of Community Board 9. “It’s a deleterious location.”

Central among local concerns, said Albert Alvarez, chief of staff to City Councilman Joel Rivera of the Bronx, is that “this hotel, opening up in an area that’s pretty much desolate, is going to be a haven of prostitution and drugs.”

The anecdotal evidence well established, DEP officials will perform a formal olfactory survey of Hunts Point:

The city’s Department of Environmental Protection has tapped an engineering consulting firm to conduct an odor survey of Hunts Point over four days starting tomorrow, with the public asked to be the bloodhounds — phoning in when they pick up the scent.

The purpose of the survey is to identify the odors prevalent in the Hunts Point area and establish their sources.

The new pungency patrol is part of a seven-page agreement City Councilwoman Maria del Carmen Arroyo (D-South Bronx) wrangled from the DEP as the price for dropping her opposition to an expansion and upgrade of the Hunts Point Wastewater Treatment Facility to be built in her district.

The $235 million project was approved by the City Council Monday by a 48-to-0 vote.

The Council approval of several land-use actions will allow the DEP to begin work, expected to take eight years, on four egg-shaped, 130-foot-high “digester” tanks, where bacteria will break down sludge into a bio-solid for use as compost and fertilizer.

Tomorrow, inspectors from the Malcolm Pirnie Inc. consulting firm will be in Hunts Point from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., ready to track down odors called in by residents to a special hotline.

They’ll be back in the evenings from 5p.m. to 10 p.m. on the following Monday and Thursday, then again on Tuesday, Sept. 25.

. . .

The DEP has even offered a list of descriptors useful for characterizing odors under three broad categories:

“Almond-like” odors might be sweet, smoky, earthy, metallic, acidic, oily or like mothballs.

“Sulfidic” odors could be yeasty, fruity, putrid, fecal, buttery or honeylike.

“Alcohol-like” smells may be rubbery, sooty, coffee-like, chemical or like fried chicken.

As city officials stumble upon even more impressive ways to waste money (a $114,762 electricity bill for a building not even open, for example*), one of the better Leona Helmsley anecdotes is resurrected:

In 235 counts in state and federal indictments, the Helmsleys were accused of using money from their hotel and real estate empires to buy a $1 million marble dance floor above a swimming pool, a $210,000 mahogany card table and $500,000 worth of jade objets d’art. Mrs. Helmsley was also charged with defrauding Helmsley stockholders by receiving $83,333 a month in secret consulting fees.

Mr. Helmsley, then 80 and suffering deficiencies in reasoning and memory, was found mentally unfit to stand trial. As Mrs. Helmsley was tried, a series of prosecution witnesses described a spiteful, extravagant, foul-mouthed woman who terrified her underlings. In the most celebrated line of testimony, a former Helmsley housekeeper testified that Mrs. Helmsley had once told her, “Only the little people pay taxes.”

*They must not have gotten to the David Owens’ piece in last week’s New Yorker that refutes the argument for security lighting; maybe it’s still sitting next to the leaky toilet?

Come on — seasoned criminals know to keep a low profile online:

A photograph lifted from MySpace.com and handed to a grieving relative of a victim in Sunday’s fatal subway shooting led to the arrest yesterday of a 16-year-old Bronx boy, police sources said.

“This is the kid who shot your nephew,” a man unknown to the family told the aunt of Rayquon Story, 19, who was killed early Sunday on a parked No. 5 train in Eastchester, the Bronx, police sources said.

After handing her the photo, the tipster went on to tell the aunt that the suspect, identified by police as Robert Denis, lives in Co-op City.

She turned the photo over to detectives, who then spoke to Co-op City security. They recognized the teenager and he was taken into custody.

Denis is accused of squeezing off five rounds during a 2:30 a.m. confrontation at the Dyre Ave. and E. 233rd St. subway station, striking four people, including Story, cops said.

He made a videotaped statement at the 47th Precinct stationhouse, and was awaiting arraignment at Bronx Criminal Court on charges of murder, attempted murder, manslaughter and criminal possession of a weapon last night.

Those pining for the bad old days should take comfort knowing that the bad old days are alive and well and they’ve returned to the Bronx to revisit an old friend:

In the age-old contest for most despicable vandal, stealing from a preschool that serves autistic and other special-needs children is bound to earn you a spot on the list. But when the object you steal is part of a memorial to the school’s longstanding and recently deceased principal? Automatic top 10.

So congratulations to the mystery thieves who on the night of Thursday, June 7, visited 2778 Bruckner Boulevard — the home of These Our Treasures, Inc., also known as TOTS — and walked away with a Japanese cutleaf maple tree — a tribute to beloved educator Nan Sforza, who succumbed to cancer three years ago.

The small tree — carefully raised in a pot in the school’s front lobby for the past two years — was planted hardly a month ago, in an emotional ceremony that dedicated the entire garden on TOTS’ Brinsmade Avenue side to Sforza. The school’s staff was planning to attach a memorial plaque within a few weeks.

Imagine their surprise, then, when they arrived at work on Friday morning to find an empty hole where the tree had been. Since, the staff has filled the hole with a white-and-red sign reading “Shame on You,” alerting neighbors to the purpose of tree.

. . .

[In a statement to the Bronx Times Reporter, TOTS officials reasoned] that since the exotic maple was carefully uprooted, rather than ripped up or toppled over, the average local hooligan is probably not to blame. “It appeared less like a random act of vandalism,” the staff wrote, “and more like the effort of some misguided gardener to get a lovely little tree at no cost.”

So far, police have been unable to track down the vandal, and no eyewitnesses have come forward. But TOTS is offering a truce to whatever brand of crook lifted its loving tribute: If the maple magically reappears at the school building in the near future — as neatly as it was removed last Thursday — the staff won’t ask any questions.

Adolfo Carrión Jr.’s Pataki-esque new ads let everyone know the good news about the Bronx’s fine hospitals:

Television viewers in the New York region will learn about a new and intriguing tourist destination this month. It is an exotic land the size of Paris, an urban retreat that gave the world not only hip-hop but also Billy Joel, and is home to a zoo, a baseball stadium and a jeer disguised as a cheer.

The Bronx.

A series of television commercials promoting the borough of 1.3 million will be on the airwaves starting June 25. The 30-second spots, the first television advertisements the Bronx has used to sell itself, are part of a marketing campaign called “We’re Talking the Bronx,” starring Adolfo Carrión Jr., the borough president.

. . .

The ads will run for nine weeks on cable networks including CNN and ESPN in parts of the Bronx, Manhattan and Westchester County. They could be seen by roughly one million viewers, according to Weinrib & Connor, the White Plains advertising agency that produced the commercials.

The spots promoting one of New York City’s grittier boroughs give the place a rather old-fashioned, small-town feel. A fiddle plays pleasantly in the background as Mr. Carrión and others smile at the camera, though the borough’s homegrown musical legacies include hip-hop, doo-wop and salsa.

In one ad, an unidentified representative of Woodlawn Cemetery, one of the financial sponsors of the campaign, stares into the camera and says: “Whether preplanning or at a time of need, come talk with us.”

In others, viewers are whisked from the borough’s Little Italy on Arthur Avenue to the blue-backed seats of Yankee Stadium to the interior of North Central Bronx Hospital, “the hospital of choice for the Norwood community.” There are shots of Mike’s Deli on Arthur Avenue and the eager staff of a Ridgewood Savings Bank branch.

. . .

Mr. Carrión said the goal of the campaign was to generate more tourism to the borough, which attracted about seven million visitors last year. The ads also raise the profile of Mr. Carrión, who is considered a possible candidate for mayor in 2009.

When asked if the ads would help his political future, he said yesterday: “Every time I wake up in the morning and do my job right, it helps me to do whatever I’m going to do next.”

The good news is we’ve reclaimed the Hunts Point waterfront and built a brand new park. The bad news is now we understand why no one wanted to go down there in the first place:

Christian Román went to Barretto Point Park on the waterfront in Hunts Point for the first time last month when the weather turned warm.

He was pleased by the lovely landscaping in the new five-acre park, which opened last October with an alluring swath of grass and a soft margin of sand along the East River. But although he liked what he saw, he did not like what he smelled.

There was a foul odor in the air that he guessed was a consequence of the park’s location, wedged between a private fertilizer plant and a public wastewater treatment facility.

“When you enter, you don’t really smell it,” said Mr. Román, a 21-year-old senior at St. John’s University who was born and raised in the South Bronx, where he still lives with his parents. “It hits you when you go near the beach volleyball area. You’re like, ‘Whoa.’ I had to cover my mouth with my shirt and walk a little faster.”

Complaints about odors that emanate from industrial facilities in Hunts Point are longstanding, but the $7.2 million park has drawn fresh attention to the problem, especially now as summerlike humidity intensifies the smell.

“We’re glad the park is there,” said Elena Conte, a coordinator at Sustainable South Bronx, an environmental organization. “People are enjoying it whenever they can. But the unresolved odor issues are a deterrent.”

Who cares like not at all about the $1 billion it will take to build a proposed new police academy? City Island residents:

At the door of his waterfront home on City Island in the Bronx yesterday, Ken Binder said one word when he learned that the police firing range, just across Eastchester Bay, was slated to close.

“Soon?” he asked eagerly.

Well, not exactly. The range is moving to a police compound in the College Point section of Queens that will not be built for several years.

Still, Mr. Binder, a retired interior designer, was ready to begin celebrating the range’s demise.

“I would get down on my hands and knees and kiss the feet of whoever would take it away,” he said, his words punctuated by a volley of deep pops echoing from across the water.

Since 1959, the New York Police Department has used the peninsula in Pelham Bay Park known as Rodman’s Neck for all manner of ballistic and ordnance-related exercises — target practice, training maneuvers, blowing up of unwanted explosives.

And for just about as long, the residents of City Island, a sort of seafarer’s Mayberry largely isolated from the annoyances of big-city life, have cursed the daylong barrage of booms and rat-a-tats. (Except for the detonation of confiscated fireworks around the Fourth of July. “That’s kind of fun,” Mr. Binder said.)

Then again, there are some who seem to be suffering a sort of Stockholm Syndrome:

“For business, it’s bad,” said the woman at the cash register of the City Island Diner, who would not give her name. “We’ll miss them. The cops are good guys, and they come from all over the place.” As for the noise, she said: “It’s like living next to the subway. You get used to it.”

Up the street at JGL Wines and Liquors, the news seemed to disturb the very order of things.

“Holy mackerel!” said the proprietor, who would not give his name.

His friend Yolanda Cirulli, who had fixed him a lunch of penne aglio e olio, did not know what to think. First Ms. Cirulli, a member of the City Island Civic Association, declared victory, recalling her years of battling the noise. But then she thought of the cats and dogs who live on the firing range and whom she cares for.

“There are at least 25 cats there,” she said, “and those policemen, they love the cats. They treat them very well. What’s going to happen to them?”

JGL’s proprietor added: “Let me tell you another bad thing. When there’s trouble here, the cops are here, instantly. And tons of guys. Last year a guy crashed his motorcycle on the corner. In five minutes, there must have been 50 cops.”

Location Scout: City Island.

Yes, an actual carny:

The decomposed remains of a carnival worker who was reported missing 10 years ago were found in a Bronx home after a water pipe sprung a leak, authorities said yesterday.

Dwayne Perkins said he went to 911 Ogden Ave. to check on his grandmother Monday evening and stumbled upon the ossified corpse of Michael Johnson in the basement.

As Perkins peered into a dank corner of the basement to inspect a pipe that was spitting steam, he spotted the old bones.

“I was ready to leave when I looked down, and I saw a ball covered in dirt, but when I looked closer, I [realized] it was a skull,” said Perkins, 40.

“It just blew me away.”

He called the police, who discovered a jacket among the heap of bones and rotting flesh. Inside the jacket was Johnson’s identification.

“The cops said the bones were in a disarray, probably because some cats, rats and dogs may have gotten to it,” said Perkins, whose family has owned the house for 35 years.

His uncle, Ray Stirrup, even had a workshop in the basement and was flabbergasted by the disgusting discovery. “Man, just thinking about it — I’ve been sitting here, doing my little projects, and he’s 15 feet behind me. I never smelled him,” said Stirrup, 56.

Johnson had been reported missing in his native state of Ohio and in New York in November 1997. He was 50 years old at the time.

He had been renting a $40-a-week room on a third floor of the three-story, 106-year-old house that’s just a stone’s throw from Yankee Stadium, after befriending fellow carnival worker Charles Byrd, Stirrup’s stepson.

See, this is what happens when you don’t follow The Rules:

For years, neighbors knew little about the frail, older woman who lived at 3280 Perry Avenue, a weathered two-story house in Norwood, in the Bronx. She lived alone, neighbors said, and seemed to value her independence.

About two years ago, though, some people on the block said that they began calling the police when they realized they had not seen the woman in a while.

On Friday, workers who were at the house to remove debris discovered bones inside, and people on the quiet residential block between East 209th Street and Holt Place began sharing scant details about the reticent occupant of the house and puzzling over what could have happened.

The medical examiner’s office confirmed yesterday that the bones found on Friday in the house were human remains. After an autopsy, the identity of the remains and a cause of death had not been determined, according to Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the office.

Yesterday, neighbors remembered a woman who walked slowly and used two canes when she was seen, which was rarely. Those on the block said that in the past the woman had depended upon people next door for help carrying groceries and shoveling snow, but that those neighbors had since moved.

“She was a loner,” said Therese Mulligan, 48, who lives on the block. “She didn’t want much help.”

Vivian Brown, also a resident of the block, said she called the police two winters ago to say that she was concerned because snow was piled high on the porch steps along with stacks of mail. Ms. Brown said that officers searched through waist high piles of refuse inside the house for about 30 minutes before leaving.

Ms. Mulligan said that she, too, had asked the police to look into the house around the same time. Officers showed up, she said, and looked inside but emerged saying they had found nothing amiss.

Fuckin’ A, beavers are back! And at $15 million, Representative José E. Serrano gets naming rights:

A crudely fashioned lodge perched along the snow-covered banks of the Bronx River — no more than a mound of twigs and mud strewn together in the shadow of the Bronx Zoo — sits steps away from an empty parking lot and a busy intersection.

Scientists say that the discovery of this cone-shaped dwelling signifies something remarkable: For the first time in two centuries, the North American beaver, forced out of town by agricultural development and overeager fur traders, has returned to New York City.

The discovery of a beaver setting up camp in the Bronx is a testament to both the animal’s versatility and to an increasingly healthy Bronx River.

A few years ago the river was a dumping ground for abandoned cars and rubber tires, but it has been brought back to life recently through a big cleanup effort.

The biologists who discovered the beaver say they have nicknamed it José, after United States Representative José E. Serrano of the Bronx, who has directed $15 million in federal funds toward the river’s rebirth.

In an interview, Mr. Serrano said he had always envisioned the river getting cleaner, “but I don’t know to what extent I imagined things living in it again.”

A number of people reported seeing the beaver last fall, but biologists figured that the sightings were much more likely to have been of muskrats, which are somewhat common in the area.

But the biologists were intrigued enough to investigate, and after trudging the riverbanks, they spotted gnawed tree stumps and the 12-foot-wide lodge — evidence that pointed to beavers, which are rarely seen in the wild because they tend to work at night and avoid people.

Then on Wednesday, the biologists were able to videotape the animal on film, swimming up the river looking for more material to insulate its home. The animal is several feet long, two or three years old, and appeared to be a male in search of a mate, said one of the biologists, Patrick Thomas, the curator of mammals at the Bronx Zoo, which is run by the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Horses running wild in the Bronx . . . wonders really never ever ever cease:

The police captured two rogue horses yesterday after a 911 caller reported that the animals were galloping through traffic on a highway in the Baychester section of the Bronx, police officials said.

Officers eventually found the two horses at a Little League field in the area. According to the caller, they were running loose on Pelham Parkway toward the Hutchinson River Parkway. It was unclear last night where the horses escaped from, but a community board leader and an official from the Association to Prevent Cruelty to Animals said the area has had problems with loose horses in the past.

It’s not the interstate, the mall or even Wal-Mart that killed Main Street — it was overzealous traffic agents:

Combatting graffiti, applying for sidewalk permits, and monitoring the scourge of empty storefronts or new chain stores aren’t at the top of the priority list for the dozens of small business owners along Morris Park Ave.

Number one on their list is parking tickets.

At a meeting called on Jan. 9, over 40 store owners met with community leaders in hopes of building a unified front to tackle issues many in the area fear could lead to the commercial strip’s downfall.

“It’s totally supportive. They need it desperately,” said John Fratta, district manager for Community Board 11.

While the addition of sidewalk cafes, new clothing stores and diverse shops would be a boon, all merchants had one beef: Ticketing of their customers by parking agents.

“Morris Park is getting killed by traffic agents,” said Fratta. “They have those people out there issuing 120 tickets a day. A customer gets a ticket, that person no longer comes to Morris Park. That person will be going to the malls in Westchester, where there’s parking.”

Clothing stores, especially well-known vendors, could provide an anchor to draw shoppers to the area between Williamsbridge Road and Bronxdale Ave., Fratta said.

“Most people now come to eat or get their nails done.”

But traffic agents deter any newcomers, he said. “Cookies [a school uniform store] wanted to come here. They looked at the traffic agents and changed their minds.”

Marco Muccitelli, owner of Marco’s Salumeria Leone caterer and deli, called the ticketing “absolutely insane.”

“People don’t even have two minutes to actually get out of their cars there and pick up a sandwich. They’re getting a $115 ticket for a $6 hero.”

Meanwhile, somewhere a lowly factchecker pleads for his job:

There’s a plaque on Shore Road where bicyclist Ivan Morales was struck by an SUV nearly a year ago. After being hurled more than 30 feet in the air, his helmet split in half. So did his skull. The NYPD and news reports said he was dead.

This weekend, Time’s Up!, a bike advocacy group, organized a tour of sites throughout the city where cyclists were killed by motor vehicles. When News 12 broadcast a segment from the spot where Morales was killed, his fellow churchgoers were shocked.

Ivan Morales is alive and well and living in the Bronx.

“I was actually dead at one point,” the 62-year-old retired Metro-North computer analyst said yesterday. “In the ambulance, they said, there’s nothing we can do for this guy. What happened, by the grace of God, I came back.” He was in a coma for four days and didn’t remember anything about the Jan. 9, 2006, incident after waking.

No word on whether the plaque was returned.

Observers were quick to blame the transfat ban for increased anxiety among the city’s food purveyors:

Kabeer Ahmad, 32, the proprietor of the Kennedy Fried Chicken shop at 868 Hunts Point Ave., was nabbed for allegedly torching the Twin Donut shop next door at 4 a.m. yesterday.

Ahmad confessed he set the fire because he was upset that the donut shop had started selling other food, including fried chicken, last month, sources said.

The doughnut store was gutted and Ahmad’s business damaged.

A new owner, Mike Chhor, had been set to take over the doughnut store yesterday.

Chhor, who paid $25,000 for the business, watched as it went up in flames.

Fire Marshals Michael Durkin and Robert Cristadoro reported finding a juice container and spray can that reeked of gasoline inside Ahmad’s restaurant. They also spotted a hole in the wall dividing the two shops.

Investigators said Ahmad had been complaining to other store owners about losing business to the doughnut shop. He was charged with arson.