It’s Still Not Clear Whether Anyone Has Ever Successfully Surfed Below Ground*

If they wanted us to ride on top of the cars they would have made the tunnels bigger, which is something you really shouldn’t have to learn the hard way:

A 21-year-old man was killed last night while riding atop a subway car in Upper Manhattan, the police said.

The accident occurred about 6:30 p.m. on a C train, in a tunnel between West 145th and 155th Streets, the police said. Service was disrupted on the A, C and D subway lines for nearly two hours.

The victim’s name was withheld, pending notification of his family, who were out of town, the police said.

The details of the accident were unclear. One police source said that the victim fell to the tracks and was run over by the train he had been riding. A transit worker who did not give her name said that while the train was moving, the victim hit a wall and was found 50 yards south of the 155th Street station.

*Above ground, yes, but below ground . . . yeesh.

Come On, You Know Good PR — Be A Team Player Here!

Instead he sloughs off the story as overzealous publicity on the part of the DA, and intimates that the amount was barely a drop in the bucket:

Anyone would be a little snippy after falling victim to identity theft — but leave it to Mayor Bloomberg to take it to a new level.

When asked yesterday about an alleged attempt to steal $450,000 from his personal account, the mayor took a shot at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which is handling the case.

“No. 1, it was a few months ago,” he snipped. “Why the district attorney chose to put it out now? It must have been a quiet news cycle.”

For the record, the DA’s office put out its press release on Tuesday, the first day one of the suspects appeared in court.

Bloomberg also scoffed at the suspects, whose alleged half-million-dollar theft attempt represents a tiny portion of his estimated $13.6 billion fortune.

“I don’t think they ever got any money,” he said. “Some guy walks in with a check from Bloomberg for $450,000, and he wants to take it all in $100 bills. Fortunately, the banks are a little smarter than that.”

New York, In Its Gluttonous Quest To Provide Its Citizenry With Anything And Everything Anyone Could Possibly Desire, Even Offers 4H Club

So what does the Post do? They go with a lede that the neither the principal nor PTA will be able to photocopy and send around. Real thoughtful:

“Hoe” is not an insult at John Bowne HS in Queens — it’s a learning tool.

That’s because the 2,900-student Flushing school hosts the Department of Education’s sole agricultural program — with a 3.7-acre farm, barnyard animals and all — which made history yesterday by serving student-harvested crops on the lunch menu.

Yes, the five vegetables in the veggie wrap, the basil in the pesto sauce and the cherry tomatoes in the pasta dish were all homegrown, shipped hundreds of feet, not miles.

“It’s just unbelievable. I didn’t know it would be real hands-on stuff,” said senior Sasha Ford, 17, one of the 540 students who manage the farm.

“You get to plant the stuff, grow, harvest and sell them, and it makes people happy to buy them.”

Students spend two of their four years working year-round on the farm, which in addition to producing apples, raspberries and collard greens is also home to chickens, goats and alpacas.

We’re Number One . . . At Russifying Our Shopping Districts!

Definitely something all New Yorkers can take pride in — a bunch of upscale chainstores drove up rents and turned Fifth Avenue into one giant overvalued loss leader for retailers:

Rodeo Drive? Puh-leeze!

The country’s far-and-away leader in elite retail remains Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, by a $7 million mile.

Real-estate firm Colliers International ranked the most expensive shopping streets in the United States by price paid per square foot, and Fifth Avenue took top honors, with an average rent of $1,350.

Rodeo Drive, by comparison, ranked third with a relatively bargain-basement price of $480 per square foot.

“Retailers, and in particular luxury retailers, continue to desire prime street-front locations,” said Ross Moore, senior vice president at Colliers.

And more than anywhere else in the country, “prime” means Fifth Avenue.

“Fifth Avenue is iconic. It’s synonymous with fashion and shopping,” said Tiffany Townsend, communications director at the city’s marketing organization, NYC & Company.

. . .

The influx of such global brands as Apple, Hugo Boss and others has dramatically driven up prices along Fifth, rising from an average of just $1,000 a year ago.

Gucci last year agreed to a record retail price of $1,500 per square foot for the right to bring back their flagship store to The Trump Building.

“Fifth Avenue is by far the greatest retail street not just in the nation but, in my opinion, the world,” said Stephen Siegel, chairman of Global Brokerage at CB Richard Ellis, who brokered the Gucci deal.

. . .

Fifth Avenue, however, just misses being the priciest stretch on Earth, with London’s Old Bond Street taking the top spot at $1,400.

Like A Good Novelist Or Sculptor, Deborah Solomon Molds And Crafts Her Raw Materials Until The Finished Product Is Just Right (Read: She Asks And Reasks Questions And Edits Down The Answers Until The Interview Says Exactly What She Wants, Which Is Roughly The Same As Making Up Stuff, When You Think About It)

Matt Elzweig explains in the New York Press how the Times Sunday Magazine’s Deborah Solomon comes off as such a pain in the ass in those preciously bratty Q-and-A features:

When I began my reporting three weeks ago, this story was slated to be a benign profile of an incisive, witty, cantankerous, high-profile-but-not-quite-famous, powerful, puzzling, playful, combative contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. Through Deborah Solomon’s weekly column, a Q-and-A interview that has become a popular staple of the Times’ Sunday magazine since its launch in 2003, the former art critic and author of two biographies has developed a voice easily as distinctive as the ones she features.

Most of my interviews with people in Solomon’s column over the years reflected positive overall experiences. (Several of those contacted either declined to comment or didn’t respond to requests for an interview.) But after conversations with two prominent Solomon Q-and-A subjects — Ira Glass, the popular host of Public Radio International’s “This American Life,” and Amy Dickinson, the nationally-syndicated advice columnist who replaced Ann Landers in 2003 — the story became more complicated. Both Glass and Dickinson, without any prompting and in significant detail, told me that in the published versions of their interviews, Solomon had made up questions, after the fact, to match answers that, at least in one instance, she had taken out of their original context.

“[Solomon] rewrites her questions and then applies any question to any answer that a person says,” Glass told me in a tape-recorded telephone interview.

Both experienced journalists, Glass and Dickinson accused Solomon of violating basic ethical standards by making up dialogue never said during their conversations with her — conversations Solomon taped. Dickinson (in a tape-recorded telephone interview) described an exchange that she says “didn’t happen” during her interview, that she said Solomon put together using her quotes. Glass went even further; of one exchange, he said that “she never actually asked that question,” and added that Solomon “was changing context in a way that changed what I meant.” In Glass’s case, he told a fact-checker for the magazine about the distortion of the interview, in an attempt to have it corrected. “I made my case as forcefully as I knew how,” Glass said in an email to me last week, “but I guess he just disagreed with me.”