You Know City Schools Are Bad When . . .

But the real question is how DOT can replace a sign without charging taxpayers:

Newcomers to the city searching for Mercer Street over the weekend may have run into some trouble at the corner of West Houston Street, where a city sign pointed the way to “Merser Street.”

Despite the popularity of the name Mercer (and of its bearers), and even though the street corner is in a heavily trafficked area — less than a block from such SoHo landmarks as the Mercer Hotel, MercBar, and this season’s new hot watering hole, subMercer — the sloppily spelled street sign lingered for all to see for four balmy spring days before being taken down yesterday afternoon.

Where the blame lies for “Merser Street” is not clear — the culprit could be the sign manufacturer, the originating work order, or someone who sought to link the proud name of Mercer with MRSA, aka Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, aka the superbug. Department of Transportation workers replaced the sign at no cost to taxpayers.

A Sociopath On The Loose In Soho

Apparently there is no place for poor old honeylocusts in the new downtown:

The three honeylocust trees on the corner of West Houston Street and West Broadway share their little slice of the city with seven newspaper boxes, four garbage cans, two billboard advertisements for a London vacation, and one Starbucks coffee shop.

The trees have been there for years, in the middle of a sidewalk that is newly widened, but the other day they were not looking good. They had no leaves, a branch was broken on the one in the middle, and all three appeared to have been heavily pruned in their upper reaches.

Still, given the events of the last month, it could be worse: Apparently, someone has been trying to kill these trees.

It seemed strange to Ian Dutton, too, when he was walking past one day a few weeks ago and noticed a layer of rock salt poured, rather neatly, on the dirt at the base of all three trees — but not on the surrounding sidewalk. Mr. Dutton, a pilot who lives in the neighborhood and is a member of the local community board, happens to be a graduate of a class on tree stewardship offered by the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation, and he worried that the heavy rains forecast for the next day would help the salt soak into the soil.

“I was like, ‘I must be crazy,'” Mr. Dutton said Wednesday. “I mean, who would do that?”

. . .

For the next two weeks, nothing much happened. Then, on March 20, Mr. Dutton’s wife, Shea Hovey, passed the trees when she going to the subway and noticed that the salt was back — again, caked around the base of the tree but not on the sidewalk. Another call to the Parks Department brought another cleanup crew, along with increased suspicion that this was not an accident.

. . .

The company that owns the adjacent building said it was not involved and had no information on the matter.

How About A Day Without Morons Using Midtown Manhattan As The Setting For Media-Whorative Performance?

No chance. There’s always some jackass somewhere . . . :

One Monday last month, the Contigianis staged a New York version of the Day of Slow Living (“It has to be a Monday, the worst day to try to slow down,” Bruno explained). As part of the celebration, Bruno was issuing phony speeding tickets to pedestrians rushing through Union Square. He was wearing a police badge and cap, mirrored sunglasses, and a sandwich board proclaiming, “Caution! Speed-walking camera in action!” Wielding a stuffed turtle with a “STOP” badge on its belly, he flagged down passersby and handed them postcards printed with fourteen “slowmandments.” (No. 4: “Write your text messages on your cell phone with no symbols or abbreviations and get in the habit of starting with ‘Dear . . .’ ” No. 7: “Avoid being so busy and full of work that you don’t have time for yourself and the delight of thinking about nothing.”) “Read once a day and keep the doctor away,” Bruno counselled one woman who stopped to pick up a brochure. “You will be on YouTube!” he shouted gleefully to another retreating figure.

No Ma, It’s This Fantastic Little Place Where Bird Once Stayed . . .

If you have a sick sense of humor, you can put Mom and Dad up there next time they come to visit:

Guests at Bellevue will soon be given bathrobes instead of straitjackets, if the city can convince a developer to turn its most famous nut house into a luxe hotel.

City officials yesterday said they’re confident the hospital’s old psychiatric ward, which until the mid-1980s provided something short of four-star accommodations to countless kooks and criminals, would help fill a void in Manhattan’s East Side medical corridor.

Originally, officials considered turning the 1931 Italian Renaissance-style building on First Avenue between 29th and 30th streets into condos, but oddly, the layout of a mental institution is better suited to a hotel, Melissa Konur, vice president of the city’s Economic Development Commission, told The Post.

“There are long corridors, and the rooms aren’t very big,” she said.

Even though officials expect the hotel and convention center would be marketed toward medical professionals and families of patients at nearby hospitals, it would be up to developers to deal with the building’s sordid past.

Not many hotels can claim Norman Mailer, Edie Sedgwick and Charlie Parker all spent the night, but the psych ward housed fewer sax players than ax murderers, said Dr. Frederick Covan, who for 14 years was its chief psychologist.

“Our patients were not normal New York neurotics, but very sick people – otherwise known as crazy,” Covan said.

“Most of the names were not recognizable, but we had one guy who bashed his mother’s brains in with an iron and then did gynecological surgery on her,” he said.

After A While It Just Gets To Your Head

And your loved ones look at you like you’re Richard Dreyfus sculpting mashed potatoes:

Residents of one of the city’s noisiest neighborhoods are honking mad at hacks who lean on their horns — so they’re cooking up creative ways to quiet the nightly cabby cacophony.

The Lower East Side’s Community Board 3, which has registered 6,133 noise complaints since July, the second most in the city, voted last week to ask the Taxi and Limousine Commission to consider installing a light atop taxis that would glow when a cabby beeps the horn.

This would make it easier for cops to ticket the driver for breaking the city’s noise code, which prohibits excessive horn honking.

“Right now, the police actually have to see a cabdriver honk the horn to issue a ticket, and that’s obviously hard,” said Board 3 district manager Susan Stetzer. “This would allow the police to see exactly who honked and make it easy to enforce the rules.”

The board will include the suggested tattletale light in a letter to the TLC, which is soliciting public feedback as it designs the taxi of the future.

But that’s not the only anti-honking measure the community is clamoring for.

Residents want to see cabs equipped with horns that blare as loudly inside the taxi as outside, creating a natural deterrent.

Next on the list: a meter that knocks $1 off the fare every time the horn honks.

“If the driver lost a buck every time he blew the horn, that would stop him real quick,” said Lower East Side resident Avram Fefer, who called the din on Ludlow Street “absolutely horrible.”

“What Times Square is to the eyes, Ludlow Street is to the ears,” he said.

. . .

And if the community’s suggestions fall on deaf ears? “A very vigorous egg-throwing campaign” might be the answer, according to Fefer.

Why not two levels of horns? A quieter one for when someone is right in front of you and a louder one for real danger? Or at least when you’re six cars back and you want to know what the hold up is . . . (seriously, the culture of honking here is absurd!)