They Find A Way To Replace All Mechanical Parking Meters With Cheat-Proof Computerized Models But Something Truly Useful — Computerized Subway Signals, Say — Is Still Like 40 Years Away

The last mechanical parking meter was taken out of commission yesterday, in a heavily attended ceremony:

The last New York City mechanical parking meter — an emblem of street life, object of driver frustration and source of fascination for children since 1951 — was withdrawn from service yesterday.

The demise of the mechanical meter was painless but not swift. Since 1995, when the city began using battery-powered digital meters and quickly found them to be more accurate, reliable and vandal-resistant than the older spring-loaded devices, the days of the mechanical meter have been numbered.

By the start of this year, the mechanical models made up only 2,000 of the 62,000 single-space meters in the city.

Yesterday morning, in a somber but unpretentious ceremony on the southwest corner of West 10th Street and Surf Avenue in Coney Island, Brooklyn, the last one was retired.

Fifteen employees of the City Department of Transportation watched as the meter was lifted out of its iron casing at 10:25 a.m. (The mechanical and digital meters both fit the same casing, which includes the transparent plastic display.) A new digital meter was slipped into its place, ready to take quarters.

“The world changes,” the transportation commissioner, Iris Weinshall, said by telephone. “Just as the subway token went, now the manual meter has gone.”

Ms. Weinshall admitted to a measure of nostalgia. “A lot of our employees feel very connected to these meters,” she said. “This type of meter will go into museums, just like other memorabilia of the city.”

Ms. Weinshall, 53, recalled that as a child in Midwood, Brooklyn, her father, a cabdriver, would use his taxi to run errands on weekends. “Whenever my father would park, it was really a thrill to put the coin in the meter and turn that little handle,” she said.

Yes, what a thrill.

In other news, the most prolific Times writer, like, ever again shows up his slacker colleagues by going the extra mile, as it were:

The first parking meter was introduced in Oklahoma City in 1935. After a trial run, meters were introduced in New York City on Sept. 19, 1951, to ease congestion — and provide revenue.

“It’s just another way of getting money out of people,” the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson grumbled at the time as an official dropped a dime into the first meter, on West 125th Street.

Mechanical meters work like wind-up clocks, with gears and springs. The original meters had no handles, according to Stephen Kerney, a meter-repair supervisor. Coins activated the devices, but, like old watches, the meters had to be wound every week, by a worker using a detachable handle.

Eventually, handles were installed, but they promptly became targets of vandalism.

“People would just knock the handles off using a hammer, to break the meters so they could park for free,” said Theodore R. Collins, chief of meter collections.

Other mischief-makers inserted gum, paper or foil into the coin slot. Still others — cheap drivers and confused tourists — inserted metal slugs or foreign coins. So many metal slugs accumulated in the meters that the city took to burying them at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. The city sold the foreign coins to collectors.

The city stopped buying mechanical meters about 10 years ago. Since then, as the meters were retired, they were disassembled, their parts used to repair other meters.

From a heyday of 69,000 on the streets in the late 1980s, the city has fewer than 5,000 intact mechanical meters now, all in storage. They will be sold for scrap or sold as mementos, said Michael Pipitone, director of field services at the parking bureau.

Some writers — even Times writers — just crib from the press release. Not Chan!

Now about those mechanical subway switches . . . (and just guess who wrote that article, too!)

What, “Gairville” Doesn’t Just Trip Off The Tongue?

The problem with calling a historical district “DUMBO” is that it’s, uh, ahistorical:

City officials are moving ahead with plans to create a historic district in DUMBO — whose acronymic name was created by developer David Walentas when he started buying up buildings in the 1980s to evoke an earlier uber-hip neighborhood, Soho.

“What to name the district is an ironic question,” said Rob Parris, district manager of Community Board 2.

“We know it as ‘DUMBO,’ but certainly in history there have been names more associated with [it].”

The area between Fulton Ferry Landing (the old name for where the River Cafe now is) and Wallabout Bay (the Navy Yard) has changed names pretty much every 50 years since it first appeared on European maps in the 16th century.

The first name was Rapailie, after the family who owned most of the land. But in the centuries to follow, the area would be called “Olympia,” “Fulton Landing” and finally “Gairville,” after the early-20th century industrialist Robert Gair, who manufactured paper bags and corrugated cardboard boxes at 45 Washington St.

Gairville has the best claim, historians say, but the name is unlikely to even be suggested. Why? Because Landmarks designation is about marketability, just as much as history.

“Can you imagine saying ‘let’s go out for dinner in ‘Gairville’?” said Simeon Bankoff of the Historic District Council.

Location Scout: DUMBO.

The Next Generation Clamors For More Acoustic Guitar And Jazz; Yippies Here To Help; Standup Comedy, Too!

The Yippie Museum and Coffeehouse makes its raucuous debut:

They were a countercultural movement springing out of the Youth International Party (Y.I.P.), embracing many of the ’60s most colorful characters, including political activists Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.

Now, The Yippie Museum and Coffeehouse at 9 Bleecker St. is set to celebrate that culture — perhaps even revive it for a new generation that’s fed up with politics and war.

Dana Beal, a self-described “second-wave” Yippie, part of a younger generation of Yippies who got involved after the movement’s beginnings, and the original owner and resident of 9 Bleecker St., announced plans for the museum, coffeehouse, gift shop and counterculture comedy club in February.

While the museum is not fully completed, the coffeehouse and venue were inaugurated this past weekend with the sounds of acoustic guitar and jazz.

“It was real,” said Steve Stollman, of the Steve Stollman Experience, who performed on Saturday. “It was quite nice, quite relaxed. I think the place is going to fly.”

How About The “William A. Shea ATM” — Sorry — The “William A. Shea Citibank ATM”?

Even if Bill Shea loses out entirely, at least Jackie Robinson will get a rotunda:

A rotunda honoring the life of Jackie Robinson, Citibank A.T.M.’s, a 41 percent increase in concessions and enough restaurant capacity to feed 3,134 people are among the features planned for the Mets’ new ballpark, Citi Field, which is scheduled to replace Shea Stadium in 2009, the team announced yesterday.

Gov. George E. Pataki, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and other politicians joined the Mets’ principal owner, Fred Wilpon, and several team officials and players yesterday for a ceremonial groundbreaking on a new 42,500-seat stadium. The design for the stadium is inspired by Ebbets Field, the former home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and is expected to cost nearly $800 million.

Under a 20-year sponsorship deal with Citigroup, the stadium will be named Citi Field, displacing the name of William A. Shea. Shea, a lawyer, helped bring National League baseball back to New York in 1962, five years after the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants left. Shea Stadium opened in 1964.

The Mets have encountered some criticism for not naming the new stadium for Robinson, the Dodgers legend who broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947, but Wilpon said fans would be welcomed into the soaring Jackie Robinson Rotunda, inscribed with this quotation from Robinson: “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.” The rotunda will include a statue, still to be designed, and an exhibition on Robinson’s life.

A rotunda is a very thoughtful way to remember the man who broke the color barrier in baseball. Almost as thoughtful as a plaza.

Bosnia, Iraq And . . . St. George

It boggles the mind to think that no one remembered there was a large mass grave there:

The cars came and went yesterday at the St. George municipal parking lot, where it might have been business as usual were it not for a small group of mostly unnoticed archaeologists unearthing the remains of 19th-century immigrants in one corner of the blacktop.

After digging and patching up parts of the parking lot for months, the team has finally located the spot where an unknown number of dead, most of them thought to be Irish or German immigrants killed by disease, were believed buried in unmarked graves three and four deep in the mid-1800s, before ever getting a crack at life in a new world.

The finding of a concentrated area of undisturbed skeletons is considered crucial to establishing how much of the four-acre parking lot will need to be preserved when the city and state begin construction of a $109 million courthouse there.

The County Clerk’s office on nearby Stuyvesant Place houses most of the borough’s public records, but the parking lot burial ground may offer its own archive: A glimpse into the ill-fated lives of immigrants struck down by typhus and yellow fever and rejected by residents fearful of such devastating diseases.

The small team of archaeologists and the state declined to give details yesterday about how many bones or what kind of skeletons are being unearthed at the lot, in a corner located closest to Hyatt Street and St. Mark’s Place.

Connecticut-based Historical Perspectives is conducting the dig, and a spokeswoman for the State Dormitory Authority said the remains are being treated with the “utmost respect and dignity.”

“They are finding the edges of the burial ground. They are finding human remains,” said Claudia Hutton. “We are not trying to dig up the cemetery, we are trying to determine the edges.”