The Magic Of A Sultry Monday Evening Enjoying Phil Hughes On The Mound Is Of Course Priceless

It’s getting as expensive as sex to go to Yankees games:

Those $250 box seats at Yankee Stadium will seem inexpensive in 2009.

The Yankees will charge $500 to $2,500 for seats near home plate in the first five to eight rows of their new ballpark — yet say they already have commitments for all 122.

The team’s Web site touts the premium areas as offering “an exclusive experience for those with discerning taste who seek the very best that life has to offer.”

Lonn Trost, the Yankees’ chief operating officer, sent a letter to season-ticket holders on March 14 that outlined premium seating in the $1.3 billion ballpark-to-be and asked whether they wanted to upgrade.

Trost said yesterday that more than 3,000 fans — “a remarkable response” — had already said yes.

Or Maybe Congestion Pricing Will Help . . .

The doggy car seat:

The latest over-the-top accessory for your pooch is a doggie seat belt — which can set you back anywhere from $20 for nylon to $200 for luxurious leather.

For smaller “toy” dogs and coddled cats there’s a padded “car seat” outfitted with a harness and kept in place by the car’s seat belt.

Big dogs get a seat-belt harness that crisscrosses their chest and clicks directly into the car’s seat belt.

“Since my kids are all grown, he’s my baby,” Renata Willner said of her 5-year-old coton de Tulear-breed dog named ‘Mousse, short for Pamplemousse, French for grapefruit.

“And I wouldn’t dream of not putting my baby in a car seat,” she said as she carefully placed her dog – decked out in a Burberry collar and leash — into a $150 car seat and harness outside her Battery Park City apartment.

Willner says ‘Mousse, whom she lovingly describes as “neurotic,” loves his carrier harness because “he can see out the car window, and if he’s tired, he can sleep.”

New York On The Moskva

Sour economy indicator — New York lags behind Moscow in filthy rich:

New York City has been eclipsed as the billionaire capital of the world, according to Forbes magazine, which yesterday released its annual ranking of the richest people on earth.

Seventy-four billionaires, with an average net worth of $5.9 billion, now call Moscow home, compared with 71, at an average of $3.3 billion, in New York City, the Forbes list shows.

The richest man in New York City is the industrialist David Koch, worth some $17 billion, according to the new Forbes ranking. He’s followed by the leveraged buyout entrepreneur Carl Icahn with $14 billion and Chanel’s Gerard Wertheimer with $12.9 billion.

Next on the list of richest New Yorkers is the city’s two-term mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who retains a sizable stake in the eponymous financial news firm he founded more than two decades ago. He is worth $11.5 billion, according to the list.

. . .

Moscow’s replacement of New York City as home to the most billionaires has far-reaching economic distinctions. An example: The price of two nights in the Carlton Suite of Moscow’s Ritz Carlton hotel now costs $10,000. Two nights in the Executive Suite at the Four Seasons in New York is a mere $4,300.

Attorney General Cuomo, Tear Down This Velvet Rope!

Spitzer’s successor goes after civil rights violations in nightclub lines (with added Barack Obama irony that only the Post would think to dredge up*):

A Manhattan hotspot that hosted a primary-night party for Barack Obama supporters has been sued by the state Attorney General for discriminating against black patrons.

The AG’s office accused the Tonic East nightclub, at Third Avenue and East 29th Street, of barring blacks based on an unwritten dress code against popular hip-hop clothing, but allowing similarly dressed white patrons to enter.

Tonic East settled the lawsuit with a simultaneous agreement that forces the bar to fork over $35,000, implement training and change its dress code to eliminate references to specific brands.

The state launched an undercover probe at Tonic East after black patrons complained that bouncers stopped them at the door, citing policies excluding clothing by Sean John and Rocawear, Nike Air Force One sneakers, Timberland boots and baggy jeans.

The Kips Bay bar was the scene of a major party for Obama supporters on Feb. 5, with overflow crowds packing the multi-level club that is built to hold 450 people and spilling revelers out into other area bars.

*Because Obama is black . . . get it?

She Stoops To Ponder

Stoop culture, alive and well and un- and underemployed:

Last summer, two young girls appeared on Charles Street between Bleecker and West 4th Streets. They perched themselves on the front steps of the brownstone at No. 90, and they’ve stayed there, nearly every day, chatting and smoking and playing with their dogs from late morning to early evening, even in the bitter cold. Block residents are used to celebrities — Sarah Jessica and Matthew live there, after all — but they’ve been flummoxed by these new ladies of leisure, who’ve inspired a flurry of intra-block e-mails with titles like “The Girls” that report sightings as late as 4:30 a.m. Few Charles Streeters seem to know who they are or why they’re there.

You can learn a lot by asking. Haley, the brunette, is 23 and from Alabama; blonde Rebecca is 22 and from Pennsylvania. (They declined to provide their last names.) They grew up spending vacations together with their best-friend grandmas before moving to New York last year, basically for kicks. Haley, who dropped out of premed in Alabama, just started English-lit classes at Hunter. “I don’t like to write, but I like grammar,” she says. Rebecca basically does nothing, nor does she know what she wants to do. They share an apartment a few blocks west; their parents paid months of rent in advance. But even in the dead of winter, they prefer the stoop to their living room — although they chafe at their status as block icons. “We’re not into the fame thing,” Haley says. “But this is what we do.”