Those were among the instructions officials gave almost 200 people getting paid about $75 each to pretend to be homeless for a few hours yesterday morning. The decoys were acting as statistical checks-and-balances in the fifth annual citywide census of how many homeless people live on the streets and in the subways.

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A professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work, Julien Teitler, said many of the decoys gain an appreciation for what it’s like to be homeless.

If some of the decoys were subjecting themselves to the winter cold for the goodness of their hearts, others were there purely for the cash.

One of them was a costume designer and theater student named Elizabeth Cassarino, who said unabashedly that she didn’t care about the homeless. She planned to use the $75 to buy food and cigarettes.

Preservationists say 96 Greenwich Street House, along with the adjacent 94 and 94 1/2 Greenwich St. buildings, are rare examples of a row of Federal-style houses, offering a glimpse of early New York. The area south of ground zero has suffered from being blocked off from the rest of the city by the 16-acre void left at the site of the former World Trade Center. Recently, developer Joseph Moinian has begun work on a 53-story hotel and condominium nearby. Much of the financial district has seen conversion to residential from office space in the past few years as the nature of downtown has changed toward a more full-time environment.

The Pussycat Lounge, long a neighborhood watering hole for Wall Street brokers and civil servants, sits on an eclectic block that also has a boxing gym and delis. A long bar runs most of the length of the Pussycat Lounge, behind which is a stage where scantily clad women perform. A small knight and a cat are design props upon the stage. The second floor is a rock ‘n’ roll club.

The Coney Island project “isn’t a financially feasible investment” without the inclusion of high-rise housing along Stillwell Avenue just off the fabled seaside boardwalk, Thor Equities spokesman Lee Silberstein — speaking for company chief Joseph Sitt — told The Post.

“Everybody wants Coney Island to be revitalized, and housing has got to be part of it,” Silberstein said, adding that from a planning perspective the project needs guarantees that there will be people on the boardwalk year-round.

The news that the city faces losing its biggest private investment in Coney Island’s future if it doesn’t meet Thor’s request comes while the developer this week took a calculated gamble by beginning to clear some of the land where its planned construction would occur.

Bulldozers have begun removing longtime attractions on Thor property along Stillwell Avenue. In doing so, Thor is banking on city officials granting necessary land-use changes.

Beside housing, Thor’s project calls for a water-park-themed hotel, another full-service hotel, time-share facilities, new retail, a multilevel carousel and a 4,000-foot roller coaster.

Chuck Reichental, a member of the agency that will determine how Coney Island is rezoned, said a majority of residents opposes housing in the amusement district as well as any new development exceeding the height of the 262-foot landmark Parachute Jump.

“We go through here every day, and everyone still looks at us like ‘What the heck is this?'” said Tom Materka, a rail freight engineer, as the train approached the Hicksville station, one of the Long Island Rail Road’s busiest commuter stops, one recent afternoon. “People are always shocked to see a freight train coming through here.”

Mr. Materka, 30, an engineer for the New York & Atlantic Railway, one of the few remaining short-line rail freight companies in the region, was running two screaming 120-ton diesel locomotives towing a string of sooty boxcars from Queens out to eastern Long Island. Well-dressed commuters looked up from their newspapers and coffee and stared as the smoky train roared by and transformed the suburban station into Tumbleweed Junction.

The line uses obscure rail tracks in Queens and Brooklyn and tracks of the Long Island Rail Road in Nassau and Suffolk Counties.

Since freight trains are far outnumbered by commuter trains, few people glimpse the bulky, graffiti-covered boxcars as they lumber past the sleek silver commuter cars rushing passengers to or from Pennsylvania Station.

[Transportation Alternatives executive director] Mr. [Paul Steely] White represents the left flank, then, of a set of strange bedfellows. Founded by radical bicyclists in the 1970’s, Transportation Alternatives comes across as a sort of alterna-elite group of forward-thinking urban planners.

About half of its 5,500 members are from Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn, and its 18 full- and part-time employees are generally white, well-educated twentysomethings who ride their bikes to work. Many of its largest donors are Wall Street types, and its largest individual funder is Mark Gorton, the high-tech entrepreneur who founded LimeWire. To them, Mr. White says, “Biking is the new golf.”

But T.A., as it’s called, has long tried to project itself as a generally pro-person, anti-traffic group. The city Department of Transportation ended up copying Safe Routes to Schools, a program established by Mr. White’s predecessor, John Kaehny, which seeks improvements to streets near schools. A similar program, Safe Routes for Seniors, is next in line for adoption, Mr. White hopes.

And the group regularly submits suggestions for traffic improvements throughout the city, sponsors bike rides, and gives away helmets in poor neighborhoods.