. . . the rest, not so much. So now that it’s no longer necessary to keep up appearances of “successful security consultant,” they realize it’s safe to start to wrap things up at the home office:

Rudy Giuliani’s consulting firm has laid off staffers as the business is reshaped after his failed presidential campaign, The Post has learned.

The layoffs last week involved administrative staffers working for Giuliani Partners, several sources told The Post.

It was unclear exactly how many departed last week, but the sources said it was at least five staffers.

First employees to go were those assigned to the Qatar account . . .

Now that he’s a lame duck, other initiatives seem to be stalling:

A growing number of Assembly members say it’s extremely unlikely their house will support a revised congestion plan backed by Mayor Bloomberg, with at least two dozen now backing a different alternative that doesn’t charge to drive into parts of Manhattan.

“It’s not going to happen,” said Assemblyman Mark Weprin (D-Queens) of the Bloomberg-backed congestion pricing plan.

Assemblyman Joseph Lentol (D-Brooklyn) added, “I never say never, but I think it’s pretty unlikely given the feeling of the [Democratic] conference.”

Either that or apparently women don’t take to beauty pageants like they used to:

The Miss Brooklyn pageant — a stepping stone to the Miss America crown — reappeared after a 16-year absence last week and was plunged immediately into controversy because the winner is a queen who’s not from Kings.

Leigh-Taylor Smith, 22, captured the sparkling tiara Saturday afternoon and promptly whisked it across the East River, forcing the borough to wait at least another year before it can crown one of its daughters with top honors.

. . .

. . . Smith, whose main qualification for being Miss Brooklyn — other than her looks, talent and charm — is that she is a parishioner at the Brooklyn Tabernacle on the Fulton Mall in Downtown.

Plus, she’s made the hajj to Junior’s and the Coney Island Boardwalk since moving to New York after graduating from the University of Virginia last year.

“Living in Manhattan, it’s nice to come to a low-key place like Brooklyn,” she told The Brooklyn Paper.

Before Brooklynites take umbrage at Smith’s victory, partisans should remember that it might never have happened had more genuine Brooklynites signed up.

“We only had a few committed girls from Brooklyn,” said Kim Thomas, executive director of the Miss Brooklyn Scholarship Program. “We couldn’t have a contest with only three girls.”

Gone to the races:

The board of directors of the New York City Off-Track Betting Corporation is set to vote today to shut down the gambling franchise, which could result in about 1,500 layoffs and the closure of more than 70 outlets across the five boroughs as early as June.

Sources say the OTB board of directors is poised to adopt a closing plan proposed by the president of the Off-Track Betting Corporation, Raymond Casey. Accounts differ as to the financial condition of the corporation, which has been famously described as the only bookie in the world that loses money. Mayor Bloomberg, who controls the OTB board through appointees, is set to shut down the corporation because he says the city has no interest in subsidizing its losses.

If the closure goes ahead, it could mark the end of the often seedy storefronts that dot the streets of the five boroughs, and it could deepen the financial troubles of New York State’s horse racing industry, which depends in part on funds from New York’s government-operated betting parlors.

See also: Off-Track Betting Parlors.

Potential thieves, take note — clubs are out on account of being just too loud:

Nicholas Williams, 31, who told cops he was from North Carolina, pulled out a gun inside the club and tried to hold up two men, but he had trouble getting their attention because the music was so loud, a law enforcement source said.

Williams yanked some gold chains and medallions off one victim, but as he was trying to stuff the gun and jewelry into his jacket pocket, accidentally squeezed the trigger and shot himself, the source said.

Then “panic ensued in the club,” the source said.

After being strong-armed out of Greenwich Village, NYU begins to look for other places to colonize:

New York University wants to build a 1-million-square-foot campus on Governors Island, school officials said yesterday.

The NYU plan would call for a mix of student and faculty housing and space for academic programs, officials said. It’s part of a 25-year, 6-million-square-foot expansion plan that also targets other parts of the Big Apple, including Downtown Brooklyn.

“NYU sees the potential of Governors Island as a place where we can grow,” said NYU spokesman John Beckman.

The state-city Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation says the university is a good fit, but the agency has yet to determine when it will seek proposals from prospective tenants.

When the only people who can afford to live in Manhattan are those in the financial sector* and students, you’re of course going to get more dorms:

Columbia’s brand-new 17-acre campus in Harlem. Six million square feet of additional space for NYU dorms and classrooms, stretching from Washington Square to the outer boroughs. A Fordham “fortress” springing up on the Upper West Side.

Colleges and universities are forecasting unprecedented growth in the coming years, adding as much as 17 million square feet of space — or more than either the World Trade Center or the controversial Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn — and may begin to exert an even greater influence on the ebb and flow of life in the city.

“Our fear is that the neighborhood could be overwhelmed by these institutions that they have played host to for 150 years,” said Andrew Berman of the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation.

Berman and other neighborhood advocates fear that the low-rise character of the neighborhood could become overrun by packs of college students and tall dorms to house them.

“It becomes a stage set instead of a real urban neighborhood, or company town where everything around you is run by a single entity,” Berman said.

*Whoops — sorry about that recession, guys . . .

Oh wait . . . I get it now:

A top executive with the construction firm managing the problem-plagued demolition of the former Deutsche Bank building said yesterday that the so-called “toxic tower” may not be as contaminated as the public has been led to believe.

“It is our belief there are not nearly [that] level of contaminants and the fear that is out there may or may not be justified,” said Mark Melson, vice president of Bovis Lend Lease, which is in charge of dismantling the eyesore overlooking Ground Zero.

With predecessors like these of course Al Sharpton will see you as a friend:

The Reverend Al Sharpton, who has not endorsed a candidate for president, is heaping praise on Mayor Bloomberg and, in turn, criticizing the legacy of Mayor Giuliani.

Mr. Bloomberg changed the “tone of ugliness” in the city, Rev. Sharpton said, so that even when there is disagreement, those on conflicting sides still speak to each other.

“It is important that even when we disagree that we not have a climate of disagreeability,” Rev. Sharpton said yesterday at an annual rally held in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. at the headquarters of Rev. Sharpton’s National Action Network in Harlem.

“Michael Bloomberg has torn down the curtain of polarized dialogue in the city and he has done it in an effective way,” he said.

If I wanted to give you my number, believe me, I would have:

Are you the one I kissed New Year’s Eve?

That’s the question haunting dozens of New Yorkers desperately trying to track down the virtual stranger they hooked up with — or tried to hook up with — as the ball dropped.

“I am looking for the identity of the man I kissed New Year’s Eve night/morning,” wrote one lovelorn Upper East Side woman in an ad on Craigslist.

“You were wearing a black and white checkered/flannelish shirt. You decided not to stay because of the disorganized chaos. I love you! Find me!” wrote a guy from the Lower East Side.

“You were wearing a gold dress. Your friend dragged you out before I could get your number,” wrote another poster.

While most New Yorkers nursed hangovers, nearly 100 romantics posted heartfelt “missed connections” messages on the Web site.

“Mike - you kissed me at a house party on 96th and 3rd on New Years. From the moment I saw you . . . I wanted you,” wrote Anne Huynh, 22.

The actress said she was on the prowl in a hot purple dress at a party on the Upper West Side when she spotted Mike in a neighboring apartment.

She crashed the neighbor’s party to meet him, a “hot hybrid between Jake Gyllenhaal and Freddie Prinze Jr.” in a tux, strumming on his guitar.

They sneaked away for the first kiss of 2008. “I had butterflies in my stomach,” she said.

But she left him shortly after without giving or getting a last name or phone number.

“I just want to see him again, and tell him how much I like him,” she sighed.

At a restaurant in Brooklyn, Robby Hecker, 30, spotted a “beautiful” woman chatting with her parents. It wasn’t long before he was invited over to the table. But shortly after, the girl disappeared without leaving a name or a number.

Really though, it’s rare that you catch a doctor around here throwing around words like “miraculous”:

Alcides Moreno plunged 47 stories that morning last month, clinging to his 3-foot-wide window washer’s platform as it shot down the dark glass face of an Upper East Side apartment building. His brother Edgar, who had been working with him on the platform, was killed.

Somehow, Alcides Moreno survived.

He was given roughly 24 pints of blood and 19 pints of plasma and underwent an operation to open his abdomen in the emergency room because, his doctor said, they did not want to risk moving him to an operating room. As December went on, he endured nine orthopedic operations.

Yet somehow, Alcides Moreno, the man who fell from the sky, survived.

In his hospital room, amid all the machines that helped keep him alive, his wife, Rosario, lifted his hand again and again to stroke her face and her hair, hoping against hope that a simple tactile sensation would remind him, would help bring him back.

Then on Christmas Day, Alcides Moreno reached out — and stroked the wrong face.

“Apparently he tried to do it to one of the nurses,” Rosario Moreno said on Thursday, describing how she chided him, gently, when she was told what had happened. “I looked at him and said, ‘You’re not supposed to do that. I’m your wife, you touch your wife.’”

. . .

Surrounded by doctors who had helped save her husband, Mrs. Moreno told her story at a press conference at which medical professionals with long years of experience in treating traumatic injuries used words like “miraculous” and “unprecedented” to describe something that seems remarkable: a man who fell nearly 500 feet into a Manhattan alleyway is now talking and, with a little more luck, a few more operations and some rehabilitation therapy, may well walk again.

“If you are a believer in miracles, this would be one,” said Dr. Philip S. Barie, the chief of the division of critical care at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan, where Mr. Moreno, 37, is being treated.

Maybe the mayor should return from all that campaigning to get this straightened out*:

The Department of Education appears to be taking a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to its ban on students bringing cellphones into the classroom.

Administrators at public middle and high schools have loosened the city’s ban on cellphones — as long as the gadgets are hidden, students and principals told The Post.

Principals said that even before a City Council bill that prohibits interfering with a student’s right to carry a cellphone to and from school recently went into effect, it was “close to impossible” to enforce the ban.

One Queens middle school principal, who asked for anonymity because she was bucking the ban, said her students can bring their phones as long as they’re turned off.

*It obviously undermines his earlier hardline position — not good for a presidential candidate who needs to appear tough!

In case you ever doubted your parenting skills, there is new reason to worry:

The Goldbergs live on the top floor of a rent-stabilized building on Broome Street. The loft is airy and neat, with tall ceilings and skylights. Alex’s father, Richard, gut-renovated the place himself when he first moved in, in the early seventies. He now works as a wine consultant and has just uncorked a bottle of Côte du Rhône. He pours a glass for Alex’s mother, Robin, dressed in skinny jeans and a designer blouse, as they sit down to talk about their son.

Alex is “a phenomenon,” says Robin. “A self-made man.” She’s constantly surprised by how many people he knows. In California, a man recognized Alex from the salad line at Peasant. In the Hamptons, people ask, “Is that cool little kid your son?” Her trainer at the gym knows Alex; he bought shoes from him at NikeID. Occasionally, she even thinks about asking his help to get into places. “It’s cool,” she says. “He’s master of a universe that he’s created for himself.”

Richard credits Nolita for Alex’s development. “Look around,” he says. “Look at what and who Alex has at his disposal.” This is why Robin has worked to help keep the corporate intruders out of their neighborhood, at least as much as possible. Peasant will show him how to cook a goose; Starbucks won’t. “It’s hard to imagine Alex growing up the way he has anywhere else,” she says.

Robin worries, of course. She worries about “maintaining his childhood.” She worries that he’ll develop an inflated ego. And she worries that all the attention he receives for playing grown-up could lead to problems with other kids. While Alex does have friends his own age, like Julian Schnabel’s twin boys, Cy and Olmo, he can be a bit of a schoolyard bully. And earlier this year, Alex was temporarily suspended from school for calling his teacher a “dick” under his breath. His teacher needn’t have taken the comment personally. Alex curses at everyone, even his parents. “Like, he’ll be in the middle of the restaurant and say, ‘Fuck you, Dad.’ I mean, it’s crazy,” says Frank DeCarlo, the Peasant owner.

Richard and Robin try to discipline Alex about his language, but overall they’re lenient. In Miami, instead of grounding him for sneaking out, Robin let him hang out with the Delano crew all weekend. (At one point, Alex found himself chatting up three topless women on the beach. “He was literally surrounded by six grade-A Miami titties,” says Fernando Gil, a former “Page Six” reporter who met him there. “He was like a kid in a candy shop.”)

The Goldbergs don’t consider themselves a traditional family, and they’re proud of Alex’s precociousness and ingenuity. Richard is impressed when he goes to Knicks games with Alex and watches his son chat up Jay-Z and Beyoncé. He feels the same way when Alex calls from the golf course near his camp in Maine, asking him to send Cuban cigars by FedEx so he might bribe his counselors. Richard was never like that as a kid. He never had that uninhibited ability to create these kinds of opportunities. “All you really have to do is let him loose,” he says.

And for those of child-bearing age, a cautionary tale: Manhattan is better earned than learned.

It’s kind of a problem when the people who would benefit the most have turned against the proposal:

Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing is facing growing opposition, with more Manhattan voters opposing the plan than supporting it, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

The proportion of Manhattan voters opposing congestion pricing rose to 47% from 36% in August, while those supporting the plan fell to 46% from 54%. Overall, the poll found that 61% of New York City voters now oppose the plan.

“Is traffic congestion a big problem? Almost all New Yorkers say yes,” the director of Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, Maurice Carroll, said in a statement. “Is congestion pricing the answer? Almost two-thirds say no.”

The outer boroughs, many of whose residents commute into the city center, have been generally opposed to congestion pricing from the beginning, making Manhattan’s support crucial to the plan’s success. The poll found that 65% of Queens residents, 63% of Brooklyn residents, 70% of Bronx residents, and 63% of Staten Island residents oppose congestion pricing.

Elliot Spitzer learns the hard way that executive experience is not at all like the “rollicking discussions” he once enjoyed as a youth around his parents’ dinner table. Less than a day — or if you believe the Sun, just hours — after details emerge about the governor’s proposed Amazon tax, he clumsily retreats:

In a second major policy reversal in less than a day, Governor Spitzer is backing down from a plan to require Amazon.com and other online retailers to charge state and local sales taxes on all purchases from New York.

Yesterday, just hours after The New York Sun reported on the new revenue collection scheme, the Spitzer administration announced that it was burying it for the time being — at least until after the Christmas shopping season. The move saved New York City shoppers from having to pay an additional 8.375% on many Amazon.com goods.

“Governor Spitzer believes that now is not the right time to be increasing sales taxes on New Yorkers,” Mr. Spitzer’s budget director, Paul Francis, said in a statement. “He has directed the Department of Tax and Finance to pull back its interpretation that would require some Internet retailers that do not collect sales tax to do so.”

The turnabout came just hours after Mr. Spitzer said he was dropping his plan to allow illegal immigrants in New York to obtain driver’s licenses.

In this latest instance, Mr. Spitzer wasted little time before pulling the plug on another controversial policy, aborting it before it threatened to snowball into a distraction for his administration.

And do you really believe this part?

Mr. Francis, in an interview, said the governor was unaware of the new tax policy, which the tax department quietly issued with a memorandum on Friday. It was supposed to go into effect next month, in time for the holiday shopping rush.

“The governor really wasn’t aware of this. My focus is to raise revenue, and the governor has a broader perspective,” Mr. Francis said. “It’s a big government, and in hindsight, we probably should have made sure he focused on it. It’s one of those things, so you live and learn.”

And a new political axiom is born: if there’s one thing the netroots hate, it’s taxing crap they buy on Amazon (and all for a lousy $100 million . . . that’s somehow using political capital wisely?).

The congestion pricing hearings sound like they’ve been really useful:

Assemblyman Herman “Denny” Farrell stood on the sidewalk in front of Hostos Community College last night, dreading the fifth public hearing of the Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission.

The state set up the 17-member panel to study Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan and ultimately to recommend ways to reduce traffic. Public hearings have been scheduled for each borough, Long Island and Westchester. But Farrell likened his presence last night to that of a dutiful schoolboy.

“You just sit there quietly and learn absolutely nothing,” he said.

A-Rod has always been the type of player who really comes through when it counts:

Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez, who had one of the best statistical seasons in the storied history of the Yankees, opted out of the final three years on his 10-year, $252 million contract Sunday, according to his agent. The move makes him a free agent and potentially ends his career with the team.

“We have put it in writing and sent it to the Yankees,” Rodriguez’s agent, Scott Boras, said in a telephone interview.

The Yankees had said they would not negotiate with Rodriguez if he opted out, so he might have played his final game with them. There is a chance that the Yankees could change their minds and negotiate with Boras toward a contract, but Rodriguez will be a free agent and will be able to negotiate with all 30 teams.

On the night their archrival, the Boston Red Sox, won the World Series for the second time in four seasons, the Yankees may have lost the player widely considered the best in the game. Rodriguez led the major leagues this season with 54 home runs, including the 500th of his career, and 156 runs batted in. He is expected to win his third Most Valuable Player award.

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

Earlier: That Was Fast.

Yes, there are times when it just might be better to get out and walk:

Riding the New York City Marathon on the city’s mass-transit system was almost as grueling as running it.

It took seven buses and three subway trains to trek through five boroughs along roughly the same 26.2-mile route some 40,000 runners will follow this Sunday.

My race began on the S53 bus in Staten Island, and like the start of the actual marathon, there was little space to breathe.

I had to duck errant elbows and fists, and thanks to one of my fellow riders, I was overcome by the odor of a thousand people sweating.

. . .

If I made every single connection, I could complete the marathon in three hours, 45 minutes — a respectable finish an hour quicker than my running time last year.

. . .

I crossed the finish line in Central Park in four hours, 57 minutes — two minutes slower than I ran the race in 2006.

Of that time, I spent three hours, 15 minutes riding buses and subways and another one hour, 42 minutes waiting for them.

Along the route that took me on seven buses and three subways, I swiped my MetroCard 10 times.

The Second Avenue Deli is now a bank and the site of an infamous 1950s mob hit is — what else? — now a Starbucks:

The barista stood stock still, her cold eyes glistening off the cool metal of the espresso machine. She grabbed the handle, and bang! bang! a few quick hits to the side, and before anyone knew what was happened, a Macchiato, double-shot, lay steaming on the counter.

Fifty years ago Thursday, in the same spot that very espresso machine sat coldly whipping nonfat mocha lattes, perhaps the most notorious mob hit in history happened.

Albert Anastasia, the powerful leader of Murder Inc., a man believed to be have personally killed 36 people, stopped in what was then a barber shop in the Park Sheraton Hotel’s lobby on West 57th Street. As he dozed in the chair, two gunmen walked in and fired a barrage of lead into the crime boss.

. . .

It is difficult today to stand on tiled floor of the Starbucks and imagine the pool of blood where the man nicknamed “The Executioner” once lay.

Those ghosts are all gone amid customers sipping Tazo teas and leaning over laptops, oblivious to the murder that captivated most of the country five decades ago. Back where the barber stood before the gunmen barged past him, a sign advertises the Starbucks song of the day: Dave Matthews’ “Grace is Gone.”

“You think people care?” says one barista, out on a smoke break and checking her Sidekick, and who, as per company policy, would not give her name. “That was 50 years ago. Trust me. They just want their coffee and they want to get on their way.”

Broadway producers look for that lucrative tween market, which obviously has more cash than it knows what to do with:

For Broadway producers, 10-year-old Jamie Carroll looks like an ideal theatergoer: she downloads scores off of iTunes, is a fervent proselytizer when she likes something and has lots of friends, two of whom she brought along to a recent Saturday matinee of “Legally Blonde.” “A lot of my friends say it’s the best musical they’ve ever seen,” she said.

Maybe. But Jamie’s father and her 14-year-old brother would not join them, considering the show too girly. Even her mother, Tacey Carroll, was only present as a chaperon: “This is a little more for them,” she said, echoing several other mothers at the theater, one of whom even dropped off her young charges and went shopping.

And that’s the rub for Broadway producers, for whom teenage and tween girls have become the demographic of the moment, wooed by marketing campaigns and featured as central characters in a flurry of shows in development, including “13,” about a teenager from New York who is transplanted to Indiana; “Princesses,” which is basically “High School Musical” meets “Gossip Girl”; and a musical adaptation of the movie “Clueless.”

Increasingly, though, some worry that the sugar-and-spice enthusiasm may be misplaced, because while teenagers and tweens may be helpful in creating a hit, they are far from enough to ensure one. For that, you still need grown-ups — lots of paying grown-ups — to want to come to a show.

*Just kidding, Mr. Mamet! We can’t wait for that Duran Duran thing to end to see your next play staged!

And everyone knows that teens love sex — they just tend to be a little cheap when it comes to paying for it, which is why sometimes you need to entice them:

Teens at a Lower East Side high school were getting their sex education outside the classroom after being targeted by pimps who lured them to a nearby brothel and enticed them with cut-rate romps, law-enforcement sources said yesterday.

The brothel, at 39 Eldridge St., was recently shut down by NYPD vice cops following complaints from outraged parents who learned that their sons at Pace HS across the street were targeted by the sleazy operators, the sources said.

Police sources said that a pingpong hall was a front for the whorehouse in the back of the establishment, and that it was run by Benjie Zheng, 47, who lived a few blocks away, and Ming Liuchang, 48, of Queens.

The men would try to lure students to the Robo-Pong Training Center by distributing business cards outside the school, sources said. The cards were printed only with a contact number, an image of a topless woman — and a word, “Good.”

Zheng and Liuchang allegedly recruited immigrant women off the street to peddle flesh in hidden rooms at the center, whose hours were posted on a sign adorned with rulers and pencils and the words “School Days.”

. . .

The rates were apparently designed to attract students who might not have wanted to wait until prom night.

“It was obvious that they were targeting young students, because the prices were so low,” said one disgusted police official, adding, “Most brothels charge at least $100.”

Fame, power and inevitable recriminations:

This should be a moment to savor for the venerable Latin food vendors of the Red Hook soccer fields in Brooklyn.

With help from well-placed allies and the passionate advocacy of their media-wise organizer, the vendors — lately a cause célèbre for pro-immigrant groups, free-market cheerleaders and gastrobloggers alike — recently won an extension of their operating season and an inside track on permanent status for the open-air multinational food court they have run on a temporary basis since the 1970s.

But just as they get ready for a difficult winter-long effort to comply with the city health code while preparing a formal bid for the concession rights, the vendors find themselves a family deeply divided over questions of leadership, money and less tangible issues.

In the last three weeks, the group’s organizer and public face, Cesar Fuentes, resigned as its day-to-day operator, threatened to sue vendors who spoke against him, threatened to quit representing them in city negotiations, then agreed to return, after all the vendors signed a petition on Wednesday avowing their “total support” and asking him to stay.

. . .

. . . Ricardo Ramirez, who helps run the largest stand, said that vendors felt that Mr. Fuentes acted as if he was not accountable.

“We want to know where the money goes,” Mr. Ramirez said last week. “How much he pays for insurance, how much he pays the workers who clean up. But when we talk to Cesar and ask him these things, he gets mad.”

Several vendors said they blamed Mr. Fuentes’s publicity efforts for attracting the attention of the city’s regulators, something they found particularly annoying because the resultant influx of non-Hispanic customers has been offset by a drop in Latino customers. “Business is the same,” Ms. Carrillo said. “But now there’s more problems.”

Mr. Fuentes said that he had provided the vendors with an accounting, and that the salary he pays himself — $20 per vendor per day, a total of $560 per weekend from the 14 vendors — was justified by his work.

Early this month, the vendors met without Mr. Fuentes. At the meeting, Esperanza Ochoa, a supporter of Mr. Fuentes who runs a Guatemalan stand and attended the meeting, said, some vendors spoke of keeping Mr. Fuentes around long enough to help them win the parks concession, then deposing him.

It was that meeting, Mr. Fuentes said, that prompted his resignation.

Location Scout: Red Hook Ballfields.

When it comes to the City Council’s new bill banning the pilfering of curbside recyclables, where the Times fears to tread, the Post understands what we most want to know:

Sanitation officials say their staff has witnessed unmarked trucks with out-of-state plates carting materials meant to be recycled. The current penalty for taking recyclables is only $100. Since January, 128 summonses have been issued.

The new law is aimed solely at those who come with trucks or cars — not people who simply rummage through trash looking for treasures.

“This is not a bill that goes after the occasional garbage pilferer,” [Councilman Michael] McMahon said, “or somebody who is looking for a new couch for their college room or picking up recyclables with a push cart.”

Jane Jacobs forty some-odd years later — at least the facades look the same:

“How many middle-class families with children do you see being raised in the West Village today?” asked Christopher Klemek, a 33-year-old assistant professor of history, sitting at a table outside the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street late last week.

Mr. Klemek has been pondering the question over the past several months as he put together an exhibition on Jane Jacobs, the onetime Village resident who became an urban prophet simply by gazing out her window a few doors away from the tavern. Actually, the question does not take much to ponder. Just use Jacobs’ primary method of research: look around.

“When Jacobs was here, this was a neighborhood which included old working-class tenants from old immigrant stock, new immigrant groups, particularly Puerto Ricans who were just coming into New York in large numbers, middle-class families like her own, some affluent residents, as well as bohemian counter-cultural figures,” Mr. Klemek continued. “This is not a neighborhood that can support that broad swath of social diversity any longer. There are a few people grandfathered in there with rent control, but not new arrivals.”

In 1961, Jacobs penned one of the most famous passages in urban planning literature — maybe the only famous passage — by describing the “ballet” on that stretch of Hudson Street. Merchants swept the sidewalk in front of their stores; teenagers dropped candy wrappers as they walked by; and longshoremen dropped by the White Horse for a pint.

Now, it’s as if the packaging is the same but someone switched the contents — or maybe it’s the other way around. The small and modest buildings are, thanks to a historic district designation, not only small and modest but also twee and quaint. There are still a lot of people on the street and there are still a lot of independently owned stores.

But the teenagers are largely absent, as are the longshoremen. The deli and the hardware store passed away; the laundromat has either disappeared or turned into a dry cleaner. In the building where Jacobs, a journalist, once lived with her family is a children’s clothing store where T-shirts with a picture of the Statue of Liberty playing the guitar sell for $36. At the corner stands a Portuguese restaurant that serves “organic beef filet mignon stone-grilled at the table” for $32 — which, given the trouble they seem to go through to make it, actually sounds like a bargain. The White Horse is just about the only place that has remained the same.

. . .

Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and Astoria, Queens, come out looking pretty good, Mr. Klemek said: “Diverse people on the street at diverse times for diverse reasons.” The West Village, by contrast, is just too gentrified — or, as Jacobs, who died last year at age 89, would have called it, “oversuccessful.”

“The loss of that particular element — the affordability of buildings and the variety of conditions — can really change a place radically, just as radically as the wrecking ball might have,” Mr. Klemek said.

If Bloomberg was going to run before (doubtful), he certainly won’t be able to now:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has promoted himself as a model of fiscal restraint, issuing dire warnings about the slowing economy, recently asking agencies to limit hiring, and even listing “fiscal responsibility” as an interest on his MySpace page.

At the same time, a review of the city’s budget since 1980 shows that Mr. Bloomberg has been presiding over one of the greatest expansions of city government since the John V. Lindsay administration, fueled by an extraordinary surge in real estate revenues, both from higher property taxes and transfer taxes from sales.

Since Mr. Bloomberg took office in 2002, the city budget, adjusted for inflation, has swelled faster than it has under any other mayor during the last 27 years, increasing by 23 percent, to $60 billion.

By contrast, spending rose 8 percent during Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s eight years, and 4 percent under Mayor David N. Dinkins, who served one four-year term. Mr. Bloomberg’s spending also outpaced that of Mayor Edward I. Koch, who increased the budget by 19 percent over his last two terms.

That didn’t end up turning out so well, I suppose:

A federal judge struck down a city health regulation yesterday that would have required more than 2,000 restaurants around New York — including chain restaurants like McDonald’s — to post the calorie content of their dishes on their menus.

The ruling by the judge, Richard J. Holwell of United States District Court in Manhattan, was a victory, albeit a narrow one, for the New York State Restaurant Association, which had sued the city Board of Health to challenge the regulation. In his ruling, Judge Holwell said he had banned the city from enacting the regulation because federal law already covers some of the same provisions it sought to put in place.

It was unclear whether the city would try to adopt a regulation that might satisfy the judge.

The regulation, formally known as New York City Health Code 81:50, would have forced restaurants that already voluntarily make public the nutritional information of their dishes on, say, Web sites, posters or tray liners to post that information either on their menus or menu boards.

The rule, adopted last December but delayed because of the lawsuit, was one of a handful of measures that the city has recently undertaken to govern the eating habits of its citizens, including a ban on trans fats. Had it been enacted, it would have affected 2,375 of the more than 23,000 licensed restaurants in New York.

The Health Department is to blame for the reduction in greenery in the city:

When television news cameras captured images of rats running rampant in a KFC/Taco Bell in Greenwich Village last February, restaurant owners around the city began scrambling to better protect themselves against such visitors.

They started bringing in exterminators weekly rather than once a month, sealing up every hole they could find, and reminding employees to keep food containers shut and garbage packed tight.

But one fast-food chain went even further. At half a dozen White Castles in the city, the surrounding shrubs have been ripped out and the parking lots have been paved over.

During a visit last month to the White Castle on Webster Avenue in the Tremont section of the Bronx, a few weeks after the offending greenery had been removed, John Vogt, regional director of the chain’s restaurant operations, said he lives in fear that someone will catch sight of a rat outside.

“If you were in the drive-through and saw a rat scurrying next to a wall, no matter where it came from, you would think it was from the restaurant,” Mr. Vogt said. “It might turn you off from ever coming back.”

City Health Department records show no rodent problems at White Castle’s New York locations. But the KFC/Taco Bell incident was troubling enough to prompt Mr. Vogt to remove some plants and flower beds from several of his chain’s restaurants in the city. “With the little landscaping that we have in our city stores, I hate to do it,” Mr. Vogt said. But rats, he said, “like to burrow into the soft dirt and wood chips.”

The ProLogical end result to Staten Island’s NASCAR failure:

Concerns about race weekend traffic drove the NASCAR debate and ultimately killed a deal to build an 82,500-seat track on the edge of Bloomfield.

But those very same worries — this time over truck traffic, not eager Dale Earnhardt Jr. fans — will likely accompany a plan to build a large industrial park there.

And the entertainment value is nil.

International Speedway Corp. confirmed yesterday that it had reached a preliminary agreement to sell its land to ProLogis, the world’s largest developer of distribution warehouses — places that are also magnets for trucks.

Unlike the proposed NASCAR track, however, an industrial park is permitted under the site zoning and does not need City Council approval, something that proved elusive for NASCAR.

A spokesman for ProLogis, the publicly traded Denver-based Fortune 1000 company, said it had reached a preliminary agreement with ISC to acquire the 676-acre site in Bloomfield. The transaction is expected to close by year’s end.

. . .

The feared flood of fans on race weekends will be replaced by a steady stream of trucks to the site, minus the fun and brand-name sponsorships. Former Borough President Guy Molinari, who once worked as a lobbyist for the racetrack proposal, stopped short yesterday of saying, “I told you so.”

“You could have wound up with something very, very nice that would have endeared us to the rest of the world,” he contended of the failed NASCAR proposal. “They would have heard about us on Staten Island, and the image would have been improved by NASCAR coming to our shores.”

Molinari recalled that when ISC executives warned the community that if the track did not get built, the site would be used for industrial purposes, they were accused of strongarm tactics.

At the time, ISC officials estimated that as many as 2,200 trucks each day could traverse borough highways if the site was used for industrial purposes. An ominous ISC slide presentation showed smokestacks looming behind a line of trucks, and ISC claimed that three race weekends a year was preferable to the alternative. That prompted some lawmakers at the time to accuse the company of making threats to get support for a track.

“We didn’t aim to be threatening. We just aimed to set the facts out. I’m not surprised,” Molinari said yesterday of the ProLogis deal.

Earlier: Container Ships Are Exciting, But They Sure Don’t Go Vroom Like A NASCAR Track.

Yes, Craigslist makes it easy to solicit prostitutes. But unfortunately there’s also a flip side to that:

The eight women visited Long Island this summer along with vacationing families and other business travelers, staying in hotels and motels in commercial strips in middle-class suburbs like East Garden City, Hicksville and Woodbury. Their ages ranged from 20 to 32.

Three had come all the way from the San Francisco Bay area, one from Miami. Two lived less than 60 miles away, in Newark and Elizabeth, N.J. and two even closer, in Brooklyn.

All eight were arrested on prostitution charges here, snared in a new sting operation by the Nassau County police that focuses on Craigslist.org, the ubiquitous Web site best known for its employment and for-sale advertisements but which law enforcement officials say is increasingly also used to trade sex for money.

Nassau County has made more than 70 arrests since it began focusing on Craigslist last year, one of numerous crackdowns by vice squads from Hawaii to New Hampshire that have lately been monitoring the Web site closely, sometimes placing decoy ads to catch would-be customers.

“Craigslist has become the high-tech 42nd Street, where much of the solicitation takes place now,” said Richard McGuire, Nassau’s assistant chief of detectives. “Technology has worked its way into every profession, including the oldest.”

Augmenting traditional surveillance of street walkers, massage parlors, brothels and escort services, investigators are now hunching over computer screens to scroll through provocative cyber-ads in search of solicitors.

. . .

The police have also occasionally turned to Craigslist to trace stolen goods offered for sale or make drug arrests. In June, in Nassau, spotting code words like “snow” or “skiing” to refer to cocaine, they set up a sting with an undercover officer to arrest a man who advertised cocaine for sex.