The Legacy Of Robert Moses Is That To This Day He Remains Useful If Only To Blame Stuff On

I think they mean “50-foot” structure, not “500-foot” because that would be, like, huge, but point taken:

Once your eyes adjust to the scale of the New York City Panorama, it’s easy to spot Riverdale’s most familiar sights in all their miniature glory. The Whitehall Building, Van Cortlandt Mansion, and the 242nd Street Station rise up from a shrunken Bronx in the form of petite replicas.

But look toward Bell Tower Park in search of Riverdale’s best-known landmark and you’ll find nothing but a small, lonely white patch. The traffic circle is there, as are the trees and homes and highway that surround it. Yet the Bell Tower itself, a 500-foot structure cherished by residents, sightseers and historians alike, doesn’t exist in this alternate version of the city.

Urban planning czar Robert Moses and model-builder Raymond Lester may have taken painstaking care in creating the world’s largest urban panorama for the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens (now housed at the Queens Museum of Art), but when it came to Riverdale’s 79-year-old tower and World War I veteran’s memorial, also known as The Monument, the pair apparently didn’t sweat the details.

There are about 895,000 individual structures replicated in the panorama, 25,000 of which are New York landmarks like skyscrapers, museums and major churches. They are custom built with striking detail.

Countless smaller structures are represented with generic blocks of wood and plastic. But The Monument didn’t even get that. Does the museum plan to place a tiny tower on the barren spot?

“I’m not sure what went into the decision making in 1964, but we’d love to work with the folks in Riverdale to see if we can get it put on there,” said the museum’s director for external relations, David Strauss, adding that even though he’s from Queens, he knows exactly where the real Bell Tower is in Riverdale. “The fact that I know the exact spot speaks to the idea that maybe it should be on there.”

Location Scout: Bell Tower Park, The Panorama of the City of New York.

If Democracy Is Like The Environment, Bloomberg Just Threw A Plastic Six-Pack Ring Into The East River

If you’re going to control the schools, go whole-hog — control them! But don’t waste everyone’s time with neutered advisory boards that, little by little, chip away at democracy by poisoning minds with cynicism:

In designing the mayoral takeover, lawmakers viewed the panel as critical to maintaining a “balance of authority,” and promised it would have a “meaningful role” on citywide education policy and approve major contracts, according to the authorizing language that accompanied the bill.

But Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg — who controls 8 of the panel’s 13 seats — made plain during the negotiations that he preferred no panel at all, and over the past seven years, he and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, who doubles as the panel’s chairman, have eased it into irrelevance.

The volunteer panelists — an investment banker, a lingerie store owner and an expert on electromagnetics among them — rarely engage in discussions with those who rise to address them. They do not debate the educational issues of the day, but spend most sessions applauding packaged presentations by staff. Some have barely uttered a public word during their tenures.

2009: The Year The City Broke

Writers and historians will use this anecdote in the introductions of the many books yet to be written detailing the Fall of New York City:

After spending $2.3 billion on new stadiums packed with suites, restaurants and the latest technology, the Mets and the Yankees expected fans to embrace their new homes and pay top dollar for the privilege. Almost every team that has built a new stadium in the recent past has seen an immediate surge in attendance.

Instead, the Mets and the Yankees face a public relations nightmare and possibly millions of dollars in lost revenue after failing to sell about 5,000 tickets — including some of the priciest seats — to each of their first few games after last week’s openers.

The empty seats are a fresh sign that the teams might have miscalculated how much fans and corporations were willing to spend, particularly during a deep recession. Whatever the reason, the teams are scrambling to comb over their $295- to $2,625-a-seat bald spots.

. . .

But the slow start in New York is striking considering how much the teams here spent to build and promote their parks. Like airlines that break even on economy tickets and rely on first-class travelers to turn a profit, the teams need to sell their most exclusive seats to help repay the hundreds of millions of dollars of tax-free bonds they issued to finance their new parks.

The unfilled seats in New York are even more glaring compared with how robust sales have been for previous stadium openings. The Baltimore Orioles sold out 67 of their 80 home dates in 1992, when Camden Yards opened. The Cleveland Indians sold out 36 games in the strike-shortened season in 1994, and were filled to capacity 455 consecutive games from 1995 to 2001.

After moving to their new park in 2001, the Houston Astros drew 3.1 million fans, 300,000 more than they ever attracted at the far larger Astrodome. The Pittsburgh Pirates, a perennial second-division team, sold 2.4 million tickets in 2001 when PNC Park opened, 700,000 more than they ever sold at Three Rivers Stadium.

Location Scout: New Yankee Stadium, Citi Field.

Can’t You Just Extort Bon Jovi Again? Doesn’t Paul Simon Want To Make Another Live Album?

Of all the stupid things you can do when you volunteer, picking up trash at the park seems like one of the stupidest:

With record crowds anticipated this summer as many New Yorkers stay home to save money, the Central Park Conservancy had to devise an emergency plan to ensure the grass stays green and clean.

For the first time, park volunteers — who traditionally help with less menial tasks — will be given trash grabbers and garbage bags, conservancy President Doug Blonsky said yesterday.

As a result of budget cuts, the conservancy — which manages the park for the city — has already laid off some employees and cannot afford to hire the extra 50 seasonal workers normally depended on to pick up the trash, he said.

. . .

“The bottom line is we’re asking New Yorkers to pitch in and pick up the litter for us,” Blonsky told The Post. “In the past, our volunteers have focused on horticulture and planning, but now we need help with the litter.”

At several locations throughout the park, volunteers can sign up to help with the upkeep.

“You’ll get a bag and a grabber, and a little vest to wear,” Blonsky said.

Let Me Strap You Into The Restaulounge So We Can Waterboard You

But in the end, threatening to torture your landlord can only get you so far:

Manhattan prosecutors described yesterday how two Greenwich Village restaurateurs allegedly set the stage for extortion this past January — kidnapping their landlord’s agent, taking him to a nearby apartment, and showing him some hardware decidedly not meant for a home-improvement project, they said.

The unidentified victim took one look at the tarp and the wicker chair on it — alongside a table full of sinister-seeming tools — and agreed to forgive $250,000 in back rent, prosecutors said.

“They showed him a chair, placed on top of a tarp with a table holding pliers, a hammer, a screwdriver, and a candle,” said prosecutor James Meadows. “A burning candle.”

It hadn’t helped that one of the suspects, Vasileios Giamagas, 35, bragged he was a former mercenary and an accomplished killer who’d slain his own brother.

“He told the managing agent that he was in the Chechen army and had blown up a building with more than 80 people in it,” said Eric Seidel, chief of the DA’s rackets bureau.

Giamagas, an illegal alien from Greece, and co-defendant Ekkehart Schwartz, a 70-year-old German architect here on a green card, had fallen behind on their rent at their never-opened bar and nightclub, Restaulounge-Bar De’Vill, at 68 W. 3rd St.