For $17,000, I Expect To Be Able To Take That Seat Home With Me (Yes, That’s A Threat)

Even as the economy cools, there will always be a market for irrational sentimentalism:

Only New York fans with some luck and deep pockets will have a shot of scoring a ticket to the last regular season games ever at Yankee and Shea stadiums this fall.

Scalpers online are asking for nearly $6,000 for the Mets final Shea game on Sept. 28, while tickets have been seen as high as a whopping $17,000 for the Yanks Sept. 21 match-up against the Orioles. And if you want to see the first All-Star game this summer at Yankee Stadium since 1977, it’ll take $25,000 to snag one ticket on the field championship level.

“Since the game went on sale and sold out (on Feb. 20) the demand is insane,” said Moe Schlachter, who’s asking for at least $3,800 for his pair of championship box seats. He said that since posting his Yankees tickets on Craigslist last week, he has already gotten 20 to 30 responses.

The 22-year-old student guessed that if the Yankees don’t make the playoffs — ensuring that the Sept. 21 game would indeed be the last at the House that Ruth Built — the prices to resell tickets could quadruple.

Face-value field championship box seats at the stadium range from $240 to $380.

While the Yankees finale sold out in 11 minutes, Mets fans can still swipe a ticket for the Sept. 28 home game against the Marlins through special packages. The most expensive seat being offered for either game was from a bold stubhub.com hawker asking $16,791 each for his Tier Box MVP seats, which normally go for about $70. Since last year, ticket scalping in New York has been legal.

Eliminate One Problem, Gain Another: Cut-Rate Oysters From Brooklyn

Things that make me never ever want to eat oysters again include . . . this, for example:

Hendrix Creek, flowing for just over a mile in Brooklyn through East New York, passes under the Belt Parkway and between two dormant landfills before it empties into Jamaica Bay. The creek, once fed by a natural stream, now starts at the output pipe of a wastewater treatment plant.

It is the perfect kind of place, said John K. McLaughlin, an ecologist for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, for an experimental project that would establish oyster beds, not for harvest, but as living water filters.

. . .

Even if the initial change in water quality is not significant, he said, the creation of a self-sustaining habitat in Jamaica Bay — where oysters and other species can survive and spread — would be an achievement. That process, Mr. McLaughlin said, would be the first step to restoring something close to the bay’s original ecosystem.

But if the Hendrix Creek oysters thrive, the city may well face another challenge: keeping away adventuresome gourmands who might be tempted to help themselves to the delicacies.

“There’s a worry that if you have oysters that sell for a dollar apiece, people will steal them and sell them,” [Gaia Institute executive director Paul] Mankiewicz said. “We want them for habitat, not edibility.”

You Can Lead A Pushcart To Customers . . .

The market for fruit is cutthroat and possibly dangerous, resembling something you might see on The Wire:

Perhaps more than any other civic rivals, street vendors and brick-and-mortar stores seem to play a zero-sum game. The stores are wary of the vendors, whom they see as nimble nuisances undercutting their prices, unfettered by regulation or rent. The vendors see the stores as competition-hating Goliaths.

The city stepped briskly into the fray in December, when it proposed licensing a fleet of fruit and vegetable carts to operate in poor neighborhoods where people were eating little fresh produce.

Reaction was swift and noisy.

Richard Lipsky, a lobbyist for small retailers, said the proposal, known as the Green Carts bill, would “cannibalize existing business.”

. . .

Kangchul Park, director of the Korean Produce Association, acknowledged that few Korean grocers were in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, two areas that would be affected by the legislation. But he predicted that licensed vendors would stray into forbidden areas with a higher demand for fruit. “Eventually,” Mr. Park said, “they’ll find out the reason why there are no grocery stores where they are. And sooner or later, they’ll be tempted to move to where there are other grocery stores.”

Cab Drivers Know What’s Best For Business

It’s going to take a lot more Operation Secret Riders to defeat the culture cab drivers have created:

More New Yorkers have come forward with stories of cabbies-gone-crazy when they tried to pay their fare with a credit card.

Sarah Snedeker, 24, says a driver locked her in a cab in Manhattan and spit in her face.

When his maniac driver refused to use plastic, Michael Blumenthal, 28, says he ended up running away from him through a Queens alleyway.

. . .

Snedeker and Blumenthal said they asked the drivers if they could pay with a credit card before hopping into the cab.

Snedeker wound up in a 5-minute argument when her driver suddenly said the credit card machine was broken as they sat outside her upper West Side apartment on Jan. 24. The driver locked the doors when she went to get out, trapping her “for what seemed like forever,” she said.

“He . . . put his face into the plexiglass separation, the section that is left open, and screamed ‘You f—— b—-!’ and spit at me, which I could feel spray all over my face,” she said. “I screamed the loudest I have ever screamed in my life: ‘Let me out of this cab!'”

Snedeker said she yanked on the door handle repeatedly as the cab idled on W. 89th St.

“Then, out of nowhere a man banged on the cab driver’s window and forced him to let me out,” she said. “It was horrifying.”

. . .

[Blumenthal’s] ride turned hellish about three blocks from his Queens home when the cabbie also switched his story, saying the credit card machine was broken.

After the cabbie threatened to drive Blumenthal back to Manhattan, the account executive said he attempted to get out of the car, opening the door at two red lights. Each time, the cabbie hit the gas. He finally got out of the cab at a red light at Crescent St. and 41st Ave. in Long Island City on Jan. 17.

“He then jumps out to come after me and I start to run,” Blumenthal said. “He ran back to his cab and threw it in reverse. I run into an alley and he stops to go in after me with the car.”

Blumenthal said the cabbie couldn’t catch him because the taxi got stuck behind a street-cleaning truck.

The City Of Neuroses

The Times’ recent sushi scare story pays dividends all around:

Seafood restaurants around town have felt the fallout since the Times reported that tuna from even Manhattan’s high-end sushi purveyors contains dangerous levels of mercury. (“All of a sudden, our business has fallen down 20 to 30 percent,” says Japonica owner Shingo Yonezawa. “It’s a nightmare. There’s a lot you can eat at sushi restaurants other than tuna.”) But one business is booming: mercury detox. “Not only did we get a rush of new patients, but our current patients asked to be rechecked,” says Dr. Jeffrey Morrison, who offers the treatment. Patients sit in armchairs while the chemical DMPS drips from an IV into their bloodstream to help draw out mercury. “Not all patients need IV,” Morrison says. “Some people can do oral chelation. Saunas work, too, but you have to take about five of them a week.”

Then again, you could just read the Jack Shafer rebuttal, stroll on down to Nobu and forget about it . . .