Hell House, New York City Style

This year features borough-specific haunted houses:

Last Halloween, [Timothy] Haskell, a theatre director, staged a public haunted house on the Lower East Side, and so many people showed up that hundreds never made it inside. “We realized that we had to turn away a lot of local people,” Haskell said. So this year he put up haunted houses in all five boroughs, tailored to prey on the fears peculiar to each one.

For months, Haskell and his crew polled residents of the five boroughs to find out their worst nightmares. . . . People from the Bronx and Queens, they said, tend to fear things that might actually happen, like being mugged (harpaxophobia), while Manhattanites are frightened of fantastical and unlikely occurrences (flying sharks, riding in an elevator that rockets through the roof of a building). “In Manhattan and Brooklyn, we heard ‘fear of the homeless,'” [chief designer Paul] Smithyman said. “Then, in the Bronx, we heard ‘fear of becoming homeless.'” Staten Island residents apparently dread chemical spills and gas leaks.

. . .

The challenge of creating a tableau representing acrophobia, the fear of heights (and the seventh most common fear of Manhattan residents), almost stumped the designers. “One idea was that we’d have people walk up a staircase and onto a Plexiglas floor and see teeny-tiny furniture beneath them,” Haskell said. “But there were liability issues.” Instead, they paired a video of someone falling off a ledge with an evocative sound effect: vroooooom, splat. For illyngophobia (fear of dizziness, No. 11 among Manhattanites), the team installed a giant spinning tunnel; for entomophobia (insects, No. 3), they glued a thousand dead cockroaches onto a wall; and for musophobia (mice, No. 6), they ordered an essence of dead rat from an outfit in Chicago called Sinister Scents.

That Doctor’s Yacht Is Brought To You By . . . Your Knees

The New York Marathon is making local doctors rich:

The marathon is 11 days away, but city doctors specializing in sports medicine are already seeing a run on appointments. Physicians say strenuous pre-marathon regimens, such as 20-mile training runs, can take a toll on the body.

Knee pain is the most common complaint of long-distance runners, the marathon’s medical director, Lewis Maharam, said. Dr. Maharam, who has a sports medicine practice on West 57th Street, estimates that his business increases by an average of 35% in the two weeks before and one week after the annual 26.2-mile race.

This year’s ING New York City Marathon, sponsored by New York Road Runners, is slated for Sunday, November 5.

On the day after the race, Dr. Maharam schedules no appointments. “People come in, and they get a number,” he said. “It’s like a bakery line, stretching down the hall.”

The director of sports medicine at New York-Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia, William Levine, said the marathon is “not very good for your body.”

. . .

Tendonitis and cartilage tears resulting in knee pain are common marathon-related injuries, according to Dr. Levine. “There are patients who don’t really recover, and end up with chronic orthopedic problems,” he said. Earlier this week, Dr. Levine said he treated a patient who ran last year’s marathon and has been experiencing knee pain ever since.

Also seen are more serious problems, such as stress fractures in the hip, thigh, and calf bones, Dr. Levine said. He recalled operating on a marathon entrant who fractured a thighbone in the middle of the race several years ago.

Any Slower And We’d Be In A Permanent State Of Carnaval

Last year’s slowest bus was the M34 (3.4 mph). This year we see some improvement, as the M14A checks in at a 3.9 mph clip:

The crosstown bus moves — if you can call it that — across Manhattan’s 14th St. at an average speed of 3.9 mph, earning it bottom honors in the annual Pokey Awards, handed out to the slowest coach in town.

Dishonorable mentions also were handed out yesterday to New York’s most unreliable and off-schedule routes by the Straphangers Campaign and other public transportation advocates.

“There are 2.5 million New Yorkers who ride the buses each day, and they deserve better,” said Paul White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives.

The ceremony took place in Union Square, just feet from where the M14A crawls by, and featured advocates dressed in tuxedos and handing out Golden Snail awards after each drumroll.

Cue elderly and/or infirm:

“They go slow because of the traffic,” said Phyllis Casper, 79, a retired bookkeeper from Manhattan. “I could walk faster if my feet didn’t hurt.”

The subways are not an option because Casper has difficulty with the stairs.

“I hate to say I’m an old lady, but I am,” she said.

The best double-barreled middle finger of the day comes from the Transit Authority:

The Transit Authority agreed traffic is a problem, but in a statement tried to put the ultimate positive spin on the daily bus commute trauma: “Slow and unreliable bus service is very much a product of the city’s vibrancy.”

All I Have To Say Is This Will Smith Vehicle Better Be Fucking Brilliant

Part and parcel of the NYU experience is waiting for film crews to finish a take before you are allowed to continue on to class:

For the past few weeks, the line between day and night has been blurred in Washington Square Park: Enormous floodlights have lit up the park, making it glow from blocks away. Production equipment often sits unused in the day, and hundreds work through the night.

This is the production scene of “I Am Legend,” starring Will Smith. The science-fiction action film, slated for release in fall 2007, is based on a 1954 novel of the same name by Richard Matheson.

But some NYU students say the excitement — which will end Friday when production moves to another part of the city — is backfiring.

Though filming has been mostly at night, the park has been closed periodically during the day. At night, other lighting in the park often has to be turned off — while the lights from the production itself dominate.

“The lights shine through my windows at night,” said Boris Tartakovsky, a Stern freshman living in park-adjacent Goddard residence hall. “They have just taken over Washington Square.”

Steinhardt freshman Melanie Field said the production is cool, but the inconvenience isn’t.

“The other day, it was raining, and a guy with a walkie-talkie said, ‘Wait five minutes, we’re filming,’ so I had to stand there in the rain waiting to go to class,” she said. “They may be filming, but I’m living.”

See also: “Big Willie Style” — Read: Two-Story Luxury Trailer.

Location Scout: Washington Square Park.

Next, An MFA In Dioramas And A Certificate Of Fake Fur

Order your American Museum of Natural History fraternity paddle:

The American Museum of Natural History, which plays host to about 400,000 schoolchildren each year, is about to become a graduate school.

The New York State Board of Regents yesterday authorized the museum, on the West Side of Manhattan, to grant master’s degrees and Ph.D.’s in comparative biology, making it the first American museum with its own doctoral degree.

It expects to recruit students next year and enroll its first class in 2008.

. . .

Johanna Duncan-Poitier, deputy commissioner for higher education in New York State, said the museum was already “one of the world’s foremost centers of research and training in the natural sciences, the physical sciences and anthropology,” and clearly met state standards for doctoral-granting institutions.

About 30 students a year already conduct doctoral research at the museum through partnerships with Columbia, Cornell, New York University and the City University of New York. Its staff includes more than 200 scientists, some of whom will become the school’s faculty.

The program plans to accept four or five students a year — reaching a total enrollment of about 20 — who will receive tuition and a stipend. It has raised more than $50 million for the program, from the Gilder Foundation, the Hess Foundation, an anonymous museum trustee and New York City. It will be named the Richard Gilder Graduate School, for Richard Gilder, an investment manager and museum trustee who is one of the school’s major donors.

Location Scout: American Museum of Natural History.