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.

First You Co-Opt Painting Like A Lunatic, Banging Junk And Generally Making A Mess From The Pre-School Set, Then You Teach It To Them

Some parents send their children to Montessori school. Others, the Blue Man Group:

Bright colors, fun music . . . blue heads? While those are all staples at Blue Man Group shows, only the first two will be common elements at the theater group’s preschool next door to its 434 Lafayette St. theater, the Blue Man Creativity Center Early Childhood Program. Gearing up for its first year of operation for 2-through-4-year-olds, the center pulls from the sights and sounds of the Blue Man Group, focusing on “sensory tactile experiences” that help children grow emotionally and creatively.

“We draw inspiration from the educational philosophies that children do some of their most important learning through play,” the center explains on its Web site, theblueschool.net.

With a logo that incorporates a splash of paint, an electrical plug and a DNA double helix and a Web site that includes everything from a white paper on tot conflict resolution to a link to the Blue Man Group’s online create-your-own-art game, the program looks to address the needs of the whole child by way of creative expression. According to the school’s philosophy, such expression is a means of exploring and understanding both one’s own emotions and those of others.

. . .

The Blue School expects to eventually run through the eighth grade.

How About An Eau De Landfill For Staten Island?*

The Brooklyn brand is sometimes freaky, sometimes brash, sometimes pizza and yet strangely evocative of a home-brewed melange of essential oils:

Brooklyn, that icon of industry, labor and pollution, now has its own scent. Not a smell (we always had that), but a scent, a nice one, one that Coco Chanel herself may approve of — Eau De Brooklyn.

. . .

“It all started in the kitchen . . .” explained Dr. Emilio Oribe, who began mixing essential oils purchased from health food stores with his wife and kids about a year and a half ago.

“It seemed whatever we liked, others didn’t like and whatever others liked, we couldn’t reproduce,” he recalled.

So after much consultation with friends and neighbors the Oribes got an idea of what they wanted and brought it to professionals, “to make sure it had a shelf life and all those chemistry details that are very important.” By last July, Eau de Brooklyn was on the shelves of area boutiques.

. . .

“You tell me, what should we do with it? Should we really go beyond Brooklyn?” he wonders. Right now, the product line, which consists of two different scented soaps and a perfume, is only retailed in boutiques in southern and western Brooklyn and on their Web site. “We never thought there would be interest anywhere else,” he says.

*Just kidding! They totally don’t find that funny.

So This Means That No Provider Should Ever Gripe About Only Charging 25 Cents, Right?

For payphone operators, the phone part is an afterthought:

They stand on corners from Brighton Beach to the Bronx, all but mocking New Yorkers: Pay phones that may or may not work, which you can’t even check for a dial tone without worrying about germs.

But they remain rooted in the pavement of New York, blocking pedestrian traffic, looking a bit like museum pieces in an age of cellphones, BlackBerrys and Bluetooth headsets.

There is a reason for their survival: Public telephones are one of the stranger cash cows in city finance. Not because of the coins that are fed into them, but rather because of the millions upon millions that companies are willing to pay to put ads on them.

The phone kiosks generate $62 million in advertising revenue annually — and last year the city got $13.7 million of the take, triple what it pulled in from calls.

Over all, the number of pay phones in New York is falling, as it is throughout the country. But in a phenomenon unique to New York, the phones are more valuable than ever, thanks to the intense competition among advertisers for attention in a city of eight million.

Phone companies say the pay phones are still necessary, noting that during 9/11 and the 2003 blackout, people lined up to use them. But it is the phone kiosks’ desirability to advertisers, who love them because they are inexpensive and plentiful, that appears to be driving pressure on the city for permission to install new phones in choice locations.

Exactly When Did Mini Storage Become Edgy?

Apparently the thinly veiled furvert campaign lost its punch and now those mini-storage pimps are experimenting with a more provocative strategy:

A Manhattan Mini Storage billboard on Manhattan’s West Side Highway is again stirring up both opprobrium and approbation.

A large sign at 44th Street and Twelfth Avenue shows a wire hanger with the words “Your closet space is shrinking as fast as her right to choose.”