Lord, these people need to get out of their heads, and perhaps off that island, too, but at the very least get out of the neighborhood for even an afternoon — there are many nice parks, for example — or maybe they should think about a trip to the beach, or take in an afternoon ballgame . . .:

Some are celebrating it as a reclaimed pedestrian space and a welcome amenity for local residents and tourists. Others, like longtime neighborhood resident Erik Wensburg, are questioning the “mammary motif” of the circular bollards. But everyone agrees that the once-chaotic and hazardous five-way intersection at Gansevoort St. and Ninth Ave. is no longer what it used to be.

Less than a month ago, construction was completed on the new Gansevoort Plaza in the heart of the historic Meatpacking District. The cobblestone intersection, formerly a bottleneck clogged by truck and taxi traffic, now is home to an array of scattered tree planters, stone slabs conducive to sitting and bollards with white reflectors on top resembling, in the eyes of some, a female breast. Meanwhile, traffic flow has been reduced to a single lane.

The project is the fruit of a community-based effort that began in 2005 with the recognition that the Meatpacking District was moving farther away from its traditional uses and toward a new identity as a center for nightlife and upscale shopping, with all the traffic that accompanies such a change. A group of community leaders formed the Greater Gansevoort Urban Improvement Project to spearhead a ground-up initiative to address their concerns about traffic, safety and preservation of a neighborhood that had been designated a historic district by the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2003.

. . .

The plaza is a temporary D.O.T. project that will continue to be shaped by community input and available funding down the line. The streetscape improvement was paid for out of D.O.T.’s budget, with contributions by [the Meatpacking District Initiative] for additional plantings. M.P.D.I. has assumed responsibility for the plaza’s maintenance for the meantime. However, M.P.D.I. ultimately hopes a formal business improvement district, or BID, is approved for the area, after which a funding stream will become available for streetscape maintenance. M.P.D.I. is four months into the roughly 18-month process to gain approval from the city to form a BID.

For now, M.P.D.I. will be distributing a survey to local residents and business owners to solicit feedback on the plaza’s design and use. The organization will then compile these results and submit them to D.O.T. for review. The space is currently being considered for outdoor events and a weekly Greenmarket.

Some active residents, however, have already informally let their opinions be known, expressing concerns over the choices of materials used and design scheme. Marge Colt, vice president of the Horatio Street Association, pointed specifically to what she called the “defacement” of the cobblestone street, the “senseless” traffic pattern and the “conflicting” seating designs.

“I think the whole thing is an abomination,” Colt said. “It looks like it has been thrown together by people who have no design experience. And the breasts must go.”

. . . we all scream, “Hey, jackass, move your freakin’ truck before I bash your head in with an oversized wrench”:

The man in the Mister Softee truck stuck his head out the window and glared at the fellow in the white cap and black bow tie.

The guy in the bow tie grimaced back as he rang the bell on his Good Humor truck, whose bumper sat inches from Mister Softee’s.

“Ching ching ching.”

“This is open turf,” said Jose Martinez, 52, the Good Humor man, yanking at the bell.

Summer is more than a month away, but the ice cream wars have already begun. In neighborhoods across the city, skirmishes are breaking out over which franchise can sell its wares on which route. And the tension between the city’s purveyors of ice-cold treats can at times be thicker than a Chipwich.

There have been harsh words, hurt feelings and even bloodshed between competitors. In 2004, a couple in their 60s who owned and operated two ice cream trucks were ambushed in the Bronx and beaten with an oversized wrench. The motive, the police said, was the couple’s ice cream route. A rival ice cream salesman was charged with assault and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

While disputes between drivers of ice cream trucks rarely become that violent, they can be cutthroat.

(That last line is the mixed metaphor of the day.)

This could only mean one thing — the return of the Good Humor man, which some don’t find funny:

On Tuesday afternoon, new battle lines were drawn on the Upper West Side at the corner of Columbus Avenue and 83rd Street, where Ceasar Ruiz, 50, the Mister Softee man, said he had been selling ice cream without any competition for more than eight years.

He said his routine was the same every season. He arrives at the corner by about 2:30 each afternoon, mostly to catch the students getting out of Public School 9 and the Anderson School, just a few yards from the corner. He stays for about an hour and a half, then moves to his next location, he said.

But Tuesday afternoon was different. When he arrived, there sat the freshly painted Good Humor truck and Mr. Martinez, decked out in a crisp uniform, ringing his bell.

“I sell Good Humor, too,” Mr. Ruiz said. “But his is more cheap. I sell bar for $2. He might sell for $1.50. Not good. Not good.”

. . .

Good Humor trucks all but disappeared from the New York streets 30 years ago. In 1977, the Good Humor company shut down its street vendor operation, opting for supermarket freezers, said Robert Pinnisi, who helped restore Mr. Martinez’s truck. But the company gave drivers the option of being independent contractors. Mr. Pinnisi said he knew of only one other Good Humor truck operating in New York City, and one in Mount Vernon.

See also: The heretofore unchallenged Mister Softee juggernaut.

Thank goodness a more accurate label has emerged:

Five weeks into a federal probe of City Council slush funds, Mayor Bloomberg revealed yesterday that he kept his own secret taxpayer-funded cash stash — and used it to reward favored lawmakers.

The mayor’s $4.5 million slush fund had never before been made public — and some council members said they weren’t even aware of it.

After being doled out to selected lawmakers, the money was passed along to dozens of nonprofit groups supported by legislators — including at least one with a checkered history.

The largest chunk, $1.9 million, went to Councilman Simcha Felder (D-Brooklyn), one of the mayor’s most ardent supporters.

Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, who has publicly praised Bloomberg as the greatest mayor in city history, received $900,000 to help fund two popular concert series.

Poor Christine Quinn . . .

A looming election, more instructional time and now it emerges why things went relatively smoothly during the last teachers’ contract negotiations:

The city shouldn’t have to pay unassigned teachers indefinitely — a side effect of the 2005 teachers’ contract that will cost taxpayers a projected $81 million by June, Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday.

Bloomberg’s message came in response to a study warning that the pool of nearly 700 teachers who’d been cut from schools — but are paid full salary and benefits to serve as substitutes - would grow indefinitely.

The report, by the nonprofit The New Teacher Project, called for putting teachers on unpaid leave after they’d spent a year in the pool known as the Absent Teacher Reserve.

“We are spending tens of millions of dollars, which we are struggling to come up with, and the taxpayer [money] would be better spent on the classroom [than] on supporting these teachers,” said Bloomberg.

“There was an outside study that said we should not pay them after a while — that the money could be better used.”

An education official denied a report there’d be a move to reopen contract negotiations to fix the problem, though “we may pursue it separately.” The official didn’t elaborate.

Time was, unions showed some muscle. These days, they seem to be reduced to high school pranks:

New York was once a union town, and no one wanted to be on the wrong side of organized labor. The workingman is a lot less fearsome these days. At a panel discussion celebrating the residential redevelopment of Williamsburg last week, members of Local 79 of the Construction and General Building Laborers Union played ringtones on their cell phones and loudly coughed to drown out a land-use expert’s talk on Schaefer Landing, a condo complex developed by BFC Partners on the site of a former brewery — without using the local’s labor. “The coughing was symbolic of the fact that BFC’s words are not worth hearing,” said Local 79 official Chaz Rynkiewicz at the April 22 event. BFC chief Don Capoccia didn’t seem to be bothered, bragging the next day that the first phase of the development is completely sold out.

. . . others push around a three-foot-tall crucifix in a granny cart:

She was depressed and needed Jesus, so she took Him home with her.

That was Dawn Piccolo’s explanation for her theft of a 3-foot wooden crucifix from St. Adalbert’s R.C. Church in Elm Park.

Ms. Piccolo, 37, of Elm Park was shipped off to jail yesterday following her guilty plea earlier this month to a count of fourth-degree grand larceny stemming from the theft of the crucifix.

Dressed in a black sweater and gray cargo pants, her blond hair piled atop her head, Ms. Piccolo did not speak when Justice Leonard P. Rienzi sentenced her to one year behind bars under the plea deal.

She’d been more forthcoming — and apologetic — following her arrest at her Morningstar Road home in March.

In a statement penned for police, Ms. Piccolo admitted suffering from anxiety and depression.

She denied “ever” using any illegal drugs, but said the medications prescribed to combat her depression “makes me turn into something I don’t want to be.”

“I am in need of help for my faults,” Ms. Piccolo wrote.

“I was in need of Christ. . . . Christ is the only thing that keeps me sane.”

The Rev. Eugene Carella of St. Adalbert’s noticed Ms. Piccolo when she showed up at the church on the morning of March 11. Discovering the theft of the crucifix, a staple at St. Adalbert’s for more than 40 years, he gave a description of the woman to police.

Cops canvassed the neighborhood, and three days later, a city Sanitation worker phoned Father Carella with word that a woman had been spotted with the crucifix in a pushcart.

The worker and Father Carella identified Ms. Piccolo through photos police took of the woman.

A detective returned the crucifix to the church in time for its Good Friday veneration, although the left arm was missing. It hasn’t been recovered.

As for Ms. Piccolo, “I hope one day to give Him my all,” she told cops.

And the church hopes that one day Ms. Piccolo will give all of Him back.

“Obviously there will be some people who are disappointed with the verdict.”

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.

But the real question is how DOT can replace a sign without charging taxpayers:

Newcomers to the city searching for Mercer Street over the weekend may have run into some trouble at the corner of West Houston Street, where a city sign pointed the way to “Merser Street.”

Despite the popularity of the name Mercer (and of its bearers), and even though the street corner is in a heavily trafficked area — less than a block from such SoHo landmarks as the Mercer Hotel, MercBar, and this season’s new hot watering hole, subMercer — the sloppily spelled street sign lingered for all to see for four balmy spring days before being taken down yesterday afternoon.

Where the blame lies for “Merser Street” is not clear — the culprit could be the sign manufacturer, the originating work order, or someone who sought to link the proud name of Mercer with MRSA, aka Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, aka the superbug. Department of Transportation workers replaced the sign at no cost to taxpayers.

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.

The immutables of city life — jerks will never move in to the center of the subway car, jackasses will continue to prove to the neighborhood that even if they don’t have the nicest automobile they surely have the loudest car stereo and your moronic, retarded tenants will never ever learn how to separate their recycling:

Richard Martin, the 71-year-old superintendent at 278 91st St., recently ended his showdown against tenants who were careless about throwing out their garbage, and has agreed to drag the nine moldering trashcans from the lobby of the building back to their rightful spot outside.

“I don’t care anymore,” said Martin, who burst onto the public consciousness last year, after The Brooklyn Paper wrote a story about the hostile hand-written signs he posted on the building lambasting his tenants as “lazy” and “dangerous” for not properly putting out their trash.

“Tenants don’t care, landlord don’t care, Ritchie Martin don’t care.”

His sudden lack of concern is a stark contrast to back in November, when Martin’s notes — all featuring his black, green and red all caps scrawl — angrily told tenants what he expected: “Take covers off to put your garbage in and put covers back on. You tenants better stop being stupid and retarded.”

When tenants failed to respond to his colorful signs, Martin hauled the garbage up to the roof, forcing some tenants to hike as many as five floors to get rid of their trash.

“It’s like trying to put out a fire with gasoline,” said one local resident of Martin’s antics.

And sure enough, the tenants continued to mix waste and recyclables.

Martin then brought out the big guns: He pulled the eight trashcans inside, forcing residents to live with piled up garbage in the lobby of their building.

Earlier: What A Country.

The fact is, there are many ways to fritter away $354 million:

Champions of congestion pricing wonder why any politician would turn down $354 million. The feds have offered just that to implement Mayor Bloomberg’s traffic fee.

But the city and the state already spend that kind of dough on projects that don’t seem as vital as mass transit.

They’ve committed $403 million to the Yankee Stadium project, for example, and just one city program granted $409 million in property tax breaks last year to Midtown office towers like the MetLife Building and such fast-food outlets as McDonald’s.

City workers have staged protests against a $410 million payroll system that uses biometric devices, including palm scanners. “They say it will reduce ‘buddy punching,’” said a union spokesman, “but we’ve not had one case of that in ten years.”

“While $354 million sounds like a huge amount of money, it will be almost gone before you start congestion pricing,” said Brooklyn Councilman Lewis Fidler.

The MTA puts its necessary upgrades at $767 million. The tolling system would take $73 million, and the operating cost is $62 annually.

Everyone knows that any plan worth its salt should provoke a lawsuit or two:

A border war erupted yesterday between Mayor Bloomberg and Garden State Governor Jon Corzine, who is threatening to sue over the proposed $8 charge to drivers entering Manhattan south of 60th Street if New Jersey commuters have to pay.

Jersey drivers are now exempt in the plan because their toll on interstate crossings counts as a deduction from the congestion pricing fee.

But to make sure out-of-state drivers pay their fair share, the congestion pricing bill approved by the City Council on Monday requires the Port Authority to agree to give the MTA $1 billion - or New York will hit Jersey drivers with up to a $4 fee.

“I am dismayed at the attempt by the New York City Council and New York State lawmakers to politicize the selection of Port Authority capital projects,” Corzine said. “Unless this plan treats all drivers fairly, I am prepared to pursue legal action to protect New Jersey commuters from this outrageous action.”

As the City Council decides that the national and local economy can chug along nicely no matter how much you gouge truckers, drivers on the other side of the Hudson — that cartoon-like expanse of the country that lay just beyond the New Yorker’s view of the world — suggest a different sort of congestion pricing may be ahead:

Truckers protesting high fuel prices are clogging the New Jersey Turnpike.

Turnpike Authority spokesman Joe Orlando says trucks “as far as the eye can see” are driving about 20 mph and heading south near Exit 14 in Newark.

He says truckers are also chanting and protesting at the Vince Lombardi Service Area in Bergen County.

Orlando says the protest is backing up Turnpike traffic.

Truckers have been staging other protests throughout the country.

A commitment to efficiency in state government:

Horace Mann School, the $29,000-a-year preparatory school in the Bronx, and dozens more New York educational and cultural institutions just got stuck between the collapse of auctionrate bonds and an expired New York law.

Rates on $60 million of the securities sold by Horace Mann in 2002 rose to 5.4%last month from 3.4%. At nearby Riverdale Country School, where tuition is $35,250 for grades six through 12, interest jumped to 11% from 3%. Interest costs almost doubled for borrowers in the $330 billion auction-rate bond market this year after banks stopped buying unwanted securities for the first time since they were created in the 1980s. Unlike local governments across the country, the New York institutions can’t convert the bonds into other types of debt after a state funding law expired January 31.

. . .

More than 800 YMCAs, libraries, hospitals, universities and prep schools in the state sold socalled civic-facility bonds, including auction-rate debt, through industrial development authorities, according to the Albany-based New York State Economic Development Council.

Auction rates for some of these borrowers have risen as much as fourfold.

. . .

Civic groups in New York lost their ability to borrow using development agencies as state lawmakers battled over rewriting the law that governs industrial authorities. Assemblyman Sam Hoyt of Buffalo, a chairman of the local governments committee, refused to extend debt-issuing authority.

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.

So that’s how it works:

The outlook for New York City’s economy and its main engine, the financial services industry, had already taken a bleak turn before the sudden failure of Bear Stearns, the fifth-largest firm on Wall Street.

Investment banks and brokerage firms started cutting their payrolls last fall as the weakening market for mortgages translated into huge losses. Employment in the city’s securities industry dropped by about 8,000 jobs from August to January, a decline of about 4 percent.

Now, with the impending loss of several thousand high-paying jobs at Bear Stearns, city officials and economists are bracing for the downturn to steepen. How deep it will be and how long it will last are open questions.

“Who knows?” said William C. Thompson Jr., the city’s comptroller. “We had been preparing for tougher times. This means things are going to get a little tougher. We just don’t know how many jobs are going to be lost because of this.”

Bear Stearns had about 14,000 employees, and as many as 8,000 of them worked in the city. Last year, those workers collected more than $3.4 billion in pay and benefits, or an average of about $242,000 per employee.

. . .

The comptroller’s office estimates that the city collects $20 million in taxes for every $1 billion paid out in cash bonuses. In 2007, year-end bonuses for city residents totaled about $30 billion, producing about $600 million in income tax revenue for the city.

A significant drop in profits on Wall Street has a direct and possibly painful effect on the city and state budgets.

“New York City and state are over-dependent on the financial industry for tax revenues,” said Kathyrn S. Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, a business-advocacy group. She estimated that Wall Street accounts for one-fifth of the business taxes collected in New York.

“Even a mild downturn on Wall Street causes tremendous problems, and this is much more than a mild downturn,” Ms. Wylde said. “This is potentially a sustained period of significant losses. That translates into the need to significantly revise budgets.”

Man sues City for lost manhood:

The builder who exactly three years ago spray-painted his Tottenville house in a fit of pique says in a federal lawsuit that the mayor and other city agencies forced him to spend several days in a hospital psychiatric ward, barred him from municipal buildings and even put him off sex with his wife after his house was designated a protected landmark.

John Grossi’s lawyers seek $10 million in damages for their client and charge, among other things, that the city violated the builder’s free speech and unlawfully detained him last spring, after he told police he would protest the landmarking by staging a mock crucifixion on his front lawn.

Grossi planned to hold a sign reading: “Mayor Bloomberg and the City of New York have Crucified me to this house,” according to the civil rights suit filed in Brooklyn federal court.

A short time later, the suit alleges, Grossi was arrested and taken to Staten Island University Hospital, Ocean Breeze. The lawsuit also alleges that the city’s “continuous and systematic harassment and depravation” of Grossi’s rights affected him so adversely that he couldn’t be intimate with his wife and prevented the couple from “procreating their first child through a natural means (sexual intercourse).”

Lori Grossi, John Grossi’s wife, seeks another $2 million in damages for loss of companionship in a suit that also names the Police and Fire departments and the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

. . .

Grossi told the Advance in 2005 that he planned to build four “upscale” townhouses at the site and five in place of another 19th-century Amboy Road home, which he did demolish.

When the mayor became aware of community concern about the other home and the spray-painting incident, he sided with the community and “publicly” vowed at a town hall meeting to landmark the house — ensuring its designation at the next meeting of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, according to court papers.

The worst thing about the Spitzer resignation is the inevitable shoot-shit-what-if game that follows:

As news broke yesterday of Eliot Spitzer’s repeat visits to high-end prostitutes in the employ of the Emperor’s Club, offices across the city were buzzing with speculation about what “unsafe” sexual favors the Governor might have requested.

Although Governor Spitzer reportedly paid about $3000 for his Feb. 13th date, the most expensive Emperor’s Club ladies are paid $5,500, according to the New York Times. I wondered: what would New York women do in a boudoir with Eliot Spitzer for $5,500? Answer: a lot!

“Pee on him, shit on him. He could pee on me but not shit on me — have to draw the line somewhere!” wrote an accomplished graphic designer with two kids, in an email. . . .

. . .

Another writer, a politically savvy one in her early thirties, sounded like she was positively fantasizing about the idea of a date-for-hire with Mr. Spitzer. “I would be Joe Bruno,” she instant-messaged “And, like, mocking him, with a strap-on. . . . I would let him come on my face, I think. He could tie me up. Actually, that would be kind of hot.” I suggested she’d need a safe word. “Troopergate,” she typed. Then she suggested that she would also consider a threesome with Andrew Cuomo.

Throw up whatever you have and see what sticks:

Mayor Bloomberg is proposing a “residential parking permit program” that would restrict parking spots to neighborhood residents during certain hours. Drivers who did not display neighborhood-specific permits would be ticketed.

If approved by the City Council, the program would allow local community boards to designate their neighborhoods as restricted parking areas. Some see the parking program as a way to appease critics of Mr. Bloomberg’s congestion-pricing proposal, which would have drivers paying $8 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street. Residents of boroughs outside Manhattan have expressed concern that if congestion pricing were to pass, their streets would become congested with drivers looking for a parking space before traveling into the city on public transportation.

Even as the economy cools, there will always be a market for irrational sentimentalism:

Only New York fans with some luck and deep pockets will have a shot of scoring a ticket to the last regular season games ever at Yankee and Shea stadiums this fall.

Scalpers online are asking for nearly $6,000 for the Mets final Shea game on Sept. 28, while tickets have been seen as high as a whopping $17,000 for the Yanks Sept. 21 match-up against the Orioles. And if you want to see the first All-Star game this summer at Yankee Stadium since 1977, it’ll take $25,000 to snag one ticket on the field championship level.

“Since the game went on sale and sold out (on Feb. 20) the demand is insane,” said Moe Schlachter, who’s asking for at least $3,800 for his pair of championship box seats. He said that since posting his Yankees tickets on Craigslist last week, he has already gotten 20 to 30 responses.

The 22-year-old student guessed that if the Yankees don’t make the playoffs — ensuring that the Sept. 21 game would indeed be the last at the House that Ruth Built — the prices to resell tickets could quadruple.

Face-value field championship box seats at the stadium range from $240 to $380.

While the Yankees finale sold out in 11 minutes, Mets fans can still swipe a ticket for the Sept. 28 home game against the Marlins through special packages. The most expensive seat being offered for either game was from a bold stubhub.com hawker asking $16,791 each for his Tier Box MVP seats, which normally go for about $70. Since last year, ticket scalping in New York has been legal.

. . . people physically attack each other over boxes filled with tomatoes and $29:

A money giveaway in Union Square by a company called Cashtomato.com turned rotten Friday when the impatient crowd bum-rushed the costumed organizers and ran off with the loot. One person was injured in the free-for-all.

“Make it rain!” and “Give me my money!” passersby shouted as the clock ticked down to the scheduled 2:29 p.m. publicity stunt, timed to mark Leap Day.

With five minutes to go, the antsy mob of 100 surged toward three workers dressed to resemble tomatoes and holding sacks and boxes of prizes up to $29.

“People grabbed and pulled on the bag,” said Jason Buzi, an executive at the fledgling video-sharing Internet company.

“I didn’t feel safe, so I let it go.”

As he fled across the street, his colleagues dropped their sacks and scattered across the park - and a wild grab for the booty ensued.

Scavengers dove to the ground and elbowed each other out of the way to get at cash-stuffed envelopes and balloons and flyers and fresh tomatoes with bills attached.

“I got pushed down and trampled, but instead of money, all I got were tomatoes,” said a dejected 29-year-old homeless woman who gave her name as Christine.

. . .

Buzi, who said he has organized giveaways in five other cities without incident, seemed dazed by the debacle.

“They grabbed all the bags and the money from us,” he said.

“I expected maybe a few homeless people, but it turned out to be a lot of aggressive people,” Buzi said.

That’s the “Patriot” bar, not the “Patriots” bar, you morons:

Another Patriot suffered a big loss yesterday, as unruly Giants fans shut down a bar of that name in Lower Manhattan for several hours.

“Fans got too hyped up,” the bar’s owner, Chardee Raymonde, said, describing the scene around 1:30 p.m., when patrons crowded onto the second-floor fire escape of the Chambers Street bar. Armed with pitchers of beer, some threw toilet paper onto the street below, where a crowd was tossing around an oversize beach ball. “Giants fans have a long history of wanting a Super Bowl win, and they finally got it,” she said, referring to the enthusiastic and, at times, rowdy celebration yesterday.

Even as crowds converged along the route of yesterday’s tickertape parade, revelers wreaked havoc downtown, clogging sidewalks and leaving trash in their wake.

. . .

Across the street from The Patriot bar, the owner of a photography store, Mark Mozaffari, closed his shop to avoid vandalism. “I’m afraid they’re going to break the windows,” he said, eyeing the crowd.

Maybe a bar will be better, so as to smooth out customers’ jitters:

The Freedom Tower will be topped by New York City’s highest restaurant, a 34,000-square-foot space on the 100th and 101st floors that the Port Authority, which owns the tower, yesterday offered up to entice interest among potential operators.

The Port Authority’s request for expression of interest for a restaurant and banquet space high in One World Trade Center is already eliciting commentary from New York’s top restaurateurs and real estate analysts.

A co-owner of Nobu, Drew Nieporent, said the attacks of September 11, 2001, had a lasting effect on the mentality of diners. About 150 restaurant employees and guests at Windows on the World were killed in the attack.

“I’m not advocating that it’s the best idea, I think it has to sink in a little,” he said. Of the terrorist enemy, he said: “You know, these people could do just about anything, they can be very creative and it doesn’t just have to be something in a tall building. If they want to wreak havoc, a public space is better where there’s a large congregation of people.”

. . .

But the proposition of renting such a unique space at such an extreme height on soil with such a history could pose a number of challenges.

“Every floor you go above sidewalk level makes it more difficult,” the owner of the River Café, Michael “Buzzy” O’Keeffe, said. “If you had only one floor like that — in a city like New York — it would probably be a big tourist attraction. But there are many floors like that here. There are many big tall buildings with tall views,” he said, adding that “it was not easy to make Windows on the World work.”

The Post is doing what it can to keep the city’s cads at bay:

It’s a case of paradise lost and found for lucky lovers Mike Goldstein and Anne Huynh.

The Post played matchmaker for the two New Yorkers who shared a soul-stirring kiss New Year’s Eve, and then lost track of each other.

The two were reunited at the Midtown lounge Kanvas.

“We’re engaged!” joked Goldstein, who locked lips with Huynh at an Upper West Side party on Dec. 31.

. . .

On a whim, Huynh posted an ad on Craigslist: “Mike - you kissed me at the house party on 96th and 3rd on New Years. From the moment I saw you . . . I wanted you.”

Goldstein didn’t respond, but The Post did, and profiled her in a story on New Year’s missed connections. Goldstein’s buddy saw the article and called his friend.

On their first official date last week, Goldstein walked Huynh to her Midtown apartment, and she finally received her long-awaited second kiss.

“It was the first kiss again. The same butterflies, except maybe even more now,” she said.

Earlier: Craig’s Dissed.

The guy who got off easy by convincing a state Supreme Court judge that jumping off of tall buildings is constitutionally protected free speech is now going to sue the Empire State Building for $30 million:

The dopey daredevil who tried to parachute off the Empire State Building is coming down on the landmark with a $30 million lawsuit.

In the suit, which is expected to be filed today in Manhattan Supreme Court, Jeb Corliss says the security guards who thwarted his 2006 attempt at jumping off the building endangered his life and caused him “severe emotional distress.”

Corliss’ lawyer, Mark Jay Heller, said the suit also charges that the building’s brass defamed him by claiming his conduct was illegal, when they knew the criminal charge against him had been thrown out of court.

The the past two years, 16 million eyes got together and busted 18 perps, making the MTA’s “See Something, Say Something” campaign a resounding success:

After 9/11, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority coined the slogan, “If you see something, say something,” and put it on posters encouraging subway and bus riders to call a police counterterrorism hot line if they encountered anything suspicious. Then, last July, the authority trumpeted results on new posters and in television ads: “Last year, 1,944 New Yorkers saw something and said something.”

But the new posters, also placed in the commuter railroad trains, left out two things: What, exactly, did those 1,944 New Yorkers see, and what did they say? Presumably, no active terror plots were interrupted, or that would have been announced by the authorities.

Now, an overview of police data relating to calls to the hot line over the past two years reveals the answer and provides a unique snapshot of post-9/11 New York, part paranoia and part well-founded caution. Indeed, no terrorists were arrested, but a wide spectrum of other activity was reported.

The vast majority of calls had nothing to do with the transit system.

Some callers tried to turn the authority’s slogan on its head. These people saw nothing but said something anyway — calling in phony bomb threats or terror tips. At least five people were arrested in the past two years and charged with making false reports.

Eleven calls were about people seen counting in the subway, which was interpreted as ominous by some.

One thing the overview did not clear up: just where did the number 1,944 come from? Police and transit officials could not say exactly.

All together, calls to the hot line, 1-888-NYC-SAFE, have resulted in 18 arrests by the New York police over the past two years; none have revealed a direct connection to terrorism.

It’s like 24 meets Missile Command:

The game is called New York Defender and can be found on the French-based Web site Uzinagaz.com, listed under the “Chaos” category. It is also available on numerous other videogame sites.

The background of the game’s welcome screen shows a digitized cityscape, with buildings consumed in orange and brown smoke.

“Go beyound [sic] your powerlessness and use your mouse to fight back” is the game’s tagline.

In the game itself, two gray Twin Towers stand tall among the city skyline as white airplanes try to crash into them from all angles.

As the player, you use the computer mouse to move about a red target sign, with two green laser-like lines taking aim at the airplanes each time you fire. A loud shooting noise designates the firing of your weapon.

If one plane hits a Tower, the building shows damage and begins to smoke.

Should a second plane hit a Tower, the building collapses in a pile of rubble.

Some protest and riot for democracy. Others mourn a fountain:

Huddled under umbrellas, a group of almost 30 activists opposed to the Washington Square Park renovation gathered for a candlelight vigil by the arch last Wednesday at 6 p.m. to mourn the loss of their park. They came from as near as a block away and as far as Brooklyn.

They would have preferred to have been standing near the park’s fountain — the planned moving of which slightly to the east they vehemently oppose — but it had been fenced off earlier just that afternoon.

“Some people think we’re going to forget about this, but we’re not going to forget,” said Keen Berger, Greenwich Village Democratic district leader, standing with her daughter Sarah.

The group formed a circle and, one by one, offered their thoughts on their battle to keep the park from being redesigned or their fondest park memories.

“I feel that the destruction of this park is the beginning of the destruction of Greenwich Village,” said Elizabeth Adam, a native Villager who lives on 12th St.

Location Scout: Washington Square Park.

Representative Yvette Clarke sure knows how to pick her battles:

Rep. Yvette Clarke voted against Christmas!

The first-term Park Slope Democrat was one of just nine members of Congress who last week voted against House resolution 847, a symbolic bill that, among other things, acknowledged “the international religious and historical importance of Christmas and the Christian faith.”

The resolution also “recognizes the Christian faith as one of the great religions of the world.”

The bill — one of dozens of purely symbolic resolutions that recognize everything from the James River as “America’s founding river” to the passing of Gerald Ford — passed last Tuesday by a vote of 372–9.

But the landslide vote masked the bill’s divisive language, including a pointed reminder that “there are approximately 225,000,000 Christians in the United States, making Christianity the religion of over three-fourths of the American population.”

“In this season of giving, love, peace and joy, I am mindful not to allow Christmas to be narrowly defined by an act of Congress or to consent to the pronouncements of others that are not reflective of my Christian experience,” she said in a statement. “I firmly believe that it is the spirit of the holiday season . . . has taught me to accept the values expressed by a diverse civil society. It is the love for our collective humanity; the desire to live in a world filled with peace and joy that truly defines and unites us as Americans.”

. . .

It’s not the first time Clarke has taken an unpopular stand against her congressional colleagues. Earlier this year, she was the only “no” vote on a proposal to name the library on Ellis Island after the British-born comedian Bob Hope. The bill was approved 420–1.

A Christmas gift idea for the representative?