Whoops, There It Is!

The group alleged to have planned to blow up the PATH train tunnel apparently got the map on the Department of Homeland Security’s website:

The tunnel terrorists got their maps of the region’s vital underground passageways off the Department of Homeland Security’s Web site, sources said yesterday.

Maps of the city’s tunnels — including subways, PATH tubes and the Holland Tunnel — were found with the group’s reputed mastermind in Beirut, and were e-mailed to other members of the group, officials said yesterday.

. . .

Homeland Security did not comment on the report that its own Web site was used by the terrorists.

Turn On The Bright Lights!

Coney Island’s Parachute Jump has been outfitted with lights:

The 277-foot tower, shaped like a giant blossom at the end of a tapering stalk, dropped its last screaming rider in 1965 and fell silent. For years it rotted, a skeletal symbol of Coney Island’s long decline, narrowly escaping demolition.

Last night, the city turned the lights back on. As an eager crowd jammed the boardwalk, a switch was thrown and the Parachute Jump was bathed in red and purple light, as shivering patterns chased each other across its girders.

There are still no riders, and no parachutes, but the jump is back in the night sky above the boardwalk.

“Not exactly how it was when I was a kid,” said Brooklyn’s borough president, Marty Markowitz, “but it will be a beacon of light for this and future generations, harking and heralding Coney Island as a place where dreams come true.”

The reviews from those assembled were muted. Phyllis Carbo, 70, who rode on the Parachute Jump as a girl, hesitated when asked for her opinion. “I’m running for Assembly on the Republican line, so I have to be very careful,” she said. “I’m impressed.”

Even the evening’s master of ceremonies, Dick Zigun, one of Coney Island’s leading boosters, pronounced the light show “very subtle.”

Others were less restrained.

“Did they light it already? Is this it?” asked Joe Joya, 63.

His wife, Jane, 61, said, “I thought it was going to be a lot brighter. I thought that the lights were going to be more of a Vegas type of thing.”

Her husband added: “You’re not going to see that from Staten Island.”

See also: Parachute Jump.

That’s Life In The Historic District

Residents of a condo on a landmarked Tribeca street recently asked the community board for permission to remove the bumpy cobblestones outside their building. The response was perhaps less empathetic than they expected:

“We like the look of the neighborhood, we are only trying to be practical,” Lilli Momtaz, a building resident and president of the condo board, said in an interview. One week earlier she had gone to the Landmarks Committee of Community Board 1 with what she thought was an innocent request — to pull up the ragged cobblestones and replace them with a more even surface.

. . .

“They laughed us out of the room,” said Paul Brensilber, a managing agent for 44 Laight Street who presented the residents’ case. “I’m absolutely surprised about how closed-minded they were.”

Here’s the problem for the condo owners of 44 Laight Street: Their block, which faces the Holland Tunnel Rotary, is part of the Tribeca North Historic District, a city designation that requires that any proposed changes to building facades or fixtures in the old industrial neighborhood be approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

The commission often take its cues from community boards, and below Canal Street that means passing muster with CB1’s Landmarks Committee, whose members include many longtime residents who consider the north section of the neighborhood to be the last unspoiled territory in Tribeca. Here, the cobblestones are protected and enjoy near-sacred status.

Committee member Rick Landman, who also chairs the community board’s Tribeca Committee, marveled.

“I’ve been here for 25 years, and this is the first time anyone has asked to remove cobblestones from outside their building,” he said.

“You should respect what the neighborhood is,” fumed committee member Paul Sipos. “You say it is unsightly. I take big exception to that. And as for the trouble with pushing baby strollers, well that’s life in the historic district.”

The request was swiftly voted down.

“It is rejected, thank you,” said Roger Byrom, the committee’s chairman, cutting off Brensilber as he continued to plead his case.

Ducci-D’oh!

An art history professor is claiming that “one of the great single acquisitions of the last half century” — the one the Met just acquired for like $50 bazillion — is actually a nineteenth-century fraud:

A painting the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought for more than $45 million and hailed as a 14th century masterpiece is a fake, according to a leading New York authority.

The “Madonna and Child” the museum attributes to Renaissance artist Duccio di Buoninsegna was really painted in the 19th century, said James Beck, an art history professor at Columbia University.

The 8-inch-by-11-inch tempera and gold on wood panel was the most expensive single object The Met ever bought when it acquired it in November 2004.

“If I’m right, this is $50 million in . . . money down the tube,” Beck told The Post. “And I’m right. It’s incontestable.”

He ridiculed its “low quality” and said it wasn’t “even a good forgery.”

There are no documents proving its ownership before around 1904, and Beck believes it was painted “in about the 1880s.”

Beck said he began to have doubts about the work six months ago and when he approached The Met, where officials expressed confidence the work is genuine.

There was no immediate response yesterday from the museum or Christie’s, which handled the sale for a Belgian family.

But Met curator Keith Christiansen told The Times of London, “There is no reason to doubt the period and the authenticity of the picture.”

Beck said the best proof that it’s a fake is the way it shows the Madonna and child behind a parapet, an artistic use of space and planes that only came later in the Renaissance. He rejected Christiansen’s claim that the work is “the first illusionistic parapet in European art.”

Refresher course: The Missing Madonna: The story behind the Met’s most expensive acquisition (New Yorker, July 11, 2005).

The Detention Complex That Dare Not Speak His Name

After former Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik was convicted of two counts of funny business, his name was stripped from the Manhattan Detention Complex:

The 881-bed jail — commonly known as the Tombs for the original Egyptian Revival structure built in 1838, or for the grim atmosphere, depending on whom you believe — will no longer be called the Bernard B. Kerik Complex. It will again be called the Manhattan Detention Complex, as it was before Dec. 12, 2001, when Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani dedicated the two buildings that make up the complex in honor of Mr. Kerik.

A City Hall spokesman said yesterday that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg made the decision to change the jail’s name on Saturday, a day after Mr. Kerik pleaded guilty in State Supreme Court in the Bronx to two misdemeanors: accepting $165,000 worth of home renovations from a contractor and failing to report a $28,000 loan from a real estate developer.

The mayor’s decision took effect almost immediately. Between 1 and 3 a.m. yesterday, workers replaced the old signs bearing Mr. Kerik’s name at the jail, at 125 White Street, with colorful plastic signs bearing the new name.

The change was so sudden that it startled, and pleased, some correction officers and visitors.

“No jail needs to be named after a crook,” said Monique N. Randolph, 30, of Brownsville, Brooklyn, who was visiting a relative at the jail yesterday. She said that she had followed the Kerik case closely and was disappointed that he would only have to pay $221,000 in fines and penalties.

“I think he should do time in jail just like the other criminals,” Ms. Randolph said.

Jessica T. Hale, 32, a manager at a Chelsea art gallery who lives on Mosco Street in Chinatown, near the jail, applauded Mr. Bloomberg’s decision. “It’s ironic that an institution of correction would be named after someone who needs correction,” she said. “His name should be off the building.”