There Oughta Be A Law . . .

. . . against billboards that speak:

Last week, at the corner of Prince and Mulberry Streets in NoLIta, a scene was playing out that would have gladdened the heart of any advertising buyer. Pedestrians were turning and gawking at a six-story tenement emblazoned with a giant billboard for “Paranormal State,” a new television series about ghosts on A & E.

But passers-by were not reacting to the billboard. Each of them was hearing an urgent, disembodied female voice whispering suggestive messages. “What’s that?” the voice hissed. “Who’s there? It’s not your imagination.”

The voices, which belong to A & E employees, were emanating from two large black speakers above the billboard, which contained a technology called directional audio. The speakers use ultrasound to produce a highly focused beam of sound, making people within their reach feel as if they are wearing headphones, listening to sounds intended for them and them alone.
. . .

This appears to be the first commercial use of such technology on a billboard.

Peter Swimm, a 27-year-old technical support worker at Pando, an Internet startup with offices nearby, was among those transfixed one morning last week. Clasping his shaggy, bearded head, Mr. Swimm peered up at the billboard through the falling snow. “It’s neat,” he said. “With terrifying implications, like all things that are neat.”

. . .

According to Guy Slattery, A & E’s senior vice president for marketing, no special approval from the city had been required for the sonic billboard. And Kate Lindquist, a spokeswoman for the Department of Buildings, confirmed that the city does not regulate sounds emitting from billboards. She added, however, that this particular billboard lacked the permit required for all city billboards.

Central Park As Giant Cash Machine

While vast swaths of public parkland go ignored, quasi-public park conservancies raise funds with overwhelming force:

Finding a unique gift for your honey can be a walk in the park — if you’ve got enough green.

The Central Park Conservancy is launching private, customized tours of the park, to be conducted by Sara Cedar Miller, its official historian and photographer, for a flat $500-per-hour fee for up to seven people.

Miller, the author of “Central Park, An American Masterpiece,” will drive the minivan that will take your party on a design-your-own walk and/or ride.

The conservancy offers free guided walking tours, but this one, it says, will be tailored to your interests, be they in landscape design, history, architecture — or little-known secrets.

Maybe Add Some Celebrity Impersonators To Officiate? Woody Allen? Frank Sinatra? Martin Scorsese? What About (The Reverend) Al Sharpton!?

Apparently they assume that people go there for the ambiance and good service:

Mayor Bloomberg is giving a wedding gift to lovebirds who tie the knot at the city chapel — a multimillion-dollar Marriage Bureau makeover overseen by Hizzoner’s personal interior designer — in a bid to make New York the nation’s coupling capital, The Post has learned.

“It’s going to be fabulous,” said one source of the planned revamp, which will move the City Clerk’s Office — where a major function is issuing marriage licenses and performing weddings — from its current, dingy digs at 1 Centre St. to the first floor of 80 Centre.

It will occupy the offices that once housed the Department of Motor Vehicles, with a fresh look designed by society decorator Jamie Drake.

Drake adorned Mayor Bloomberg’s Upper East Side townhouse with Egyptian marble, and also was tapped by the mayor to give Gracie Mansion a face lift five years ago.

The city will use the new chapel as part of a worldwide marketing effort to lure marriage-minded visitors, sources said. It’s part of a goal to bring 50 million tourists here by 2015 and contribute to the economy.

“Vegas might be one location where people go” to get married, the source said.

“But a lot of Europeans, if they go somewhere romantic and are coming to America, one of the first things they think about is New York City.”

The goal is to replace Las Vegas and make New York “the premier marriage location in America,” the source added.

. . .

The Marriage Bureau, now on the second floor of the Municipal Building, has sterile marble, and the door to the wedding chapel is painted deep red.

Couples sit on plastic chairs lining the walls in the hallway until their names are called; there is graffiti scratched into the walls; and, worst of all, there are no bathrooms nearby.

Sources said Drake, who also decorated the billionaire mayor’s London townhouse, will work at a reduced rate on the project, which has a $13 million budget and should be finished by spring 2008.

The new space will be about 6,000 square feet larger, and will have proper seating areas, attractive marble floors and columns, as well as bathrooms and vanity rooms where brides and grooms can primp.

It will be a storefront, with a streamlined security system. As of now, brides dressed in white must walk through a magnetometer to get hitched.

“I feel like I’m at the DMV,” said one man, who was at the clerk’s office to witness a friend’s wedding.

The bride-to-be agreed, saying, “It’s so institutionalized — not really what you picture your wedding day” to be.

Location Scout: City Clerk’s Office.

How About The Pottery Barn Student Center At Barnard?*

The concept of selling naming rights has gone beyond just stadiums and arenas:

A Victoria’s Secret Student Center might seem incongruous in the company of Milbank Hall, Brooks Hall, and the Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger Residence Hall on Barnard College’s four-acre campus. It hasn’t happened — yet. But if Victoria’s Secret offered, well, the possibilities are open.

In a push to raise $20 million for its largest, most costly expansion project to date, the liberal arts college is selling the naming rights for a 70,000-square-foot building currently under construction with an online ad seeking a corporate or private sponsor to foot the bill, administrators said.

“It’s not typical to raise $20 million gifts by posting them online, but I think it would be a brilliant thing to do if a company wanted to demonstrate its commitment to women and higher education,” the vice president for institutional advancement at Barnard, Cameran Mason, said.

A $20 million corporate outlay would be one of the largest donations the college ever received, she said, and would represent about 10% of the school’s endowment. The board of trustees would ultimately have to approve the donation, and would likely reject a contentious donor “such as a convicted felon,” Ms. Mason said.

*And when crafting your lede (or political cartoon — Sean Delonas, we’re looking at you!), feel free to refrain from suggesting more obvious tie–ins because most of the ones that automatically come to mind are actually not very funny . . .

New York — The Town So Nice They Gave It Its Own Domain Name

He perhaps overstates the power of the Internet:

Is it time for the big city to start cornering a piece of the Internet?

A growing grassroots movement says yes, and is trying to create a “.nyc” domain name to go alongside the dot coms and dot orgs of the World Wide Web.

“When Ford introduced their first car 100 years ago, no one thoughtto start building roads for it,” said Tom Lowenhaupt, an interactive marketing consultant who heads Connecting.nyc, a group he formed to lead the effort.

“So we ended up having to tear down miles of the Bronx to build freeways to start accommodating them all. It’s the same thing now. We have the opportunity now to plan for the future and start organizing ourselves and our resources in a responsible way.”

Backers say that a dot NYC Web address will allow the city’s small businesses to distinguish themselves in the crowded online marketplace and foster better community cohesion and social activism.

“The Internet is great at global things but it isn’t very good at local things,” Lowenhaupt said. “There are 60 million dot com names out there. When all six billion of us are on the Internet New York is going to be forgotten.”