Crotch Grabbing And Sexual Innuendo To Be Replaced By . . . Crotch Grabbing And Sexual Innuendo!

As Lady Macbeth might say, “Unsex me here”:

A production of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” will replace a hip-hop festival next summer in a DUMBO venue controlled by the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy — and organizers of the rap show believe that race played a role.

The Brooklyn Hip-Hop Festival — which brought thousands of people and big-name rappers to the park-and-condo waterfront development site in 2006 and 2007 — had already scheduled its 2008 production for the weekend of June 22.

But organizers were shocked last month to discover that the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy had given those days to St. Ann’s Warehouse to stage a Polish rendition of that Scottish play.

Festival organizers believe the move was racially motivated.

“Hip hop brings a lot more brown people to this neighborhood, and people who live here are not comfortable with it,” said Wes Jackson, whose Room Service Production founded the festival in 2005.

“[People have told me that residents say], ‘The festival should be in Commodore Barry Park between the projects and the BQE, not next to my $2.5-million condo.'”

Whether racially motivated or not, the rejection of the hip-hop festival sounds very much like the scenario long imagined by critics of Brooklyn Bridge Park, where condo and commercial development will finance greenspace along a 1.3-mile stretch from DUMBO to the foot of Atlantic Avenue. Opponents believe that public events will not be public at all, but subject to the whims of the wealthy condo-dwellers whose maintenance fees will pay for the park’s upkeep.

The Next Twenty Minutes Of Your Park-Going Experience Is Sponsored By Alpo . . .

The recent formalization of the leash law has paved the way for further commercialization of the city’s parks:

If you visited Bryant Park on a recent Tuesday afternoon and muscled your way through the throng of suited spectators standing around the plaza, you could have watched a sleek black dog taking an acrobatic leap into a swimming pool.

The dog was participating in a water sport sponsored by DockDogs, a company that promotes the activity. But the dog’s antics appeared to hold little appeal for Karen Merz, a product development manager who was eating lunch in the plaza with a co-worker.

“If it was in the evening and it was like ‘Let’s watch a funny dog show,’ O.K.,” Ms. Merz said. “But I’m in the middle of work, and I’m all stressed out, and it’s, like, ridiculous.”

According to Maxine Teitler, the chairwoman of the Parks Committee for Community Board 5, such grumblings speak to a larger issue.

“There is a lot of concern about the commercialization of the parks,” said Ms. Teitler, whose board covers an area that includes Bryant Park and the two other parks that form Midtown’s green corridor: Madison Square Park and Union Square Park.

Shoot First, Take Pains To Seem Fiscally Responsible Later

Better get all your spending in now because things might not look so good down the road:

City budget officials say they are seeing signs that the soaring revenues of the last several years are coming to an end, and they have begun preparing for belt-tightening in the months ahead.

The anticipated falloff is due in large part to lower expected profits on Wall Street and a projected decline in large real estate transactions.

“The economies of our world and our city are cyclical, and it looks like, sadly, we’re going from one of growth to one of hopefully not decline, but certainly nowhere near as much growth, if any,” Mr. Bloomberg said yesterday at a news conference on the Brooklyn waterfront.

Officials in Mr. Bloomberg’s administration have often warned of shortfalls that never materialized. But this time around, said Mark Page, the city’s budget director, continued fallout in the financial services industry from the national mortgage crisis and recent losses at hedge funds are likely to significantly cut into profits on Wall Street this year.

In turn, that means less tax revenue for the city, and lower real estate transaction fees — an unusually rich source of revenue in recent years — as fewer fat bonuses fuel high-end apartment shopping sprees.

In addition, Mr. Page said, city officials had already been projecting lower revenue from real estate transactions in the current fiscal year than in the year that ended in June because they predicted fewer large deals like the $5.4 billion purchase of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village.

. . .

Although city officials are not yet predicting an economic downturn, the city is already looking to rein in costs. About 10 days ago, Mr. Bloomberg sent a letter to all agencies seeking to limit new hiring and warning that budget cuts may be necessary in the coming months.

“As a practical matter, if you start trying to squeeze down marginal spending sooner, you don’t have to jam them down as much to save the money you need,” Mr. Page said in explaining the move.

In the letter, the mayor said he had asked Mr. Page to “closely scrutinize all agency hiring.”

“It is easier and more prudent to tightly manage headcount now, rather than face staff reductions in the future,” Mr. Bloomberg wrote.

(Diane Cardwell is relentless . . . who’s feeding her this? Is her husband still advising President Clinton? The Hillary juggernaut rolls over all the opposition!)

(OK, OK, so that’s paranoid — but if you want to investigate the mayor’s record she really is a good place to start.)

I Take It The Comptroller Is Not A Fan Of Rattan . . .

Some state officials are not scared of the Lionel-Industrial Complex:

An audit released this week by the state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, criticizes the financial management of a program in which the Metropolitan Transportation Authority periodically runs excursions with vintage subway cars, called the Nostalgia Train. The trips raise money for the New York Transit Museum, an arm of the authority based in a decommissioned subway station in Brooklyn Heights. Mr. DiNapoli’s audit, released on Wednesday, found that the authority did not adequately keep track of the money it raised. It also said repairs to the trains were paid for by New York City Transit, meaning that subway riders and taxpayers were subsidizing the rides.

See, for example, Monday’s A train diamond jubilee and the Centennial Special Shuttle Trains.

Pay To Rezone

Something “interesting” in the way that campaign contributions often can be “interesting”:

Among the 2006 and 2007 campaign contributors to the two city councilmen whose districts cover most of the territory to be rezoned under the city’s so-called Jamaica Plan, two groups stand out in their donations: real estate developers and trade unions.

Between $9,850 from unions and roughly $15,000 from real estate and developer interests, City Councilman James Gennaro (D-Fresh Meadows) received almost $25,000 in 2006, a year in which he disclosed $60,050 in corporate campaign contributions, according to campaign finance disclosures from the state Board of Elections.

In 2006, City Councilmen Leroy Comrie (D-St. Albans) declared $16,200 in donations from individuals and partnerships, of which $2,500 came from interests associated with real estate development, according to campaign finance disclosures from the state Board of Elections. His campaign’s corporate contributors that year gave a total of $17,250, of which $2,750 came from real estate groups and developers.

. . .

The Jamaica Plan would alter the permitted height, usage and density of new buildings across the 368 blocks to be rezoned under the proposal, stretching from Highland and Hillcrest avenues in the north to 110th and Sayres avenues in the south, west to the Van Wyck Expressway and east to 191st Street. In many cases, the changes allow much taller buildings along major roads and near the transit hub at Jamaica Center than exist there now.