When You Put It That Way . . .

The Daily News wants you to know that we are all going to die:

The Brooklyn Bridge is one of 166 city bridges labeled “structurally deficient,” putting it in the same category as the one that collapsed into the Mississippi River.

In fact, under the the feds’ rating system, the Brooklyn Bridge scored dramatically lower than the doomed Minneapolis bridge — and the Willis Ave. Bridge, which connects East Harlem to the Bronx, was not much better.

The Brooklyn Bridge also got lousy marks from the state, which called it one of three city bridges in “poor” condition with rusting steel joints and deteriorating brick and mortar on its ramps.

The biggest problem was the roadway deck on the Manhattan and Brooklyn approaches.

The state felt the “poor” rating was enough to raise concerns but not enough to shut down traffic like it did with the nearby Williamsburg Bridge in 1988.

At the city’s iconic landmark, a reporter observed considerable rust on metal structures and areas of missing brick work on the Manhattan anchorage.

Responding to the Daily News’ findings, Charles Carrier, a spokesman for the city Department of Transportation, said, “The bottom line is, if a bridge is unsafe, we close it. Obviously the Brooklyn Bridge was not deemed to be unsafe, but there are issues we’re going to be addressing.”

. . .

City officials stood by what they termed a “state of the art” inspection system and declined to perform additional checks on any of its bridges.

In New York, the federal government has labeled 2,110 bridges “structurally deficient,” of which 166 are in New York City, records show. The feds define this as structures with “deteriorated conditions of significant bridge elements.”

All of these bridges are rated by the U.S. Department of Transportation on the same 1-to-100 scale that gave the Minneapolis bridge a “sufficiency rating” of 50.

Considering factors such as structural adequacy and safety, serviceability and functional obsolescence, the Brooklyn Bridge was given the lowest possible “sufficiency rating,” a zero.

On the other hand, Sewell Chan is not into fear mongering*:

More than 2,000 bridges in New York State meet the federal government’s definition of “structurally deficient,” from the heavily traveled on-ramps of the Brooklyn Bridge to a 28-foot span across Trout Brook near the Canadian border.

The bridge that collapsed Wednesday in Minneapolis had also been labeled structurally deficient. But the term can have a variety of implications, and does not necessarily mean that any of the bridges are in real danger of significant failure. Typically the finding means inspectors have identified some kind of deterioration, cracks or movement.

The ramps to the Brooklyn Bridge, which carries about 132,000 vehicles a day, were downgraded last year from fair to poor condition. Yesterday, city officials said $149 million in repairs to the span were under way and that the bridge was safe. Still, city inspectors were at the bridge yesterday afternoon to check on its condition.

. . .

In the last eight years, the city has spent $3 billion improving some of the 787 bridges it controls, said Lori A. Ardito, the first deputy transportation commissioner. As a result, Ms. Ardito said, the number of bridges that the city deems to be in poor condition dropped to 3 last year from 40 in 1997.

In addition to the Brooklyn Bridge, the two others were a pedestrian bridge at East 78th Street over the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive in Manhattan and a bridge at Willow Lake at 76th Road in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens.

Ms. Ardito said “poor” did not mean a structure was at risk of collapse. At the Brooklyn Bridge, the major problem is the roadway deck on the ramps, and not structures that support the roadway. She said a more complete rehabilitation was expected to start in 2010.

“The poor rating for the Brooklyn Bridge means that there’s only components of the bridge that are in poor condition,” she said. “They’re actually the ramps leading to the bridge, not the span of the bridge.”

*Not that he didn’t try . . .

Earlier: Nothing A Little Paint Won’t Fix.

Location Scout: Brooklyn Bridge.

Pier 40 Critics Raise Concern About Cancerous Cirque

The bold proposal to develop Pier 40 on Manhattan’s West Side — with plans for a dedicated Cirque du Soliel theater — has been derided by critics as “Vegas on the Hudson,” a cancerous, infectious Vegas on the Hudson:

Because the designs were first released late last year, community opposition has been tough and unified, with critics decrying the idea of a tourist hot-spot that would take the place of community recreation space and spread uncharacteristic development to the adjacent neighborhood.

“Clearly this is a regional tourist destination that would have little connection to the neighborhood and would solely be an attraction to tourists,” the executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, Andrew Berman, said of Related’s proposal. “If you have Vegas on the Hudson next door, the tendency will be to look to develop similar uses in the inland area — and that would be totally unacceptable.”

Of All The Reasons . . .

Parent groups have been vocal about the Board of Education’s plans to increase the number of “schools within a school” — specialized magnet programs — throughout the city. Space considerations are a big issue, but then there’s this:

Park Slope parents are up in arms over a Department of Education proposal to insert a new small school focusing on Arabic language and culture inside the same building as their children’s elementary school.

Department officials faced what is becoming a familiar uproar over new small schools when they announced a proposal to locate the Khalil Gibran International Academy, one of the more than 200 small high schools created by the Bloomberg administration, inside P.S. 282, the Park Slope school.

. . .

Fearing that their children will lose art, music, and science classrooms and a library if Khalil Gibran moves into the Park Slope school’s top floor, parents reacted by “screaming and crying,” a parent who attended the meeting with department officials Monday night in the school’s auditorium, Jennifer Bacon-Fossati, said. She said parents were also concerned about the safety of their younger children, who may have to share bathrooms with the older students.

. . .

Another parent, who asked that her name be withheld to protect her child’s safety, said she feared that the school’s focus on Arabic culture and language may draw a backlash from right-wing groups that could threaten the building’s students.

“There are concerns of the kind of criticism this school could face,” she said. [Emph. added]

Lady, quit overreacting! The students are long gone by the time Sanitation gets there on trash day . . .

City Neighborhoods Simply Crawling With “Sex Sickos”

They act like being a convicted sex offender is a bad thing:

Nearly a third of the city’s most dangerous sex offenders live within just two blocks of an elementary or middle school — and authorities have no power to make them move farther away, the Daily News has learned.

The sobering findings emerged from the most exhaustive examination ever conducted of the state sex offender registry.

The disturbing report, completed by Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn), shows that about 670 of the city’s 2,114 worst sex offenders live within two blocks of a school.

The clusters of sickos grow even larger a few more blocks away.

More than 85% of the city’s Level 2 and Level 3 sex offenders — the worst of the worst — live within a quarter-mile of a school, Weiner’s examination found. “Every day my kids when they leave the house I say a little prayer that they won’t cross one of these sex sickos,” Bronx mom Cynthia Hawkins, 35, said as she walked her kids home from Public School 33 in Highbridge.

Anthony Weiner: master of the low-hanging fruit.

If They Concoct Entire Terror Plots In Order To Nab Would-Be Bombers, Then Why Not Also This?

So paranoid:

A graffiti crew called “Made U Look NYC” — or MUL NYC — is boasting to have spray-painted a piece spanning 10 subway cars last month, according to a Web site madeulooknyc.com.

The site is selling T-shirts featuring a photo of an R train with the Monopoly character painted on it, and promoting a 60-minute documentary about the piece’s creation that they plan to auction on eBay Mar. 1.

Some bloggers, however, speculate that the NYPD may be behind this stunt as a way to lure the culprits.

“If you were thinking of buying a T-shirt commemorating Made U Look’s painting of 10 whole NYC subway cars, you may want to reconsider now,” warned city blog RazorApple.com. Its recent posting of an explainer showing how the NYPD might be monitoring the site’s visitors got picked up by various blogs such as Gawker and Gothamist.

“It seems illogical that [MUL] would incriminate themselves in this way, with a Web site selling T-shirts,” Razor Apple’s editor Will Sherman told Metro yesterday, “but stranger things have happened.”

Sherman doesn’t doubt MUL was behind the “staggering feat” of painting the 750-foot-long piece — “Nothing this large was put on the subway since Easter Sunday 1988,” he said — but the site’s photos, which appear to have been taken at a rail yard on Dec. 26, seemed fishy, he thought. “It’s hard for me to believe they were able to film and take all those photos in daylight.”

He grew more suspicious after an e-mail exchange he had with “Frank,” who responded to the e-mail address listed on MUL NYC’s site. “He talked about other members in his crew, calling them ‘gentlemen,'” Sherman said. “I wouldn’t think you would describe the people in your crew like that.”

“Frank” denied allegations of police involvement in an e-mail to Metro.