Maybe now that New York has caused the world’s entire economic system to collapse people think the city kind of sucks. And the Yankees’ inability to quickly sign superstar pitcher free agent C.C. Sabathia is the first sign of The End of New York:

On Friday, it will be three weeks since they barreled into the free-agent negotiating period with a six-year, $140 million offer to starter C.C. Sabathia. His response has been silence. Derek Jeter had already called Sabathia by then, and Alex Rodriguez has called him since. Yet the offer sits there, an anomaly in a depressed free-agent market, begging to be accepted but met with indifference.

. . .

Typically, the Yankees do not need to beg free agents to accept. The Yankees’ strategy is usually to identify their target, overwhelm him with an early offer, intimidate the competition and get their man. They have done the first three things, but Sabathia is still a free agent.

“If they went to Sabathia with $140 million, he could go back to them and say, ‘Give me $170 million and I’m there,’” said one major league general manager, who was granted anonymity so he could freely discuss another team’s plans. “He hasn’t done that. The Yankees aren’t his first choice. Why isn’t he jumping on their offer?”

The Yankees have continued to negotiate with Sabathia, and they would like to sign him next week. But they have not sensed the usual enthusiasm that accompanies a splashy Yankees offer.

Mike Mussina signed quickly after the 2000 season, and a year later, there was never much doubt about Jason Giambi’s intention. Both times, the Yankees had just been to the World Series. Both players wanted to be in New York — or in Mussina’s case, somewhere close to his Pennsylvania home — and both had a veteran agent, Arn Tellem.

Sabathia is a different case entirely, and the reason he is stalling, to those who know him, is just as the general manager suspected: his first choice is not New York. Sabathia is from Vallejo, Calif., near the Bay Area, and it is well known that his preference is to play for a team on the West Coast. But the money is elsewhere.

“It’s not that he doesn’t want to be a Yankee; that’s not it at all,” said a friend of Sabathia’s, who was granted anonymity because Sabathia had not authorized him to speak on his behalf. “It’s just the aspect of being out there, his family, that kind of stuff.”

Side note: Red Sox fans, probably still boiling about years of obnoxious “1918″ chants from the right field bleachers at Old Yankee Stadium, should consider chanting some aspect of Prince’s “1999″ to remind the Yankees of their last World Series win, as in, “Two-thousand zero zero party’s over it’s out of time . . . party like it’s 1999.” Red Sox fans are insufferable yahoos, but this would be funny.

Just like a three-card monte game where the rube walks away a winner:

I was trying to find out from a very harried looking cameraman why a full film crew was following around the worst dressed group of young people at last night’s packed Semi Precious Weapons show at Rebel.

“They’re nobodies,” said the cameraman trailing them around the club. A friend whispered to me that they weren’t just any nobodies, they were the cast of the new The Real World in Red Hook. The lights, cameras, VIP status, bottle service and fawning by wannabe socialites was explained.

MTV had the kids well trained. “I’m sorry I can’t divulge that,” the cast members would tell me when I pressed them for any details on life in the Pier 41 house. But Chet Bannon, the Mormon who the producers are trying to have de-flowered, was too nice not to talk. By far the most suave of the yahoos, he was wearing an H&M scarf, Elvis Costello glasses and had his short blonde hair spiked. Best of all, he admitted that they were indeed the cast of The Real World.

“I love glam rock,” Chet told me as he sipped a Shirley Temple, “you just don’t see anything like it in Salt Lake.” As if on cue, Justin Tranter, the mascara-wearing, teased, peroxide-haired frontman of the Weapons, put a medallion around Chet’s neck, whispered something in his ear, then strutted off.

“Wow, that’s just so cool,” Chet — who’s engaged to a girl back home — gushed.

There was trouble in paradise, however, and the young man needed to get something off his virginal chest. “When we go to Williamsburg we get harassed. The hipsters throw things at us and say ‘Why are you here? Go home! Ten years ago none of them were there either.’” He looked hurt and wondered, “Why are the hipsters so small minded?”

Adam “Jersey City” Sternbergh out-Sternberghs himself:

Until last May, Cloyd and Herbeck were living in Sunset Park, in Brooklyn, and they were barely making it. They ate mac ‘n’ cheese for dinner. They couldn’t afford to go out with their friends. They wanted a family, but “there was no room in our Brooklyn equation to have kids unless we put them in a closet,” Herbeck says.

Then one night, Herbeck, who’s 30, found herself browsing online listings in Buffalo. (Why Buffalo? She comes from Buffalo. And like many young Buffalonians, she got out as soon as she could.) “We were like, ‘Okay, the prices are great,’” she says. So they looked at some photos. “And we were like, ‘Okay, they’re really nice apartments. They’re really big. And right by the park.’”

And all of a sudden, they found they were staring at a very different what-could-be life: the one they’d be able to have if they were willing to leave New York.

This is how it happens:

But since the store opened, something unexpected has happened. Ikea has won grudging acceptance from some of its detractors, who admit, somewhat sheepishly, that the feared blue box has brought perks enjoyed even by those who have no interest in stepping into the store.

There is the daily water taxi and shuttle bus service provided free by Ikea, technically for its customers. But for residents, the boats and buses have made the hard-to-reach neighborhood without a subway stop a little less remote; the ferries in particular have given them a picturesque way to travel between Manhattan and Red Hook.

The grassy waterfront esplanade that Ikea built, featuring benches with a view of the Lower Manhattan skyline, framed by remnants of Red Hook’s maritime past, is also catching on as a neighborhood attraction.

And the onslaught of Ikea-generated traffic that so many predicted has yet to materialize. Indeed, traffic is so light on some days that a rumor started among locals that Ikea was actually turning out to be a customer-starved failure (Ikea said its store was meeting its financial expectations).

Just before sunset one recent evening, Kerri-Ann Jennings, a graduate student at Columbia University who said she had opposed the store’s opening, sat in a chair on the esplanade with a view of the water, sketching plans for a new bedroom that she was considering filling with Ikea furniture. She offered the kind of reluctant approval heard over and over in interviews, a declaration somewhere between an armistice and a retreat.

“It isn’t awful,” she said.

Otherwise even more soul food restaurants would probably close:

A recitation of the names of the vanished Harlem soul food restaurants — where the waitress/owner called everyone “Baby,” and the temperature in the room was determined by the amount of lard in the skillet — would be longer than the menu at most of the places.

Among those now out of business are: 22 West, where Malcolm X used the pay phone in back to do radio broadcasts; Adel’s, popular for its fried chicken; Pan Pan, which burned down in 2004; Wilson’s, known for its breakfasts; Wimps, revered for its smothered chicken and red velvet cake; Singleton’s, which was among the last restaurants to regularly serve pig tail stew, hog maws, and pig ears; and Wells Supper Club, best known as the restaurant credited with putting chicken and waffles on the same plate.

Onetime staples like butter beans, country fried steak, hog maws, oxtails, chicken livers, ham hocks, neck bones, and chitterlings have become uncommon, and in some cases, unavailable, in this former soul food capital.

. . .

Restaurants, including soul food places, are also operating under increased pressure from the city to offer more nutritious meals. This summer, the city banned restaurants from using artificial trans fat to prepare foods, and also required chain restaurants to post calorie counts of their menu items.

Even before the new laws took effect, some traditional soul food restaurants began to offer more healthful choices, including sometimes using skim milk in macaroni and cheese, and offering the option of oven fried, instead of deep fried, chicken.

The calorie count for a traditionally prepared dish of macaroni and cheese, for instance, is about 650 calories, and a single piece of deep fried chicken can have more than 400 calories, said Lindsey Williams, author of Neo Soul cookbook.

Those numbers are in line with a typical fast food meal: At McDonald’s, a Big Mac has about 540 calories, while a McDonald’s premium crispy chicken club sandwich contains 630 calories, according to the restaurant.

Then it’s “goodbye, pork pie hat”:

No one outside the pub that night would loan me a cell phone to dial 911. Crying, I went inside and borrowed a phone from Melvin. Two uniformed cops responded to the call, a man and a woman, young and as unsympathetic as the patrons at the bar — who hugged me in greeting most nights — and now wouldn’t look me in the eye.

“Nobody knows you,” the cops said. “Nobody saw anything,” they said.

“It’s always like that in there. Someone gets stabbed in the backyard and nobody saw nothing, nobody knows nothing. It’s a matter of time until someone is killed here, and we can shut the place down. What’s a woman like you doing in a dive like this?”

“I love the jazz,” I said.

They looked at me like I was crazy.

Well, when you put it that way:

Two Willets Point business owners have signed agreements to sell their land to the city, marking the first major property acquisitions the New York City Economic Development Corp. has made in its bid to raze and redevelop the 62-acre industrial district.

The EDC announced Wednesday afternoon that Sambucci Bros. Inc. and BRD Corp. have each reached agreements with the city to sell their combined 74,000 square feet of land if the city wins approval from the City Council later this year to redevelop Willets Point.

“NYCEDC is pleased to have completed the first property acquisition agreements,” President Seth Pinsky said. “They provide tangible evidence that we will make good on our promise to achieve fair, negotiated deals with as many businesses and owners as possible in connection with the Willets Point redevelopment.”

But while the deals were trumped as substantial benchmarks of progress by the city, the excitement was not universally shared.

Shortly after the news was released City Councilmen Hiram Monserrate (D-East Elmhurst), John Liu (D-Flushing) and Tony Avella (D-Bayside) sent a letter to Community Board 7, urging its members to vote against the plan when the board issues its recommendation. This is expected to take place June 30.

Location Scout: Iron Triangle.

Not to put too fine a point on it:

Whether or not the excitement of opening day lingers, remains to be seen.

“I think they just have really good PR people,” said Sam Ahmad, who owns Home Court furniture store in nearby Cobble Hill. “And if it doesn’t work out, they will have ruined an entire section of Brooklyn.”

*Sort of like “the Scottish king”.

Carpetbagging hedonists are disappointed to find that the South Bronx doesn’t really offer the libertine atmosphere they expected:

Some creative types streaming across the Harlem River in search of the city’s “next” neighborhood are starting to find their new home to still be more South Bronx than “SoBro.”

At least that’s artist Emily Stedman’s conclusion after her show, “Erotic Watercolors,” was pulled off a neighborhood gallery’s walls when patrons at adjacent restaurant deemed it offensive.

“I expected it to be an anything goes, sky’s-the-limit, open kind of place,” said Stedman, 59, who left her loft in TriBeCa for Mott Haven in December after tiring of hearing people at gallery openings talk more about real estate prices than art on the walls.

“I’ve been in New York a long time and there’s always a neighborhood where people move to — a Williamsburg or a Long Island City, and it seemed like Mott Haven was going to be the next place. I don’t know if that is still going to happen.”

Her show features soft watercolors of couples or threesomes in various states of embrace. The opening earlier this month at the Bruckner Gallery attracted dozens of art patrons.

But the owner of the Bruckner Bar and Grill, a hip new dining spot which owns the gallery, ordered the show to come down after some of the neighborhood old guard — who rented out the space for golden wedding anniversaries and the like — considered the paintings pornographic.

“A lot of young people have moved here, but you still have a lot of old timers coming in for parties or what not,” said Alex Abeles, the bar’s owner. “We didn’t want to take it down but you could see that it collided with the ideas of people.”

Stedman, who has shown at the Brooklyn Museum and at galleries in Chelsea, said she was shocked that the show was closed, and added that it was hard to imagine something like it happening in Manhattan or Brooklyn.

I guess it’s not a nice thing to wake up one morning next to an IKEA:

When she moved to her apartment five years ago, Perian Carson’s small corner of Red Hook in Brooklyn looked much different. An abandoned Civil War-era warehouse sat a few blocks away on Van Brunt Street. Nearby, along the cobblestones on Beard Street, she could see the remnants of the old Todd Shipyards, where ships were repaired in a massive graving dock.

It was a drowsy neighborhood where one could smell the harbor, a close-knit community where people signed for one another’s mail. Ms. Carson tended a small garden on the sidewalk near her building.

Today, the graving dock and many of the cobblestones are paved over, and from her garden, Ms. Carson sees something else: an enormous blue and yellow Ikea superstore, all 346,000 square feet of it, rising along the waterfront. The old warehouse is now a Fairway supermarket, with luxury rentals above.

“I’m at the fulcrum here,” Ms. Carson said one evening, as she tended to the lilies and goldenrod in her garden. “It’s so much at once.”

Bloomberg and unions, teaming up to force eminent domain on the Iron Triangle near Shea Stadium:

The Bloomberg administration has forged an unusual pact with labor leaders, promising that in exchange for their support of the city’s ambitious plan to transform Willets Point, a 62-acre enclave of auto repair shops and cinder block sheds near Shea Stadium, the project will provide union jobs and good wages.

Union leaders hailed the agreement as a template for similar pacts with city and state officials, even as the Real Estate Board of New York, the industry’s powerful lobbying arm, criticized it.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has promoted a $3 billion plan to raze the area, which is often flooded when it rains, to create a vast neighborhood of office buildings, hotels, parks, restaurants, retail shops and up to 5,500 apartments.

But some local civic groups, property owners and elected officials have opposed the plan because it calls for displacing about 260 small businesses, possibly through eminent domain. Housing groups like Acorn and some union leaders have also pushed for more housing that would be affordable for low- and middle-income New Yorkers.

After months of negotiations, the city recently completed a deal with unions representing construction workers and building service and retail workers. In return for their support, the Bloomberg administration essentially promised to require that developers use union construction contractors and pay union wages to building service workers like doormen and security guards.

The city also agreed to look favorably upon developers who propose job-intensive businesses at Willets Point that would pay at least $10 an hour. At the same time, the city said it would discourage “suburban models of big-box stores,” a reference to Home Depot and Wal-Mart.

“The transformation of Willets Point is one of the city’s most important economic development projects today, and the fact that we were able to come to an agreement on it with organized labor is good news,” said Deputy Mayor Robert C. Lieber. “We’ll continue to work closely with community and advocacy groups, elected officials, labor and the private sector to ensure the transformation of this blighted area results in the right balance of good jobs, affordable housing and sustainable design while remaining economically feasible.”

The support of organized labor for the administration’s initiative is vital because the City Council must approve zoning changes to make it possible. Labor is particularly influential in the Council, providing votes and campaign contributions to many members.

Location Scout: Iron Triangle.

Annotation: When you need something controversial passed, couch it in terms of “jobs for the community.”

Even people in hip, post-cool Brooklyn line up days in advance for IKEA openings:

The doors to Brooklyn’s new Ikea have yet to open, but the madness has begun.

Shoppers in Red Hook were plotting ways to get their hands on a bargain Friday after hearing thousands of dollars of free furniture would be up for grabs Monday morning.

“I’ll camp two days for a couch,” said student Kashmere Square, 20, when he found out the first 35 customers would receive a $699 sofa, and the next 100 will be rewarded with a $199 armchair.

“It’s cool. I’ll definitely be shopping there. I need a computer stand, a table and chairs.”

Michael Malgonada, 17, quickly called friends to work out how they would take turns to secure a spot at the front of the line.

“For a free sofa from Ikea? [I'll] definitely [line up],” he said.

“If you have to be 21, I’ll bring somebody older. We’ll do shifts.”

Ikea’s doors officially swing open at 9 a.m. Wednesday, and giveaways will be handed out throughout the day at the 346,000-square-foot store on Beard St.

Annotation: “Ikea Riot” (Gridskipper, February 10, 2005); “Three die in Saudi shop stampede” (BBC, September 1, 2004)

One of Coney Island’s own, who had once backed the ambitious master plan, has rescinded his support:

Dick Zigun, the so-called mayor of Coney Island plans to resign from the group charged with redeveloping the amusement mecca, the Daily News has learned.

Zigun said he would bow out of the 13-member Coney Island Development Corp. to protest a revised city development plan he charged could include a shopping mall near the center of the 47acre plan.

“This spring, without the CIDC ever having a discussion or ever taking a vote, the strategic plan that I had been a major cheerleader for was totally changed and compromised in a way that no amusement park lover could possibly be happy with,” said Zigun, founder of Coney Island USA, which runs a world-famous sideshow.

In a blistering attack, Zigun said that the revised city plan would also mean a significantly smaller amusement park if passed by the City Council next year.

The shopping mall, which would usher in retailers such as a Toys “R” Us with its looming Ferris wheel or an FAO Schwarz with its giant floor keyboard, is a concession to developer Thor Equities, Zigun and other critics contend.

“The CIDC plan promised a world-class tourist attraction with an entertainment core — lots of rides complemented by year-round nightclubs and enclosed water parks,” said Zigun in a letter to Mayor Bloomberg.

“Instead the core will now be rezoned for a shopping mall full of Niketowns, Toys ‘R’ Us and four 30-story hotels.”

. . .

CIDC President Lynn Kelly balked at Zigun’s complaints, insisting the role of CIDC members was to create a development plan for the area, not vote on its merits — a job that will be left up to the City Council.

Kelly defended the revised zoning plan and a shopping mall, but said the use of so-called entertainment retail across 15 acres of Coney Island was still being debated.

“We’re still writing the zoning text, but if there is going to be any type of entertainment retail, the driving force is the entertainment,” said Kelly, who used as an example a rock climbing wall at a Niketown store or a Sony electronics store that provides video game demonstrations.

“It’s really about the interactivity with the item,” Kelly added. “We’re carefully considering how you define entertainment retail because that’s really key.”

It’s like a punch in the gut, like hearing that sweet 18 year-old you’ve been dating is actually more like 16:

For two decades, the city’s official directory, the Green Book, has stated definitively that the five boroughs encompass nearly 322 square miles of land.

Not so, Mr. Miller and his staff recently discovered: New York’s land area actually totals 304.8 square miles.

The shrinkage generally is not the result of rising sea levels from global warming or beach erosion or any other act of nature. It is largely the work of man, mainly Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, whose yen to precisely measure everything from poverty to traffic congestion led the planning department to recalculate the city’s land mass.

Acting on the mayor’s mandate, Mr. Miller and his team spent months analyzing thousands of digitized, high-resolution aerial photographs of the squiggling shoreline and other geographic features to calculate the city’s size anew.

“This is not a reflection of a change in the physical area, but a refinement of the measurement,” Mr. Miller said.

Seventeen square miles may not seem like much. But consider:

• 17 square miles could accommodate 13 more Central Parks, nearly a third of Washington, D.C., about three dozen versions of Vatican City and nearly two dozen replicas of Monaco.
• If 17 square miles were populated at Manhattan’s density, New York might be home to as many as 1.1 million more people.
• At the price of an acre in Midtown, as recently computed by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 17 square miles could be worth $1 trillion.

The Vermontization of the Lower East Side:

The National Trust for Historic Preservation designated the Lower East Side of Manhattan as one of the 11 most endangered in places in America on Tuesday.

But for some people, the designation only makes explicit the obvious: that the wide swath of Manhattan well known for its immigrant communities and countercultural vibe has long ago given way to rampant real estate development and gentrification.

In a news conference at Seward Park High School, the National Trust warned that construction of new hotels and apartment towers threatened to efface the area’s immigrant past.

“The community, with little recourse for protection,” it said, “is reeling from the recent destruction of its cultural heritage, including the defacing of several historic structures and the loss of First Roumanian Synagogue. Slapdash and haphazard renovations have led to the destruction of architectural detail, while modern additions to historic buildings sharply contrast with the neighborhood’s scale and character.”

Losing an alcohol license didn’t kill Club Kalua, but eminent domain might:

The strip club Sean Bell visited the night he was killed in Jamaica could be demolished as part of a larger redevelopment plan for that area of Queens.

The Greater Jamaica Development Corp. is moving forward with plans to turn Jamaica into a transit-oriented development center and is assembling sites on which to build new hotel, “affordable” housing to lure some of the 35,000 employees who work at nearby John F. Kennedy International Airport, and additional parking.

The development corporation has already targeted a number of nightclubs for demolition, and sources with knowledge of the plans have suggested Club Kalua could be next on the chopping block.

The president of the development corporation, Carlisle Towery, said the area’s positioning as a nexus of the Long Island Rail Road, the AirTrain to JFK airport, three subway lines, and dozens of bus lines makes Jamaica an ideal place to build an airport village.

“It is highly accessible. A lot can get to it and a lot goes through it and we are tying to make it a destination, not just a transfer point,” he said.

Mr. Towery said there are no fixed plans to condemn Club Kalua, but he made his feelings about the establishment clear.

“It’s been a social blight for years,” he said. “What its future is, I don’t know. But it certainly doesn’t belong here.”

And Mayor Bloomberg kills two birds with one stone, eliminating the source of Sean Bell and solidifying his legacy in one fell swoop. Funny how that works out sometimes.

Do it, do it, do it, do it:

It seems that Brooklyn might not be ready for the “The Real World.”

The MTV reality series is heading to the borough for its 21st season, possibly starting production this summer for four months, says Jim Johnston, the executive producer of the show.

Johnston says the network is considering various areas that are Manhattan-accessible — Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Dumbo, Park Slope, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Carroll Gardens, Red Hook and even Coney Island — but nothing is locked down.

“Just the sound of ‘The Real World: Brooklyn’ [has a ring to it],” Johnston says.

SJP apologizes for single-handedly making parts of New York City unaffordable:

“I don’t know if you do this with your husband,” Parker says. “But say one of us is walking down the street, I’ll call him and say, ‘You know, the laundromat is closed!’ And he’ll say, ‘What?’ I’ll be like, ‘The laundromat at 11th and West 4th Street is closed!’”

Parker and Broderick keep a running count of these changes, a mutual mourning for the transformation of their neighborhood into a luxe, tree-lined shopping mall. She knows this sounds absurd coming from her, that people blame Sex and the City for the ruination of the West Village; even Broderick says, “That’s your fault!” when he sees a thong poking up from low-slung jeans, and her close friend John Benjamin Hickey, an actor, longs for the days before “those girls on buses.” Parker clarifies that she doesn’t want to sound like Madonna bemoaning what’s happened to New York: It’s not that there’s no “creative energy” in the air, it’s simply been priced out of this particular borough.

Still, she says, her New York, like that of many New Yorkers, is one that is no longer quite there. “You know, when I arrived in the city in 1976, New York was financially a wreck,” she remembers. “But to me it’s the New York that Matthew and I literally try to find every day of our lives. It was the best place in the world. It was literature. It promised everything. And for someone who loved food and smells and stimulation, who was rocked to sleep by the sound of taxis — well, there’s just so much money now, and the city is so affluent, and all the colors, all the shops, the look of a street from block to block is just terribly absent of distinguishing coffee shops, bodegas. All of that stuff that made it possible to live in New York is gone.” Even Brooklyn is “very chic” now, she adds. “I guess there are places in Queens that are affordable.”

Today’s essay topic, gentrification in 50 words or less:

The rezoning would remake 125th Street, one of the city’s liveliest streets — and home to many small businesses like clothing stores, pawn shops and hair salons — into a regional business hub with office towers and more than 2,000 new market-rate condominiums.

The plight of the self-consciously trendy is they’re always a step or two behind:

The promise of learning the cold, hard realities of today’s housing market is what brought more than a dozen skinny-jean-wearing, tattoo-sporting members of Williamsburg’s art and music scene to Hugs bar last month to attend [real estate agent Eve] Levine’s first “Hipster Mortgage Night.”

It’s the latest version of a marketing campaign Levin first began as mere barroom lectures.

“There is so much information people just don’t know,” said Levine, a musician and artist herself who created the event not only as a tool for marketing her own business, but also a means of supplying financial and home buying know-how to a group of people she bluntly describes as “the opposite of Wall Street.”

Members of that group, frankly, agree with that assessment.

“Figuring out how to buy a home in New York City is like climbing Mount Everest,” said Margaret Raimondi, who attended the event with her fiancé, Brad Augustine.

“Hopefully, ‘Hipster Mortgage Night’ will make it more like climbing Mount Rainier,” she added, referring to the much-shorter mountain in Washington State.

All your venues belong to us now that “Downtown has moved to Queens”:

Robert Prichard hopes to illuminate Long Island City with some emphatic Times Square-style signage.

“I’d like it to be visible from the 59th Street Bridge,” he said. “First, it flashes ‘Queens,’ then ‘Bridge,’ then ‘Theater,’ and then ‘Queensbridge Theater.’ And then maybe an arrow that lights up and points down to our loading dock.”

Mr. Prichard, 52, has long had a flair for the dramatic. This is the same guy, after all, who nearly a decade ago led a conga line up Avenue A in protest of the city’s antiquated cabaret laws.

Nowadays, he’s participating in a perhaps farther-reaching kind of procession — the ongoing exodus of artists, musicians and other creative types abandoning Manhattan in droves.

Adopting the slogan “Downtown Has Moved to Queens,” the former Lower East Side stalwart is partnering with developer Michael Waldman to open what he called a “rock ‘n’ roll supper club, similar to a Bowery Ballroom or a Mercury Lounge with a restaurant — a first for Long Island City, a first for Queens.”

Scheduled to open this summer, the 5,000-square-foot Queensbridge Theater, located at 37-31 10th Street, may be somewhat unique in concept. (After the nighttime entertainment ends at 4 a.m., the proprietors intend to open back up just three hours later for breakfast, with homemade bread baked fresh on the premises.)

Bwahahahaha!

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.”

Well, it’s a good thing they rushed to tear down all those people’s homes:

The slowing economy, weighed down by a widening credit crisis, is likely to delay the signature office tower and three residential buildings at the heart of the $4 billion Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, the developer said.

“It may hold up the office building,” the developer, Bruce C. Ratner, said in a recent interview. “And the bond market may slow the pace of the residential buildings.”

Mr. Ratner, chief executive of Forest City Ratner, did not specify the kinds of delays possible, but suggested that construction could be put off for years. His comments are his first public indication that the darkening economy has slowed the ambitious project, spanning 22 acres at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues.

The developer did say he was confident about starting construction on a $950 million basketball arena for the Nets by the end of the year. The arena was to be surrounded by the office tower, known as Miss Brooklyn, and three residential buildings in the first phase of the project.

But Mr. Ratner has yet to secure an anchor tenant for the Miss Brooklyn building, and now plans to phase in the residential buildings slowly.

Location Scout: Atlantic Yards.

The complaints about Water Taxi Beach, the Hipster Guantanamo temporary-ish waterfront attraction that was established a couple of summers ago in a desolate corner of Long Island City, seem to be coming from the restaurant across the street. You don’t say:

Despite the official and popular support it has gained, at the request of the owner of Water Taxi Beach, a special meeting was held in early March to air and answer charges that the ferry terminal and summer resort on the shore of the East River in Long Island City is a public nuisance. The charges, dealing mainly with drunken and disorderly behavior, are so strong they threaten the continued life of Water Taxi Beach during the summer months.

. . .

. . . detractors said, when the sun goes down on summer weekends, trouble begins, particularly toward and into the early morning. An alleged source of disruption is P.S. 1, the Museum for Contemporary Art, which holds weekend events in its yard on Jackson Avenue. When they are concluded, according to this version of events, many of the celebrants go looking for further alcoholic consumption down at Water Taxi Beach and other places in Hunters Point. WTB gets the main share of attention because it can handle hundreds of persons at a time.

The complaints came mainly from workers at the Waterfront Crabhouse, at 51st Avenue and 2nd Street. They said that many persons, several of them barely qualified to drink legally, come up from the beach and into the restaurant to use the restrooms or to continue drinking. If refused service or told the restrooms are for patrons only, they often become obstreperous and present a problem for Crabhouse security personnel, the restaurant’s workers, mainly women, told the meeting. One of them said she has endured incidents where young drinkers have come toward the restaurant “in droves” and yelled insults she described as “extremely vile” at her. She related being on a smoke break one night when one inebriated man tried to relieve himself in her ashtray.

. . .

[Water Taxi Beach owner Tom] Fox had a few things to say, both in his defense and about changing the situation. He admitted it was bad, though not as dire as his critics believed it was. He said he would move up last call on Saturday and Sunday mornings from 4 a.m. to 2 a.m. and have the place closed and dark by 3 a.m.

Location Scout: Water Taxi Beach.

Ah, how I’ve missed hearing the mellifluous combination of “Uncle Tom” and “sellout”:

Amid shouts of “Uncle Tom” and “sellout,” the City Planning Commission yesterday approved a controversial rezoning plan for 125th Street that would create condos, more performing-arts space and a 21-story office tower with such tony tenants as Major League Baseball.

The plan was approved 11-2 and now goes to the City Council.

When the vote was over, opponents booed and Michael Henry Adams, an architectural historian and author of “Harlem Lost & Found,” began a diatribe against the commission’s chairwoman, Amanda Burden.

“You’re a rich, rich, rich horrible person. You’re destroying our communities. You’re a rich, rich socialite. You’re a rich, rich socialite. How dare you! You’re destroying Harlem. You’re getting rid of all the black people,” he screamed.

He was ejected.

Earlier: All Bloomberg Needs Now Is To Give Kanye An Opportunity To Say That He Doesn’t Care About Black People.

. . . and then attack:

Tyrus, a 7-year-old, 60-pound female pit bull who lives in Apartment 708 in the former Olcott Hotel at 27 W. 72nd St., has run up a $90,000 tab, the building’s residents charges.

The condo is suing her owner for the amount, accusing Tyrus of chasing tenants, defecating in the halls, nearly killing a Pomeranian, and mauling several other pets.

Neighbors call the dog a “lunatic” who stalks the halls, leaving residents and management of the Upper West Side condo terrified.

They claim the owner never walks her but instead lets her out alone in the hall, where she goes to the bathroom and roams free.

“Every time I enter or exit my apartment, I am fearful that the dog in Unit 708 will be loose . . . or will attack,” wrote a neighbor as part of the suit filed late last month in Manhattan Supreme Court.

The owners of Pumpkin, a 4-pound Pomeranian, said they were walking in the seventh-floor hallway on Jan. 31, when Tyrus leapt through of an ajar apartment door and lunged at them.

“She knocked me to the ground and started eating my dogs,” said Elisa Schindler, who along with her boyfriend, Larry Frankel, was with Pumpkin and two other Pomeranians, Sugarplum and Marshmallow.

Frankel threw his jacket over Tyrus. But, he said, the attack stopped only after a visitor came out of Apartment 708, grabbed the pit bull and went back inside without a word.

Blood and fur coated the corridor after the attack, Schindler said. It took three surgeries and about 100 sutures to save the nearly eviscerated Pumpkin.

“I would have been mauled, except my boyfriend pulled me into my apartment and wouldn’t let me save my dog,” Schindler said.

The couple called 911, and responding cops hauled the visitor out in handcuffs. He was charged with possession of cocaine, a police report said.

With any luck, this should make that ridiculous VP talk go away as well:

The street may not be much to look at now, say people who grew up in Harlem during the 1950s and 1960s, but back then, 125th Street seemed like the bustling center of the world.

At Moore’s book shop, a lawyer named Thurgood Marshall was often seen browsing through volumes of African-American history, while at the corner of Lenox Avenue, Malcolm X could be heard proselytizing as a young boxer named Cassius Clay, later known as Muhammad Ali, listened intently among the crowd.

Up the street, Aretha Franklin or Stevie Wonder performed periodically at the Apollo Theater, and Fidel Castro once conferred with Nikita Khrushchev over lunch at the Hotel Theresa. Blumstein’s may not have been Macy’s, but it did have black mannequins and, at Christmastime, a black Santa Claus.

The street has long been in decline, though national chain stores like Starbucks have taken an interest in it more recently. Now the Bloomberg administration has proposed the most sweeping zoning changes for the street since 1961, when there was a citywide rezoning and 125th Street was at the heart of African-American cultural life.

The rezoning, which is expected to be approved by the city’s Planning Commission in the coming weeks, is part of package of city plans that call for the thoroughfare to be transformed from a low-rise boulevard lined with businesses like hair salons and buffet-style soul food restaurants into a regional business hub with office towers as high as 29 stories and more than 2,000 new market-rate condominium apartments, as well as hotels, bookstores, art galleries and nightclubs.

The corridor between 124th and 126th Streets from Broadway to Second Avenue would be rezoned, which could ultimately force out more than 70 small businesses and their 975 workers and might lead to the razing of some of the street’s century-old buildings.

. . .

“This would be signing Harlem’s death warrant,” said Craig Schley, executive director of a group called VOTE People, which opposes the rezoning. “It is part of the continuing ‘Katrina-fication’ of Harlem, carried out with a pen instead of a hurricane. They intend to remove people in this area, plain and simple.”

The neighborhood gets less divey:

On a recent Friday at Sophie’s bar in the East Village, owner Bob Corton sat on a corner barstool like any other of the wizened patrons he’s served for more than two decades. He reminisced about 21 years spent inside his decidedly unrefined dive with the customers that became his closest confidants.

Corton, 54, who opened Sophie’s in 1986, and later the nearby Mona’s in 1989, can trace the evolution of the neighborhood as it played out in his rough-hewn saloon: from the early days when the art community thrived in the low-rent district shared with indigent drug users, to the present day where a predominance of swanky lounges has reduced his unmarked hole in the wall to another blip on the grid of nightlife destinations.

But to anyone who spent time at either of the well-worn watering holes — which Corton announced last month would likely shutter due to his ailing health — the bars posses a mythical quality wrought by waves of well-lubricated patrons who found solace inside the shabby spaces. The regulars spin tales of mirth no doubt emboldened by the heavy flow of whiskey and beer, but no less poignant given the setting. Now, for these two muses of the Downtown drinking class, the stories might be the only thing Sophie’s and Mona’s have left to save.

. . .

Jeff, a holdover from the neighborhood’s heyday who still sported long, gray hair from beneath his woolen cap, struck an even more plaintive note about the new East Village.

“We won’t be able to go anywhere. . . . It’s just the last peg of a dying neighborhood,” said the Sophie’s fixture, who’s been coming for “a couple of years, or a couple of hundred” but declined to give his last name. “This place is like a church for drunks.”

The pints still pour amid gossip over the bars’ future, giving regulars a chance to eulogize their hangout with the imminent sale. It’s where barflies named Jimmy Tokens, Johnny Red, Caveman and Degenerate John took up years of residency on the tattered barstools, earning renown for their eccentric character traits.

Caveman, described as a large, brutish man with full beard, famously slugged pitchers of beer at a time — drinking directly from the source instead of a glass. Degenerate John, a postman who had a history of back injuries, regularly extended his own brand of chivalry by greeting all women patrons with the offer to “sit on my face.”

There’s a new transparency in police investigations these days:

Since Thanksgiving week, a luxurious sport utility vehicle disfigured by bullet holes has been blocking a bus stop on Union Street in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn, several local residents and store owners said.

The driver’s side seats of the Audi Q7 are draped with black and yellow plastic, the rear window is shattered, and it appears that some dried blood is on the back seat. The four bullet holes on the driver’s side back door are marked with police evidence labels.

“Something like this doesn’t make residents feel safe,” Nate Shaw, 38, who had previously noticed the vehicle while walking with his 4-year-old daughter, said. “My two sons would probably think it’s cool, but I think having to explain it got shot up would be worrisome,” a 40-year-old carpenter from Carroll Gardens, Greg Paul, said. “Why doesn’t the police department have more space to store shot vehicles?”

. . .

“An officer drove it into the spot and it has been there for at least two weeks,” the manager of Francesco Pizzeria, which has large windows facing onto the street where the car is parked, Anthony Caravello, said.

The vehicle was confiscated in connection with a homicide investigation, police said.

On October 6, an unknown number of suspects riding in the Audi shot at Andre Garcia in front of 66 Sullivan St. in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, which shares a police precinct with Carroll Gardens.

Garcia, 24, who was shot multiple times in the stomach, was pronounced dead at the scene, police said.

Opposition is organizing in and around Queens’ Iron Triangle in the next great eminent domain battle:

. . . 10 businesses have taken a stand and formed the Willets Point Industry and Realty Association, intent on fighting tooth and nail for their rights.

The City plans to relocate all the businesses from the area adjacent to Shea Stadium and start fresh with 5,500 residential units, 1.7 million square feet of retail and entertainment space, nearly 1 million square feet of office and convention center space, a 650-pupil school, a hotel, a park and eight acres of green space.

This is the last thing Dan Feinstein, of Feinstein Steel Works, wants to see happen.

“We’ll use every means under the law to protect ourselves,” he said. “We’ll do whatever we have to, to make sure the city doesn’t screw us.”

This City has said on record that it is looking out for the Willets Point businesses and is in negotiations to relocate them. However, Daniel Sambucci Jr., of Sambucci Bros. Salvage Yards, said this is misleading.

“We’ve had meetings and they’ve shown me properties for $40 million,” he said. “But the city doesn’t own the property and they don’t know how they’re going to get it.”

Sambucci said he is worried there is not enough property in the city zoned for heavy industrial to accommodate all the businesses.

“They don’t have a final development plan, a developer — they don’t know how much it’s going to cost and they don’t know where they can move us,” he said.

. . .

In 1991, a study conducted by the City’s Economic Development Corporation found Willets Point would flourish once sewers and basic services were provided, however, this has yet to happen.

“This place would look completely different by now if they had done what the study suggested,” Dan Scully, of Tully Environmental, said. “But [former Borough President] Claire Shulman ignored it.”

Anthony J. Fodera, president Fodera Foods, said the problems of Willets Point is a story of purposeful neglect.

“We call the police or 311 and once we tell them were we are they say ‘oh you’re in that area,’ and never come,” he said.

Feinstein said the business owners are not so stubborn that they would impede the public good but the redevelopment plans do not serve the public good more than his company does.

“If they were planning on building an airport or needed a state highway here, we’re not happy but we understand,” he said. “But don’t say you don’t like my house and your friend’s going to build another one.”

*But most parents don’t — and that’s saying nothing of the idea of staying at a hotel in the flightpath, or attending a concert in the flightpath (is any soundproofing that good?), much less actually living in the flightpath.

Backstory: “Trendy” Willets Point?; Willets Point Junkyards Threatened!; If By “Vibrant And Attractive New Urban Community” You Mean A Superfund Site In A Flood Plain In The Flight Path To LaGuardia, Then I’m Right There With Ya!; First You Tap That Ass, Then You Tax It; Don’t Worry — That’s Just 20 Minutes Of War In Iraq.

Location Scout: Iron Triangle.