So Does That Make Him Dennis Ross? Or Yasser Arafat?

Every so often it’s good to be reminded how self-obsessed people in Manhattan are. For example, Borough President Scott Stringer drawing a comparison between NYU’s occupation of Greenwich Village and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank:

Eager to cool its often rancorous relations with its neighbors in Greenwich Village — and to pave the way for its next 25 years of expansion — New York University has agreed to try to push some of its expansion farther from its central core, to consult the community when it designs new space and to develop policies to relocate tenants when they must be moved because of university construction.

The agreements are part of an unusual accord that the university has hammered out over the past year with many of its fiercest critics, including public officials and community leaders. The planning principles, which are aimed at making the university’s growth smoother and less disruptive, are to be unveiled on Wednesday by university officials and other members of a task force that drew them up.

“The county and N.Y.U. have been in turmoil for well over 20 years,” said Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president who led the task force that shaped the accord. “This is the first joint announcement ever. Like the Israeli peace plan, I can’t guarantee that there will be peace. But this is definitely N.Y.U. changing direction.”

Economic Woes Filter Down To The Professional-Managerial Class (Or At Least The Poor Schlubs Who Are Assigned To CDOs)

And so it begins:

In the days leading up to Thursday, Jan. 10, the offices of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft were wracked with anxiety. Something was about to go down at the white-shoe law firm with a knack for attracting both celebrities and bedbugs. But nobody knew what.

The availability of conference rooms at Cadwalader is visible on the firm’s intranet, and observant associates noticed that Mitch Walsh, Cadwalader’s executive director, had reserved an entire floor of conference rooms on that Thursday. Patti Ellis, the firm’s head of Associate Development and Recruitment, had reserved another half-dozen conference rooms for the day.

Some speculated that associates were going to be called up to conference rooms and notified individually of their year-end bonuses. Others wondered if a merger was afoot. But the biggest fear was that Cadwalader was about to announce layoffs, and the conference rooms would be used to process the victims. It was a widespread theory, and turned out to be correct. Still, not everyone was prepared.

“I thought I was being called in for my year-end review,” one unlucky associate said. “I totally wasn’t expecting it.”

The associate, who asked to remain unnamed, was among 35 lawyers Cadwalader laid off that morning — the firm called them “targeted personnel reductions” — in its U.S. offices. The laid-off lawyers were in the capital markets and global finance departments, two areas of the practice hit especially hard by the credit crunch.

Transaction Fees On Parental Care . . . Interesting Concept (Just Kidding, Ma!)

I don’t recall reading certain details in the New York Magazine pushback piece on Anthony Marshall. Like, for example, this:

Brooke Astor’s only son and one of her former lawyers have been indicted on criminal charges stemming from the stewardship of her financial affairs and the handling of her will, according to people who were briefed on the situation.

Her son, Anthony D. Marshall, 83, and the lawyer, Francis X. Morrissey Jr., have been told to surrender to authorities today, those who were briefed said.

A Manhattan grand jury has been hearing evidence from witnesses since mid-September, following an investigation by the district attorney’s office into, among other issues, the management of Mrs. Astor’s fortune by Mr. Marshall as well as Mr. Morrissey’s role in the signing of a third amendment to her 2002 will.

The exact charges against the two men, who have been partners in a theater production company, were not known.

Prosecutors were believed to be investigating millions of dollars in cash, property and stocks that Mr. Marshall obtained over the years in his role as steward of his mother’s finances.

That included the sale of one of Mrs. Astor’s favorite paintings, “Flags, Fifth Avenue,” also known as “Up the Avenue from Thirty-Fourth Street, May 1917,” by Childe Hassam, for $10 million.

Mr. Marshall collected a $2 million fee from his mother for handling the transaction.

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.

Solution: Congestion Pricing On Hipsters Moving In To Previously Overlooked Middle-Income Neighborhoods

The best way to make the case against cars in the five boroughs is to pin the problem on the hipster — because everybody likes to snicker at the hipsters:

The cars came by twos and twos, ones and threes, swimming into the parking lot of the Red Hook Fairway like salmon returning to their childhood stream.

It was shortly after four on a summer Wednesday — not even rush hour — but the six lanes of asphalt lot were already two-thirds full. They were jammed with cars of every shape and origin — with boxy Acuras and slope-backed Subarus, snub-nosed Jeeps and bug-shaped Jettas, braggy Mercedes, rah-rah Fords, and a strange BMW-minivan chimera the color of a fresh picket fence. In the distance, the Manhattan skyline reared up flat and two-dimensional, signifying City. But here, as car alarms twittered and shopping carts squeaked, as shoppers kowtowed to the shrine of their trunks, the vibe was pure car-country nirvana.

“I didn’t realize how much I missed the car until I had it here,” said Lauren Robinson, a 25-year-old dietician with pixie-cut brown hair, a fetching dimple, and a bearded beau who was dutifully loading groceries into her Honda CR-V. The Honda was a relic of her youth in upstate New York, but she had recently brought it to the city after moving from car-hostile Manhattan to auto-friendly Brooklyn. She didn’t really need the vehicle, and, theoretically, she could have grabbed a bus to Fairway. But, as she explained, “It’s just so easy to jump in and drive somewhere.”

“I don’t think you need a car,” she said, “but I think it’s definitely a plus. And it definitely makes me feel more” — she paused to search for the word — “well, not like such a city person.”

Ms. Robinson is hardly alone in her secret suburban car lust these days. In fact, for all the talk of the evils of automobiles, she is in decidedly turbo-charged company. From Greenpoint to Red Hook, Inwood to Astoria — across all of the city’s young, lifestyle neighborhoods, really — New Yorkers of a certain breed and background have taken to toting their four-wheeled friends down to the city, dragging them through the streets like well-worn baby blankets. Lured by the musk of vinyl and gasoline, they have lined the lanes of Fairway with out-of-state license plates. They have given their cars names like Ruby, Monty and … Digger. (“I call it my baby,” said Digger’s driver, Michelle Barlak.) And though few would dare admit it, they have made sections of the city seem so, well, L.A.

“Oh, I hope New York’s not becoming L.A.-ified, because I moved to New York to get away from L.A.,” gasped Laura Allen, 24, a giggly SoCal native, right before she hopped into her boyfriend’s white Jeep Cherokee and turned its muscular tires onto the smoothness of Williamsburg’s North First Street.

. . .

But there is something strange — or particularly strange — about the car culture that has taken root in certain swaths of the city in recent years, sprouting up alongside the former kids of suburbia as they have continued their march across Boerum Hill, the South Slope, Williamsburg, Astoria. As many of these drivers will admit, they wouldn’t keep a car if they lived in the parking-space tundra of Manhattan. But with their move to the boroughs — to the land of “far-flung” specialty stores, parking-space-lined streets, and the accelerated domesticity of brownstone life — they have realized that they can resurrect the customs of their pre-urban past.

Never mind the weird, globally warmed weather patterns or the congestion-clogged streets. And forget the fact that many of these drivers probably came here to escape the cul-de-sac culture of their youth. For reasons both deep and ineffable, these young transplants just can’t help bringing suburbia with them.

“The day we leased the car and got the keys was like my 16th birthday all over again,” Melissa Walker, a 30-year-old writer, Park Sloper and leaser of a silver Saab 9-3 sport wagon told The Observer in an e-mail message. “I felt a great sense of freedom, like I could go to a beach other than the A-train Rockaways, like I could hit a Rhinebeck B&B at a moment’s notice, like I could go to Fairway and load my groceries into a trunk just like a suburban girl!”

. . .

This tableau of the cute girl and the big car — with or without the neutered cur — is uncannily common in Williamsburg these days, despite its oddly Teflon reputation as the home of the hipster. While it’s still possible to stumble on the odd, tricked-out hearse or pass a small Tour de France’s worth of bicyclists (biking is big there), gently distressed Volvos — thanks, Ma and Pa! — are equally ubiquitous, as one recent visit revealed.

In the short distance between North Fourth and North Ninth Streets on Driggs Avenue, The Observer counted nine of these family-friendly vehicles glinting in the sun. Most of the them were classic four-door types, but there were also two-doors and wagons, old Volvos and new — a whole menagerie of in-state and out-of-state vehicles littered with everything from tennis racquets to Pottery Barn catalogues to an Atlas of the five boroughs. The total afternoon Volvo-count came to 23.

But perhaps the real sign of the car culture apocalypse — the hint that, when it comes to wheels at least, Williamsburg and Winnetka might not be so different after all — is the sobriety check that cops have set up on Meeker Avenue, near one of the on-ramps to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. No one can say exactly when the checks began or whether they are a direct response to the influx of postcollegiate boozers. (The New York Police Department did not respond to a request for a comment.) But several sources agreed that they first noticed them sometime within the past year — a floating barricade of police, batons and breath-a-lizers, just like back home!