Nothing A Little High-Density High-Rise Wouldn’t Fix . . .

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.

Solution: Congestion Pricing On Hipsters Moving In To Previously Overlooked Middle-Income Neighborhoods

The best way to make the case against cars in the five boroughs is to pin the problem on the hipster — because everybody likes to snicker at the hipsters:

The cars came by twos and twos, ones and threes, swimming into the parking lot of the Red Hook Fairway like salmon returning to their childhood stream.

It was shortly after four on a summer Wednesday — not even rush hour — but the six lanes of asphalt lot were already two-thirds full. They were jammed with cars of every shape and origin — with boxy Acuras and slope-backed Subarus, snub-nosed Jeeps and bug-shaped Jettas, braggy Mercedes, rah-rah Fords, and a strange BMW-minivan chimera the color of a fresh picket fence. In the distance, the Manhattan skyline reared up flat and two-dimensional, signifying City. But here, as car alarms twittered and shopping carts squeaked, as shoppers kowtowed to the shrine of their trunks, the vibe was pure car-country nirvana.

“I didn’t realize how much I missed the car until I had it here,” said Lauren Robinson, a 25-year-old dietician with pixie-cut brown hair, a fetching dimple, and a bearded beau who was dutifully loading groceries into her Honda CR-V. The Honda was a relic of her youth in upstate New York, but she had recently brought it to the city after moving from car-hostile Manhattan to auto-friendly Brooklyn. She didn’t really need the vehicle, and, theoretically, she could have grabbed a bus to Fairway. But, as she explained, “It’s just so easy to jump in and drive somewhere.”

“I don’t think you need a car,” she said, “but I think it’s definitely a plus. And it definitely makes me feel more” — she paused to search for the word — “well, not like such a city person.”

Ms. Robinson is hardly alone in her secret suburban car lust these days. In fact, for all the talk of the evils of automobiles, she is in decidedly turbo-charged company. From Greenpoint to Red Hook, Inwood to Astoria — across all of the city’s young, lifestyle neighborhoods, really — New Yorkers of a certain breed and background have taken to toting their four-wheeled friends down to the city, dragging them through the streets like well-worn baby blankets. Lured by the musk of vinyl and gasoline, they have lined the lanes of Fairway with out-of-state license plates. They have given their cars names like Ruby, Monty and … Digger. (“I call it my baby,” said Digger’s driver, Michelle Barlak.) And though few would dare admit it, they have made sections of the city seem so, well, L.A.

“Oh, I hope New York’s not becoming L.A.-ified, because I moved to New York to get away from L.A.,” gasped Laura Allen, 24, a giggly SoCal native, right before she hopped into her boyfriend’s white Jeep Cherokee and turned its muscular tires onto the smoothness of Williamsburg’s North First Street.

. . .

But there is something strange — or particularly strange — about the car culture that has taken root in certain swaths of the city in recent years, sprouting up alongside the former kids of suburbia as they have continued their march across Boerum Hill, the South Slope, Williamsburg, Astoria. As many of these drivers will admit, they wouldn’t keep a car if they lived in the parking-space tundra of Manhattan. But with their move to the boroughs — to the land of “far-flung” specialty stores, parking-space-lined streets, and the accelerated domesticity of brownstone life — they have realized that they can resurrect the customs of their pre-urban past.

Never mind the weird, globally warmed weather patterns or the congestion-clogged streets. And forget the fact that many of these drivers probably came here to escape the cul-de-sac culture of their youth. For reasons both deep and ineffable, these young transplants just can’t help bringing suburbia with them.

“The day we leased the car and got the keys was like my 16th birthday all over again,” Melissa Walker, a 30-year-old writer, Park Sloper and leaser of a silver Saab 9-3 sport wagon told The Observer in an e-mail message. “I felt a great sense of freedom, like I could go to a beach other than the A-train Rockaways, like I could hit a Rhinebeck B&B at a moment’s notice, like I could go to Fairway and load my groceries into a trunk just like a suburban girl!”

. . .

This tableau of the cute girl and the big car — with or without the neutered cur — is uncannily common in Williamsburg these days, despite its oddly Teflon reputation as the home of the hipster. While it’s still possible to stumble on the odd, tricked-out hearse or pass a small Tour de France’s worth of bicyclists (biking is big there), gently distressed Volvos — thanks, Ma and Pa! — are equally ubiquitous, as one recent visit revealed.

In the short distance between North Fourth and North Ninth Streets on Driggs Avenue, The Observer counted nine of these family-friendly vehicles glinting in the sun. Most of the them were classic four-door types, but there were also two-doors and wagons, old Volvos and new — a whole menagerie of in-state and out-of-state vehicles littered with everything from tennis racquets to Pottery Barn catalogues to an Atlas of the five boroughs. The total afternoon Volvo-count came to 23.

But perhaps the real sign of the car culture apocalypse — the hint that, when it comes to wheels at least, Williamsburg and Winnetka might not be so different after all — is the sobriety check that cops have set up on Meeker Avenue, near one of the on-ramps to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. No one can say exactly when the checks began or whether they are a direct response to the influx of postcollegiate boozers. (The New York Police Department did not respond to a request for a comment.) But several sources agreed that they first noticed them sometime within the past year — a floating barricade of police, batons and breath-a-lizers, just like back home!

You’ve Got To Moo Your Way To Freedom

And here you thought you no longer needed those lasso skills now that you moved to the city:

A frightened white-and-brown bovine led a small army of cops and firefighters on a merry chase until they finally corralled it in a Briarwood yard about 11 p.m.

Just where “Queenie” came from was unclear, but neighborhood residents said there are a number of halal butchers in the area who keep animals for slaughter according to Islamic law.

Police said 911 calls began coming in shortly before 10 p.m. from people who spotted the animal hoofing it on Union Turnpike and later at a number of other locations.

Dimitri Mitropoulous, 45, almost came hood to head with the critter.

He was driving past Queens Hospital Center, near the parking lot, when “the darn thing just came out of nowhere. There must have been a little bit of grass in the lot and he was feeding.”

Mitropoulous called 911 and got an operator who thought he was a prankster. “She asked me what color the cow was and I said, ‘Are you joking? It’s a cow in New York City.'”

When it was finally determined there really was a four-legged fugitive — from somewhere — on the loose, cops began tracking Mitropoulous with a Global Positioning System device as he followed the cow.

“We must have gone about 2 miles,” Mitropoulous said, “and it was running at a good pace for a while. I had to do 20 [mph] to keep up with it. I was driving right alongside. If I had a rope I would have grabbed him.”

The chase ended when the cow turned into a yard next to a three-story building at 85-22 144th St., where it was trapped by more than a dozen radio cars and Fire Department vehicles.

Scores of rubberneckers mounted light poles, and climbed on trucks and garden walls to watch as the pursuers closed in with lassos.

But the cow was not cowed. Queenie bucked, kicked and mooed loudly as she was wrestled toward a waiting NYPD horse trailer.

The tug-of-war clearly tickled a number of onlookers, who began chanting “Attica, Attica” — a reference to the violent suppression of a riot at the upstate prison — while others laughed.

(Too soon to tell whether the if-you-can-pull-it-off-you-earned-it rule is in effect.)

Why And When Solid; Who, What, And Where Is Another Story

This somehow qualifies as news at the Post? Someone did something horrifically horrible but we won’t say where because it’s just too horrible:

A crude and tasteless Web site that claims 9/11 was “funny” and the victims “deserved what they got” has provoked a storm of criticism.

The site features a series of heartless jokes, cartoons, and vile photos that make light of the disaster.

Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association President Patrick J. Lynch blasted the site as “crude, vulgar, hurtful and unpatriotic.”

“The police officers who sacrificed their lives that day, and every day, do so to ensure the freedom of speech that this Web site insults,” he said.

“America’s greatness lies in the tolerance of crap like this – where those responsible would be summarily executed for this kind of offense in a terrorist country.”

The Webmaster, who identifies himself only as “Henry” and “Hank Tom,” invites people to send him hate mail via e-mail or a message board — and many have obliged.

“You better hope we never meet in real life,” wrote one distressed Web surfer. “What happened to people on 9/11 isn’t anything compared to what I will do to you.”

There was no information on the identity of the ghoul who set up the site.

(The Daily News fills in the details.)

And Here You Assumed Craigslist Was About Finding Menial Jobs, Bait-And-Switch Apartments And Junky Ikea Castoffs . . .

Yeah, I suppose one could reach that conclusion:

During a crime wave in the winter of 1857, Harvey Burdell, a prominent dentist who lived at 31 Bond St. in Greenwich Village, was found in his office strangled and stabbed 15 times.

Suspicion soon fell on his mistress, Emma Cunningham, a 36-year-old widow who Burdell had taken into his home along with her five children.

“She needed a wealthy new husband willing to take on five children,” said Benjamin Feldman, author of “Butchery on Bond Street,” a new book about the case. “And she made a bad choice.”

Burdell, according to Feldman, “took ruthless advantage” of Cunningham\], routinely raping her, impregnating her two times, and twice performing an abortion on her with his hands.

Still, she needed the money and respectability a husband would bring, and so, when Burdell refused to do right by her, she hired an imposter to stand in for him at a wedding ceremony. When this ruse failed, she took to violence.

“I never in my life have heard a story that incorporated so much dysfunction and sociopathic behavior between a man and woman,” Feldman said.

. . .

Comparing the frenzy that trial produced to the O.J. Simpson case 135 years later, Feldman thought it was significant how little had actually changed in the relationship between the sexes in the big city.

“I don’t know if life is all that different today,” he said. “Take a look at Craigslist. The technology is different, but you still see women searching for sugar daddies and all that kind of stuff. The only difference is that in the middle of the 19th century it was OK to do that.”