He Is I, And I Am Him, Slim With The Tilted Brim

Community Boards across the city deal now facing Snoop Dogg quandary:

Local residents should expect to see fewer blocks named in honor of their late friends and neighbors now that the city has instituted new guidelines regulating the practice.

Just a few weeks ago, the city approved 85 new street designations throughout the five boroughs — 13 of them right here in Brooklyn. But that’s the last big batch of honors the borough is likely to see for some time.

Community Board 11 Chair Bill Guarinello recently explained the new criteria his board will now be following, saying that “street namings have been run like the Old West” and that in the past the designations were partly granted on the basis of “who you know.”

“Community Board 11 has new standards,” Guarinello said. “There are going to be times now when we are going to be rejecting people.”

Under the new criteria, candidates put up for consideration must have been “New Yorkers of a significance to New York City.”

This greater emphasis on citywide rather than local appeal significantly raises the threshold that prospective honorees now have to achieve before a street is designated in their honor.

The latest group of Brooklynites to have streets named after them includes victims of violent crime, a successful realtor and members of Coney Island’s Polar Bear Club.

According to Guarinello, Community Board 11 committees charged with considering new street dedication applications will immediately begin using the city’s revamped criteria.

Aha, That’s What Borough Presidents Do!

Advocate for the destruction of bits and pieces of the city’s architectural history:

Queens Borough President Helen Marshall urged destruction of the New York State Pavilion during an interview this week with the Daily News, pre-empting a city study on whether the structure can be saved.

“It should be demolished,” Marshall said of the pavilion, designed by famed architect Philip Johnson. “We have great artists. He’s not the only artist in the world.”

Though the 1964 World’s Fair exhibit has decayed much over the decades, the unique rotunda with three towers remains integral to the city’s proposed transformation of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

Location Scout: New York State Pavilion.

Watch Me Unravel I’ll Soon Be Naked, Lying On The Floor I’ve Come Undone

Mayor Bloomberg, illustrating his near-peerless ability to helm the ship in the midst of stormy, uncertain weather:

Call him Mayor Doomsberg.

In rat-a-tat fashion on Wednesday, Hizzoner:

– Warned city workers they are in danger of being laid off.

– Defiantly told homeowners not to count on property tax rebates.

– Ordered city thermostats turned down as temperatures hovered near freezing.

“Wear a sweater if you’re chilly!” the mayor advised city workers — before threatening them with unemployment.

“You’re trying to plan, if you’re a city worker, whether you’re going to have a job. You have to start worrying about that and plan,” Bloomberg said. “There’s an awful lot of the 300,000 municipal employees who have got to start worrying about their jobs.”

. . .

Bloomberg also said the city won’t send out $400 property tax rebates until he’s sure the city can afford it, despite his budget director’s admission on Monday that the Council has to approve the decision.

“I understand exactly what the Council said. We issue the checks. And this is not something that’s going to be decided by litigation,” he said, referring to a suit filed by several Council members to force him to send the rebates.

Third Term? What About A Second?

As a matter of fact, I was thinking this. Thanks for bringing it up:

As thankful as the city is for all Mayor Mike accomplished after 9/11, that was nearly a full term ago. Now, he’s decided he wants a third term, even though he still owes us a second.

Even his strongest allies have a hard time naming a memorable achievement from Bloomberg’s second term — beyond his sparking a national gun-control campaign. Instead, he was fixated for most of the last two years by an always-improbable, yet ballyhooed pursuit of the presidency, followed by a largely unnoticed, two-month-long audition for the consolation prize of vice president.

In one of the most sordid performances by a city executive in modern history, Deputy Mayor Kevin Sheekey appeared on NY1 in May to declare that “the person who picks Mayor Bloomberg as their vice-presidential candidate wins the election,” partly because Bloomberg would “help finance a campaign” with “between zero and a billion” dollars. This televised and indiscriminate bribe offer generated no takers and, more remarkably, drew not one word of fire from the city media.

Two weeks later, Bloomberg acknowledged that he’d asked a pollster to see what voters thought about extending term limits so he could run again.

Annotation: Wayne Barrett writes the best, most complete history of how this all happened. The op-ed co-optation, the charitable bribes, the “lack of time” to prepare a referendum, the City Council treachery, the misuse of the worldwide financial crisis to gin up a reason to run again and much, much more; bookmark this or clip it and put it in your scrapbook . . .

Wait Around Long Enough And Everything Becomes A Landmark

Wow, the much maligned “Superblock” of the 1960s gets landmark designation in Greenwich Village:

Three towers that have dominated the Greenwich Village skyline for 40 years were given historic landmark status yesterday — a move that will make it harder for the property owner, New York University, to expand on the site.