In Case You Were Wondering Why Some Cops Seem So Jacked . . .

After authorities raided a Bay Ridge pharmacy that allegedly sold steroids, it turns out that some NYPD officers were customers:

As many as 30 cops were rounded up last night and ordered to an NYPD medical facility in Queens to take drug tests as part of a steroid investigation that has rocked the department, sources told The Post.

Six officers are under investigation for alleged steroid use after a raid on a Brooklyn pharmacy yielded information indicating they may have received improper prescriptions, police said in an official statement.

The statement said no officers have been arrested and no arrests are anticipated.

But the cops sent for drug tests will be placed on modified duty. They are assigned to precincts in Brooklyn and Staten Island, and one is a high-ranking member of the NYPD, The Post’s sources said.

The investigation stems from a Monday-night raid on Lowen’s Pharmacy in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

The Gowanus Canal Has The Clap

You might be wondering how a body of water can catch a venereal disease. So is everyone:

Scientists have discovered that the long-contaminated Gowanus Canal is not just toxic, it’s also infected with gonorrhea.

The cringe-inducing find was revealed by New York City College of Technology biologist Dr. Niloufar Haque in this month’s Scienceline, an NYU publication.

While developers have envisioned the canal someday turning Brooklyn into a bit of Venice with idyllic gondola rides, Haque’s team found their own emergence of hanky-panky in the Gowanus’ waters.

“One group of students found gonorrhea in a water drop,” the professor told Scienceline.

It’s not the first time the toxic waterway — dubbed the Lavender Lake because of its oily, purplish hue — has come up positive with disease. In the mid-1970s, the channel was found to contain typhus, typhoid and cholera.

Location Scout: Gowanus Canal.

Like Cronkite’s Pronouncements About Tet, Heath Ledger’s Departure Portends Trouble For Second-Tier Celebrity Mascots Across Brooklyn . . .

Because once you’ve lost Heath, mass foreclosures can’t be far off . . . Heath Ledger as leading economic indicator:

It wasn’t supposed to matter to Brooklyn. Heath Ledger, the crown prince of the borough’s celebrity aristocracy, apparently fled his fiefdom in Boerum Hill for Manhattan after splitting up with his girlfriend, the actress Michelle Williams.

“To each his own,” said Jay Wilkinson, 29, an actor who lives in the neighborhood, speaking just blocks from the house on Dean Street where Mr. Ledger had lived since 2005 with Ms. Williams and their daughter, Matilda. He echoed a theme expressed by many on blogs and in the streets after the breakup. We barely notice the stars among us. If we lose one, no big deal.

In that, though, lies a tale of arriviste anxiety. What if Brooklyn’s recent cachet as the locus for what’s next is little more than a thin and fragile crust of chic, hiding the insecurity of people who constantly measure the social currency of their ZIP code by Manhattan standards?

The number of trendy boutiques, bistros and music clubs in Brooklyn may have spiked in the last five years, but its infrastructure of cool still represents only a fraction of that found in Manhattan. Its new identity is moored to a finite number of shops, restaurants, luxury condominiums and, yes, celebrities. If even one leaves, a void is created. Could the borough’s new status vanish as quickly as it ascended?

In recent years, Brooklyn’s pool of second-tier celebrity mascots (John Turturro, Rosie Perez, Norman Mailer, Steve Buscemi) has swollen and taken on a level of movie-star glamour, thanks to recent home buyers like Jennifer Connelly and her husband, Paul Bettany, Adrian Grenier and Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard.

These famous names, functioning as both symbols and selling points for the new Brooklyn, helped drive up property values, provided a focus for gossip in coffeehouses and dog runs, and instilled pride among the tide of newcomers who arrived — sort of by choice — from Manhattan and beyond.

Crotch Grabbing And Sexual Innuendo To Be Replaced By . . . Crotch Grabbing And Sexual Innuendo!

As Lady Macbeth might say, “Unsex me here”:

A production of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” will replace a hip-hop festival next summer in a DUMBO venue controlled by the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy — and organizers of the rap show believe that race played a role.

The Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival — which brought thousands of people and big-name rappers to the park-and-condo waterfront development site in 2006 and 2007 — had already scheduled its 2008 production for the weekend of June 22.

But organizers were shocked last month to discover that the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy had given those days to St. Ann’s Warehouse to stage a Polish rendition of that Scottish play.

Festival organizers believe the move was racially motivated.

“Hip hop brings a lot more brown people to this neighborhood, and people who live here are not comfortable with it,” said Wes Jackson, whose Room Service Production founded the festival in 2005.

“[People have told me that residents say], ‘The festival should be in Commodore Barry Park between the projects and the BQE, not next to my $2.5-million condo.'”

Whether racially motivated or not, the rejection of the hip-hop festival sounds very much like the scenario long imagined by critics of Brooklyn Bridge Park, where condo and commercial development will finance greenspace along a 1.3-mile stretch from DUMBO to the foot of Atlantic Avenue. Opponents believe that public events will not be public at all, but subject to the whims of the wealthy condo-dwellers whose maintenance fees will pay for the park’s upkeep.

This Is When Things Start To Get Shakespearean

Fame, power and inevitable recriminations:

This should be a moment to savor for the venerable Latin food vendors of the Red Hook soccer fields in Brooklyn.

With help from well-placed allies and the passionate advocacy of their media-wise organizer, the vendors — lately a cause célèbre for pro-immigrant groups, free-market cheerleaders and gastrobloggers alike — recently won an extension of their operating season and an inside track on permanent status for the open-air multinational food court they have run on a temporary basis since the 1970s.

But just as they get ready for a difficult winter-long effort to comply with the city health code while preparing a formal bid for the concession rights, the vendors find themselves a family deeply divided over questions of leadership, money and less tangible issues.

In the last three weeks, the group’s organizer and public face, Cesar Fuentes, resigned as its day-to-day operator, threatened to sue vendors who spoke against him, threatened to quit representing them in city negotiations, then agreed to return, after all the vendors signed a petition on Wednesday avowing their “total support” and asking him to stay.

. . .

. . . Ricardo Ramirez, who helps run the largest stand, said that vendors felt that Mr. Fuentes acted as if he was not accountable.

“We want to know where the money goes,” Mr. Ramirez said last week. “How much he pays for insurance, how much he pays the workers who clean up. But when we talk to Cesar and ask him these things, he gets mad.”

Several vendors said they blamed Mr. Fuentes’s publicity efforts for attracting the attention of the city’s regulators, something they found particularly annoying because the resultant influx of non-Hispanic customers has been offset by a drop in Latino customers. “Business is the same,” Ms. Carrillo said. “But now there’s more problems.”

Mr. Fuentes said that he had provided the vendors with an accounting, and that the salary he pays himself — $20 per vendor per day, a total of $560 per weekend from the 14 vendors — was justified by his work.

Early this month, the vendors met without Mr. Fuentes. At the meeting, Esperanza Ochoa, a supporter of Mr. Fuentes who runs a Guatemalan stand and attended the meeting, said, some vendors spoke of keeping Mr. Fuentes around long enough to help them win the parks concession, then deposing him.

It was that meeting, Mr. Fuentes said, that prompted his resignation.

Location Scout: Red Hook Ballfields.