And Now You’ve Seen Everything

And I’m guessing Dick Wolf is anxiously rewriting an episode as we speak:

A bunch of chickens and a big white turkey appeared near the corner of 125th Street and Second Avenue last week and began pecking in traffic.

The chickens were loosely gathered in a vacant lot next to a gas station on the northwest corner, but they roamed the gas station on Thursday and strayed all over the sidewalk and the street. They darted into traffic and amused passers-by and people waiting at a nearby bus stop.

. . .

Don Newcomb, a construction worker renovating a building across the street from the lot, said that “some guy” keeps dumping chickens in the area.

“This crazy guy keeps buying them from the market — some animal-rights guy, but I think he’s messed up in the head — and he keeps leaving them here,” Mr. Newcomb said. “He thinks he’s saving them, but it’s not like they’re safe around here. Somebody told me the hawks swoop down on them, too. Eventually, the health department comes, or whatever, the A.S.P.C.A., and they pick them up.”

“They run out in the road,” he said. “I’ve already seen two of them get run over. It’s a shame, because they’re cool chickens.”

. . .

An animal care official said that a note was left on a nearby fence. “Please do not bother the animals,” it read.

The note continued: “I removed them from the chicken market and they are sickly and unfit to eat. Please provide them with food and water if you think they need it.”

A phone number was listed. The man who answered that line said that he was Alex LaForte, 38, and that he had been feeding and caring for the chickens for almost two years. He said he had kept them in a henhouse in the vacant lot, but it was taken down.

Mr. LaForte, who said he had no job and was staying with friends and relatives in East Harlem, said he picked up castoff food from supermarkets and fed it to the chickens each night.

Asked about the note, Mr. LaForte denied having released the chickens. He said: “I don’t know who’s putting them out there, probably some rescue group, but whoever it is is saving them from suffering. I’ve seen the way they’re mistreated and made to suffer in those slaughterhouses.”

“We’re all struggling through these hard times, and the chickens are struggling to survive, too,” he said. “They find freedom on the city streets, and once they find freedom, they can eat and survive, rather than be put in a pen or slaughtered and eaten. I’m a struggler, and I try to help others struggling. If I feed them, they’ll survive.”

Who’s PILOTing This Ship?

I still can’t understand why that thing costs $1.3 billion:

New York City and the Yankees may have violated federal tax regulations and state laws in using $943 million in tax-exempt bonds to build the baseball team’s new stadium, according to a report issued on Tuesday by Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky.

Saying the taxpayers are footing the bill for the $1.3 billion Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and are getting little in return other than higher ticket prices and the loss of parkland, Mr. Brodsky, a frequent critic of the deal, said that the report stems from a review of thousands of pages of previously unreleased documents.

Although city officials and the Yankees hotly disputed many of the findings, the report concluded that the city and the state invested as much as $850 million in cash and tax breaks in the new stadium, which sits across 161st Street from the team’s historic home in the South Bronx.

. . .

Mr. Brodsky and other critics have argued that the city violated federal tax regulations by manipulating the assessed value of the land beneath the stadium so that the team’s annual payment in lieu of taxes would effectively equal the annual payments to bondholders, or debt service, of $56.7 million beginning in 2010.

. . .

The Yankees and the Bloomberg administration have always insisted that the team is paying for the new stadium, unlike almost every other professional sports team. The use, however, of tax-exempt bonds, will provide the team with savings of about $181 million over the life of the bonds, according to the Independent Budget Office.

Mr. Brodsky contends that because the Yankees will pay the city an annual sum in lieu of taxes, that money, in turn, is being diverted from city coffers to pay the debt service on the bonds.

There is no question that taxpayers are making a sizable investment in the new Yankee Stadium, as well as a new stadium for the Mets in Queens. The city and the state agreed to provide the Yankees with more than $300 million in cash subsidies for garages, a Metro-North train station, replacement parks and road work. But the teams do not pay rent for playing on city land, nor do they pay property taxes.

The Bloomberg administration successfully lobbied the Internal Revenue Service to approve the use of the tax-exempt bonds for the stadium, which did not initially qualify. But the I.R.S. later issued a proposal that would tighten the rules governing such bonds so it would be nearly impossible for this kind of financing to be used again by a profitable sports franchise.

Another Music In A Different Kitchen, for comparison’s sake.

By The Numbers

A lot of condoms. A lot:

The Mayor’s Management Report, issued yesterday, showed that the Health Department gave away 39,070,000 male condoms to community groups in fiscal 2008, which ended on June 30.

That’s enough for every man, woman and child in the city six times over.

It was more than double the previous year’s 17,770,000.

The price tag of the rubbers was put at $1,054,228, which doesn’t include the bill for some 2 million female condoms.

Proponents argued that’s not much compared to the $350,000 lifetime cost for medicating a single person with AIDS.

Lehman Folds . . .

. . . black car companies hardest hit:

A Brooklyn-based livery cab company is feeling the pinch more than most after the dramatic collapse of Lehman Brothers this week.

Corporate Transportation Group, which has a fleet of 1,400 vehicles in the city, had a contract with Lehman to shepherd thousands of the investment giant’s employees around town.

Now many of its drivers, who would normally line up for hours outside Lehman headquarters waiting for workers, have to spend more time driving to make up for the loss of income.

“We’re getting hammered,” said Eduard Slinin, 44, who started Corporate Transportation when he was 17 years old in 1982. “Lehman was one of our biggest clients. We would do 800 rides a night. We never believed Lehman would collapse. It’s like a bad dream.”

This must have been what the mayor was worried about.

This Is How We Roll

All aboard the vomit comet:

They are off into the night as another group of revelers — mostly young ladies — comes off the 10:32 from Mineola. They don’t want to give their names, but one is glad to share the recipe for the cocktail she is sipping from a plastic Starbucks cup on the sly: Smirnoff Blue (100 proof), a little 7 Up and cranberry juice.

These must be the “beauties” that a Long Island Rail Road engineer speaks of a little later at Tracks Bar & Grill, where he is convening with two other co-workers at the end of a shift. They would only talk if their names weren’t used.

“It’s beauty coming in and the beast coming home,” the train engineer says of the transformation partying commuters make when they come in fresh and leave haggard.

The engineer and his conductor buddies know too well the iniquities of the weekend ride, a shift usually reserved for rookies.

“At the 12 o’clock hour, there are a lot of fights. At the one o’clock hour, it’s the ‘vomit comet,'” one of the conductor says.

“And by 2 or 3, they’re zombies; the leftovers that couldn’t make the ‘vomit comet.'”

Fabio Bari and Phillip Prado, both 23, are familiar with the weekend routine. It’s barely 1 a.m. and they are making sure to hit the 1:19 a.m. to Manhasset, which if they miss leaves them only with the 3:19. Not an option. “It’s full of drunken animals,” Bari says.

There are worse possibilities, however, than missing the 1:19: “God forbid you miss the 3:19. You’ll be contemplating all the wrong directions you took throughout the night and your life,” Bari says.

Location Scout: Penn Station.