These Challenging Times Demand Independent, Honest Leadership

Like a push-poll:

He is comfortably ahead in the polls. He has the vast powers of incumbency at his disposal. He has the backing of the city’s most powerful business interests.

But that does not seem to be enough for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

As his campaign sought to overpower any candidate considering challenging him, Mr. Bloomberg commissioned a telephone poll last month that spread derogatory information about Representative Anthony D. Weiner, one of the mayor’s possible rivals in the race.

The calls came around mid-March, even as Mr. Weiner announced he was not certain he would run for mayor.

In interviews, several people who received the telephone calls said that they were told when they picked up the phone that a survey was being conducted, but were soon asked a series of questions featuring negative information about Mr. Weiner.

. . .

Asked if the Bloomberg campaign had commissioned the telephone messages, Howard Wolfson, a Bloomberg spokesman, declined to respond directly. But Mr. Wolfson denied that the campaign had engaged in any push-polling.

“Unfortunately for Congressman Weiner, the fact that he takes money from lobbyists and special interests, misses votes and has not passed any significant legislation isn’t a push poll — it’s his record,” Mr. Wolfson said.

A person familiar with the Bloomberg campaign confirmed that the poll was Mr. Bloomberg’s.

The Mind Reels

See, tax credits work! They give good jobs to deserving New Yorkers! Though there is something absurdly circular about someone getting laid off from an industry that is probably as responsible for reestablishing New York City’s on-screen persona than anything else in the city for the last couple of economic cycles who then gets work as an extra in those films. It’s like Old Tucson* or something:

Laid off in December from a private equity firm downtown, Trent Calabretta, 26, found himself last month within a cubicle’s length of Angelina Jolie on a Manhattan set for the movie “Salt.”

“I’m not one to get star-struck, but it was a bit surreal,” Mr. Calabretta said. “There were thousands of people there, and we were going up and down Park Avenue for this one parade scene. People were playing military officials and past presidents, and everyone was in different uniforms, and we were all trying to come together to shoot this one scene. When I saw Jolie, my first thought was, ‘Well, she’s definitely not ugly.’ ”

The $8 an hour Mr. Calabretta earned as a nonunion extra — more recently, he was on the set of the CW’s “Gossip Girl” — will not cover the $1,750-per-month rent on his Upper East Side apartment, but he hopes the money he saved during three and a half years in finance will last until he finds a similar job.

“I’ve gotten a few paychecks as an extra, but I haven’t even looked at them yet,” Mr. Calabretta said. “My intention is to get back into finance, and in the interim, I’m going to keep doing these fun little side jobs.”

Managers at casting agencies around New York said they were seeing increasing numbers of people like Mr. Calabretta who have little experience in, or even aspirations for, acting, but are filling hours they used to spend at office jobs with gigs as extra, also called background, talent.

At Extra Talent Agency, a Manhattan firm that casts extras for commercials, television shows and documentary films, the actor database swelled to 9,680 in March from 6,850 in December. Fleet Emerson, assistant casting director at Sylvia Fay/Lee Genick and Associates Casting, has seen correspondence from aspiring extras triple over the past several months, something he called “quite a phenomenon.” And Grant Wilfley Casting, also in Manhattan, had open calls for new background talent in February and March that yielded 1,500 and 1,300 people, respectively.

*Location Scout: Old Tucson.

It’s A Shame Because “Deuce Alley” Had Such A Nice Ring To It

And what’s more, it leaves open the issue of where exactly we are supposed to relieve ourselves:

Astoria Walk, an alleyway connecting the neighborhood’s busy commercial strip on 31st Street to a Key Food parking lot, was recently given a $300,000 makeover by city-based Jenel Management. The company cleaned up the site and now rents space to six vendors, who sell sunglasses, flowers and other products at their kiosks, City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. (D−Astoria) said.

The walk is located between an AT&T store and a Subway chain restaurant on 31st Street.

“It’s been an eyesore and a nose-sore for as long as I can remember,” Vallone said of the alleyway. “People used it as a bathroom. It was graffiti-strewn and people dumped garbage there.”

But Jenel Management white-washed the walls of the strip, added a newly paved brick road and provided space for the colorful kiosks which now reside there. The management company is currently seeking more vendors for the site, Vallone said.

Footprints Like A Couple Of Yetis, You’d Think They’d Be Able To Mix In A Compact Fluorescent Or Two

It makes sense that the Mets and Yankees (especially the Yankees!) would have a bigger carbon footprint in their new stadia; no one would expect any less from two teams that are known for sucking up all available resources:

Yankee Stadium and Citi Field combined use enough electricity to power 20,000 homes, twice as much as the old ballparks, Con Ed says.

Citi Field, the smaller of the two, has the higher peak capacity — 11 megawatts, enough to power 11,000 homes. That’s 120 percent more than Shea’s maximum 5-megawatt draw.

The new Yankee Stadium has access to 9 megawatts, enough for 9,000 homes. That’s about twice the power draw of the old Stadium.

Blame the stadiums’ big potential power use on what makes them great — hi-def TV screens, huge scoreboards and extra elevators, escalators and lighting, said Con Ed spokesman Bob McGee.

The Yankees’ new main scoreboard, at nearly 6,000 square feet, is seven times bigger than the lower-tech scoreboard in the old Stadium.

And both new stadiums have plenty more elevators. Citi Field has 11; at Shea there were just four. The new Yankee Stadium has 16 elevators, compared to three in the old park.

. . .

The standard for green ballparks has been set by the Washington Nationals’ stadium, which opened last year and won a silver rating from the US Green Building Council — the first major pro stadium to earn such certification.

Nationals Park uses about 15 percent less power than the old RFK Stadium did, thanks in part to energy-saving lighting that reduced peak power usage from 1,293 kilowatts to just 1,011 — a savings worth about $440,000 over 25 years.

Location Scout: New Yankee Stadium, Citi Field, Nationals Park.

The Secret Plan To Drive Up Housing Prices Again

And while you’re at it, compare and contrast to the effects of eliminating the more media-friendly M8:

Some bus riders would be stranded by bus cuts leaving them up to 2 miles from the nearest mass transit option, according to an MTA study.

Residents in four areas on the city’s border face the longest treks if the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s array of doomsday service cuts go into effect: the far West Side of Manhattan; Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn; Woodlawn, the Bronx, and Oakwood Beach, Staten Island, according to an impact study done in connection with the authority’s planned service cuts.

“It’s not right to leave us stranded,” said house cleaner Linda Girron, who works six days a week and lives at 49th St. and 11th Ave. “The bus is my only way of getting to work. We can’t get anywhere without the bus.”

Since last year, transit officials have warned they’d have to make severe service cuts to fill massive budget gaps if the state doesn’t adopt a bailout.

On the chopping block is weekend service on the crosstown M50 route used by Girron. Its demise would leave some workers and residents west of 11th Ave. a mile from mass transit, according to the study.

Residents in Gerritsen Beach, a corner of Brooklyn near Sheepshead Bay, would fare worse during the wee hours of the morning. Some parts of the neighborhood would be nearly 2 miles from another bus route if the B31 is shut down as planned between 1:30 and 4:30 a.m.

That’s bad news for late-shift workers like Alex Popov, 28, who works at a Times Square restaurant. He rides the B31 between 2 and 3 a.m. on his way home. “I need this bus,” Popov said.

On the city’s northern border, Woodlawn residents may lose the Bx34, which runs along Katonah Ave., the heart of the neighborhood, connecting with the last stop on the No. 4 subway line. Some sections of Woodlawn would be left with “no transit service within a walkable distance” during some overnight hours, the study states.