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.

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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.”