Sir, Ma’am, Please Allow Me My 20-Inch Bubble . . .

The MTA reveals* what you already knew — rush hour subway trains are packed beyond capacity. But you may not have known what constitutes “capacity”:

Crowding is so bad that on the 4, 5, 6 and L lines, trains during the morning rush exceed the transit agency’s loading guidelines, which posit that every rider should have at least a three-square-foot space to stand in (that translates to a square patch of car floor 20 inches on each side).

*Revealing it why? Maybe as a favor to their allies in Albany who seem to be against the city’s end-run congestion-pricing fundraising ideas? It’s not that far fetched:

[New York City Transit president Howard H.] Roberts said the data had particular significance in light of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s proposal for a congestion pricing system that would charge most drivers who enter Manhattan below 86th Street — with the intent of moving people out of their cars and onto mass transit.

Mr. Roberts said that on many subway lines, especially the heavily used numbered lines, there is little or no room to accommodate more riders.

“It’s bad news,” Mr. Roberts said. “There’s no room at the inn.”

Straight Out Of Venice Or Florence . . . Or The Bellagio

Whatever its color, some of the neighbors seem a little put off by it:

What color really is Julian Schnabel’s new building at 360 W. 11th St.?

What it’s definitely not is hot pink, according to a Schnabel associate who is working closely with the renowned artist and filmmaker on the new 17-story tower between Washington and West Sts.

Brian Kelly said Andrew Berman, director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, was way off base in calling the tower “hot pink” in The Villager last week. And Kelly stressed that Schnabel certainly did not pick the shade to get back at neighbors for opposing the tower, as Berman suggested, but because he liked it.

. . .

Kelly invited The Villager up to the site on Monday afternoon to take a closer look at the building. A TV crew from Channel 2 News had just finished doing a story on the building’s color. The TV reporter had gotten Schnabel on the line from Europe, where he is currently traveling. According to a source, Schnabel called the building’s color “Pompeii red” — and was “quite upset” during the brief interview.

. . .

At first, Kelly dubbed the building’s color “dusty rose” — then later said Schnabel is describing it as “Venetian red.”

“It’s straight out of Cuba, or Venice, or Florence,” Kelly said of the building’s design and color. “Venice mostly — it’s Venetian. There’s buildings like this in Naples, in Palermo, Sicily. If you go to Cuba, you see buildings like this. It’s more of a dusty rose color.”

The color will get deeper in the rain, and pollution will darken it over time, he added.

In addition, because the stucco didn’t cure properly, some of the white came through, Kelly noted. But he said Schnabel loved this fortuitous effect, which gave the paint a faded look — and ordered it not to be touched up.

. . .

Kelly challenged a reporter to poll passersby on their feelings on the building.

“We hate it!” spat a tall, silver-haired man as he purposefully strode down 11th St. carrying a gym bag. “We spent $5,000 to keep the son of a bitch from doing it.”

Asked what color he thought it was, he retorted, “Blood red! — It’s the final color!”

. . .

Meanwhile, for his part, Berman, G.V.S.H.P.’s director, remains unapologetic for calling the building hot pink.

“I heard they were calling it ‘Pompeii red,'” he said. “It’s splitting hairs. The color is just the icing on the cake, unfortunately. I would challenge Schnabel to show me a 17-story enormous box of a building like that anywhere in Florence or Naples. Frankly, I don’t care if it’s pink, green or blue — it’s still totally inappropriate.”

The Best Example Of A Truly Ordinary Building

As the city gets more and more comfortable with historic preservation, it’s time to start thinking about preserving the best examples of the most ordinary architecture:

The six-story brick apartment houses of Pelham Parkway in the Bronx have little in common with the cast-iron emblems of SoHo, the opulent town houses of Gramercy Park or the palatial apartment buildings of Central Park West.

Yet a group of graduate students in historic preservation from Columbia University has proposed designating roughly 14 blocks of the seemingly unremarkable buildings as a historic district.

“What gets paid attention to in 20th-century housing in New York City is often atypical,” said Patrick Ciccone, one of the six students, in explaining the wisdom of designating the Pelham Parkway structures, which were built in the 1920s and 1930s. “These fairly standard buildings are important as examples of a type.”

On Tuesday, walking through the proposed historic district, which would lie generally south of the Pelham Parkway and east of Bronx Park East, Mr. Ciccone pointed to Alhambra Gardens, a fanciful 1928 building with Moorish elements set around a courtyard, and Tudor Arms, also constructed in 1928, with plaster lobby walls made to resemble travertine marble.

Other buildings had Spanish tile, crenellated rooflines and additional elements that, Mr. Ciccone noted, made them feel “not mass-produced to the degree that they were.”

. . .

Andrew Dolkart, the professor of historic preservation who oversaw the students’ work, thought they had made a compelling case for the neighborhood to become the city’s first historic district of six-story apartment houses.

“There’s so much interest in the preservation of the 19th-century row house, yet we have thousands of six-story apartment houses that very little has been written about,” he said. “It was really a civilized way to create housing for people who weren’t enormously wealthy.”

Thirty Seconds Over Broadway Junction

These people are going to get really, really good at gauging commercial breaks:

In three years, the easiest job in New York will be L train operator — whose only job will be pushing a button every 30 seconds to prove he’s still breathing.

The trains will be so automated, they’ll be able to start, stop, speed up and slow down without any human help.

The operator will take over only in an emergency — such as a passenger falling off a platform, or if the automatic system fails.

Normally, the operator’s only duty will be pushing the button to prove to the system he’s awake and capable of springing into action.

If he or she doesn’t push the button, the train will come to a stop.

And then there’s the concept of the “dead man’s switch”:

It’s the updated version of the current “dead man’s switch” — which is part of the train operator’s controls.

Unless the operator keeps downward pressure on it, the brakes engage immediately.

. . .

Train operators say the dead man’s switch is most often activated when operators fall asleep at the controls.

Often, when that happens, “they report that there was no cause for the brakes to be [activated], and that maybe someone pulled the brake,” one veteran train operator said.

“Sometimes, it is released by accident. If you hold it down hard and then let it up a couple of inches, it will go off.”

A Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsel Of Architecture!

We have looked into the eyes of the enemy and . . . found him refreshingly non-offensive, completely unlike the profination we expected:

And so it is now that Toll Brothers is making its presence known in at least three of the five boroughs, Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan. Until recently their name had not often been mentioned among the usual ranks of New York City developers. But outside of the city, where their presence approaches ubiquity, they are best known for creating luxury one-family residences.

A Google search of this firm, whose 2005 revenue was nearly $5.5 billion, turns up what amounts to a high-tech, digitized groan. Type in McMansion and chances are you’re only a few keystrokes away from a reference to Toll Brothers. They are to houses what Martha Stewart is to interiors — and you know what she’s like! Just in case you don’t: She endeavors to bring a whiff of spurious style, a soupçon of upwardly aesthetic aspiration, to the newly moneyed middle classes who raid her various ventures to fill their newly minted McMansions. Toll Brothers has been similarly assailed for cheapening the fabric of the hinterlands with the debased simulacra of true taste.

. . .

As such, it would be pleasant to dismiss [Toll Brothers’ One Ten Third] as worthless and unimaginative, but that, I fear, is not the case. True, a high-rise does not look especially apposite amid the generally lower building-stock. But Third Avenue doesn’t look especially good along most points of its career, so this new addition cannot be seen as a major profanation.

(Thanks, Brian.)