They Can’t Shui-at To Shui In On The Two New Stadia

In case you were wondering how Citi Field and the new Yankee Stadium stack up:

A study of the two new baseball stadiums by feng shui expert Judith Wendell found the Yankees’ future home has good luck while the Mets’ Citi Field will be plagued by “a lot of disturbed energy.” Wendell visited the two sites, which are slated to open in 2009, exclusively for The Post.

There is one bright spot for Met followers: Citi Field’s color scheme of dark blue exposed steel with green seats and red brick are what Wendell calls a “power combination.” They are certainly “much better” than the team colors of blue and orange, which she deems “antagonistic.”

The Yanks broke ground on Babe Ruth’s birthday, Aug. 16, and are repeating many elements of the old stadium, including the angles for home plate and the positions of the dugouts. Cathedral arches and the entire façade will also recapture the old Yankee Stadium incarnations.

“In feng shui terms, they are taking the ‘predecessor chi’ and bringing it with them and graphing it on to the new stadium, which is very good for luck,” said Wendell . . .

Location Scout: Citi Field, New Yankee Stadium.

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.

Germ Warfare On Mosquitoes . . .

. . . sounds creepy when you put it that way:

In an ongoing campaign to prevent a possible outbreak of West Nile virus, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) has announced yet another round of helicopter missions to eliminate mosquito larvae.

According to DOHMH, the helicopters will be dropping “natural bacterial granules” on non-residential marshlands in Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx, on Thursday, August 16, Friday, August 17 and Monday, August 20, from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. each day. In case of rain, the campaign will continue the following day.

DOHMH says the “larvicide” pellets are meant to kill the mosquito larvae, which live near the surface of pools of stagnant water, before they can emerge as adult insects.

. . .

The agents being used by DOHMH are VectoBac CG and/or VectoLex CG, which contain a bacteria, bacillus thuringiensis israelensis.

If You’ve Had A Dose Of A Freaky Ghost . . .

If only Discovery were doing reality programming in 1984, there’d be such a tie-in opportunity:

There might be an appliance theme to the haunting of the Merchant’s House, a nineteenth-century town house in the East Village that was owned by a single family until 1933, when it was turned into a museum. In the nineteen-seventies, someone decided to fit the kitchen with a cast-iron stove. One day, the story goes, a museum worker witnessed the stove shaking violently, as if someone were pushing it from behind. In the early nineties, the museum’s curator installed a computer. The machine froze every time she typed “Tredwell” — the last name of the house’s original owner. “Well, not every time, but three out of five,” Pi Gardiner, the museum’s current executive director, explained one night recently. “Our theory was that the spirits were, like, ‘What is all this newfangled technology?’ ”

. . .

Seabury Tredwell, the patriarch of the presumed ghost family, bought the house for his wife and their seven children in 1835. When he died, his kids stuck around — most notably Gertrude, the youngest, who stayed until her death, at the age of ninety-three. [Dan] Sturges, a veteran of more than fifty missions with Paranormal Investigation of NYC, is searching for their spirits pro bono. (He did the same for the Belasco Theatre and for the restaurant One If by Land, Two If by Sea. He supplements his income with acting gigs; see the 2002 Hungry Man “XXL” commercial.)

Sturges unpacked his equipment: a digital-video recorder, two electromagnetic-field meters, a thermocouple — like an iPod, with a metal coil to tell temperature (you look for cold spots) — a digital camera, and a tape recorder. “My dad was a fisherman,” he said. “I tell people I go out fishing. You don’t always catch something. Plenty of times, you get skunked.”

. . .

Using the tape recorder, he conducted an Electronic Voice Phenomena test. “Is there anybody in the kitchen tonight?” he asked. (“Ideally, we would hear, ‘Yes! It’s Gertrude!'” he explained.) No reply. In the family room, he inspected two mannequins — one bald, both in yellowed nineteenth-century dresses. He held up the recorder again: “If there’s anybody here in this room, can you make a noise? . . . Can you shake the chandelier? A knock on the wall or the ceiling would be great.” There was a sort of shuffle outside, on East Fourth Street, but Sturges dismissed it.

Then He Said Unto Them, Therefore Every Scribe Which Is Instructed Unto The Kingdom Of Heaven Is Like Unto A Man That Is An Householder, Which Bringeth Forth Out Of His Treasure Things New And Old

Any good newsman will tell you some stuff you just can’t make up:

A walk last week through the denuded ex-headquarters of the Times, on West Forty-third Street, was kind of spooky for a citizen already in an apocalyptic frame of mind. The paper’s empty offices, mid-gutting, suggested the twin desolations of war and obsolescence. But in the eyes of the “architecturologist” Kevin Browne, who searches modern ruins for loot, these wastes were full of possibility. Browne had come to the Times Building from another scavenge job (the old Queens County Courthouse — spectacular terra cotta) to look in on some of the spoils he’d been coveting since the Times decamped to Eighth Avenue, last month.

Browne, fifty, is the president of a salvage operation called Olde Good Things, which has showrooms in Chelsea, Chicago, Los Angeles, Florida, and Scranton, Pennsylvania. Olde Good Things is owned by the Church of Bible Understanding, a sect founded by a former vacuum-cleaner salesman. For a couple of decades, the church ran a cut-rate carpet-cleaning business that employed teen-age runaways. About a dozen years ago, Browne steered the church into the junk game. “It was totally Jesus leading us,” he explained. In the Lord’s name, he has salvaged artifacts from demolitions and renovation jobs all over town: the Plaza, Alice Tully Hall, the Morgan Library. The Times had already consigned most of its valuable stuff to be sold at auction. Now Browne had a shot at whatever leftovers he could find.

In the front lobby, Browne, a man with a Tommy Chong beard and a loping stride, put on a hard hat and led the way up some stairs to a vast newsroom. “You see anything you like, you can have it,” he said. There wasn’t much to like, just drifts of paper and trash: computer disks, laser printouts of war photographs, a sci-fi paperback (“Earth: Final Conflict — The Arrival”), a lei. Browne spoke into a walkie-talkie. “Junior, those glass doors to the newsroom that said ‘New York Times’ — they gone?” Junior assured him that they were not. “If it says ‘New York Times’ on it, it has value,” Browne said.

. . .

Down at the loading docks, Browne poked around in the back of his van. It was crammed with booty: a pair of oxidized bronze sconces, some antique iron nail pullers, a laser printer. He pulled out a giant black-and-white photograph, printed on poster board, of a Times reporter, in shirt and tie, sitting in front of a typewriter — a real Mohican. Browne had no idea who it was, but he was determined to find out.