Inadvisable . . . Unless You’re Oscar The Grouch

If only they asked, a consultant would have told them how it looked:

City Council members spending thousands in taxpayer dollars to buy new garbage cans bearing their names should think twice about the stink such a move might make, branding and political image consultants say.

Linda Passante, the managing partner of a New York-based brand development agency, the Halo Group, said that if she were advising council members, she’d tell them to steer clear of promoting themselves on waste receptacles.

“I don’t subscribe to the idea that any publicity is good publicity,” she said. “If I’m walking by a garbage pail and I’m smelling garbage and seeing a name associated with it,” it wouldn’t leave “a positive impression.”

The CEO and founder of Political Capitol, Kathryn Mahoney, said the idea that politicians would mount their names on garbage cans has “that desperate, sort of used-car sale feel to it, as if they are doing everything they can” to get their name out there.

“It gives you that automatic, negative feeling,” Ms. Mahoney, who said she advises members of Congress, said. “It feels kind of slick. And that’s the last thing you want as a politician.”

The Department of Sanitation said 21 council members, two former members, and President Scott Stringer of Manhattan have spent about $811,914 in public funds to buy 2,025 garbage cans with their names on them.

“Sexy Philanthropist” Costume Not Popular This Year

Community groups have turned down help from Scores before, but even on the sexiest of holidays, volunteers from Scores still can’t catch a break:

Scores strippers set to help out at a Halloween festival held at a Brooklyn middle school have been told thanks, but no thanks.

Ladies from the jiggle club were scheduled to volunteer at the Puppetry Arts Theater’s Halloween Carnival Benefit at MS 51 in Park Slope on Saturday, but wouldn’t have worn their, uh, work uniforms.

“The benefit is not an appropriate venue for volunteers identified as adult dancers,” said Department of Education spokesman David Cantor.

Sooner Or Later You’re Going To Listen To Ralph Nader . . . Or Not

As good a reason as any not to act like a moron — the tongue-clucking Staten Island Advance:

A 29-year-old man from Richmond Valley with numerous speeding convictions died last night after he was thrown from his speeding car as it tumbled down the West Shore Expressway’s grassy median.

The crash victim, Michael P. Lehmann, of Culotta Lane, lived alone and he died alone.

Again, Think Of What $2.5 Billion Could Buy

How about health care for every uninsured New Yorker? Just asking! Because now you have a lame duck mayor spending his waning political capital on a subway stop:

Over the next nine months the Bloomberg administration will likely press the state for an additional $450 million in funding for the no. 7 subway line extension, as cost overruns have left the 1.5-mile project with only one planned station stop.

The city has put up the full $2 billion required for the project. Though with the major tunneling contract slated for approval tomorrow, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has dropped plans for constructing the shell of a station at Tenth Avenue and 41st Street.

The extension has been billed as an essential driver of development for the area west of Midtown, which is one of the Bloomberg administration’s key initiatives.

“The city is coming up with a couple of billion out of the taxpayer’s money — I would argue that it’s the MTA’s responsibility” to fund the station, Mayor Bloomberg told reporters yesterday.

While the city is anxious to have the MTA come up with the money, the state agency has said it is facing major budget deficits and is prioritizing other projects such as the Second Avenue Subway.

Again, that’s a $2 billion investment for a) a convention center that is fully booked to begin with and b) infrastructure for waterfront housing for rich people that doesn’t even exist yet. Oh, and probably an artificial-turf ballfield named for Dan Doctoroff forty years down the line. That would be worth it.

Ashes To Ashes, Dust To Dust

The landlord-tenant dispute that will only die when one of them does:

For nearly a quarter century, since Ronald Reagan was in the Oval Office, Lascelle Wright, 49, and his neighbors have been locked in a dispute with their landlord.

Even by the standards of New York City, where such disputes are blood sport, their face-off has become a long, strange war of attrition.

Mr. Wright is one of seven holdout tenants, most of them poor, elderly and in ill health. They want to remain in the Windermere, an echoing, ruined beauty of a building that was designated a city landmark in 2005. The alternative, they say, is the street.

Mr. Wright’s rent is $100 a month, but the landlord has provided no mailing address for his checks, so Mr. Wright has not paid even that.

A grand apartment house in the Romanesque Revival style, the Windermere is an eight-story building at West 57th Street and Ninth Avenue. It was famed in its late-19th-century heyday for its marble fireplaces, its uniformed “hall boys” and the latest in technological wonders, the hydraulic elevator and the telephone.

. . .

Nearly 7,000 miles away in Tokyo is [Masako] Yamagata. The head of the Toa Construction Company, he is 89 years old and hospitalized.

Last week, Mr. Yamagata did not respond to a list of questions. A woman who described herself as an employee supplied his age and the status of his health and said she would notify Mr. Yamagata of the inquiry. But she added, “I cannot tell you when he will or if he will answer at all.”

Last year, one of many housing activists who have tried to help the holdout tenants, Roseanne Haggerty, was finally granted a meeting with Mr. Yamagata in Tokyo after six years of entreaties.

She described him as white-haired and charming, if enigmatic. In a wood-paneled office that reminded Ms. Haggerty of an American recreation room from the 1970s, Mr. Yamagata had many American souvenirs, including a small Statue of Liberty and an ashtray with a New York logo.

In an informal gesture, he rolled up the sleeves of his white business shirt and showed Ms. Haggerty small scars on his arms from kidney dialysis. He could no longer visit New York because of his illness, he told her.

. . .

When Mr. Wright became a tenant in 1980, the Windermere was about half full, with about 80 families, he recalled.

By 1982, a previous landlord was offering incentives of up to $5,000 an apartment to vacate the building. Many left. By 1986, when Mr. Yamagata’s Toa Construction bought the building, Mr. Wright counted only a dozen or so families remaining, most protected from eviction under the city’s housing laws.

For the next two decades, the tenants and their advocates, in and out of housing court, attempted to resolve the standoff.

On Sept. 19, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, using reports from fire inspectors, cited Toa for 209 violations, including fire safety problems like exposed wiring, “the accumulation of refuse and/or rubbish” and “no electrical supply entire building.”

At the contempt hearing today, Mr. Yamagata could agree to the repairs.

If he does not, the city could perform the repairs and send him the bill.

Or some form of long-term alternative housing might be sought for the tenants until the building is habitable, according to Housing Conservation Coordinators.

Mr. Wright said he remained calm throughout the fight.

“I don’t curse, I don’t yell,” he said.

“The landlord is waiting for us to die,” he said. “But I’m 49, and he’s, what, almost 90?”