Another Win-Win Solution Engineered By Al Sharpton

With 125th Street already named for Martin Luther King, Jr. and the portion of 125th Street in front of the Apollo already named for Nat King Cole, those wanting to honor the memory of James Brown find that they have simply run out of streets. Enter Al Sharpton:

A large part of 145th Street in Harlem soon may be renamed in honor of the late James Brown.

The Rev. Al Sharpton said yesterday he has met with officials from Community Board 10 about renaming the stretch of street from Lenox Avenue to Broadway “James Brown Way” for the late godfather of soul, who died Dec. 25 after a decadeslong, groundbreaking career. The street runs in front of the new headquarters of Sharpton’s activist group, the National Action Network.

Genius!

John Toscano, Unless You’re Moonlighting As Anthony Weiner’s Press Secretary, You Really Have To Do Better Than This!*

Is all press still good press** if media outlets*** basically reproduce your press releases verbatim? The headline**** “Weiner Gets $2.5 M for Safety Improvements” just gives it away:

Five schools in Congressmember Anthony Weiner’s district will be getting upgraded traffic safety measures, thanks to a $2.5 million grant from the federal Department of Transportation, the lawmaker announced.

The public safety improvements were announced at a press conference held by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Schools Chancellor Joe Klein, city Department of Transportation Commissioner Iris Weinshall and Weiner (D–Queens/Brooklyn).

The schools involved, according to Weiner, are P.S. 220, Edward Mandel School, Forest Hills; P.S. 71, Forest Elementary School, Ridgewood; I.S. 250, Robert F. Kennedy Community Middle School, Flushing, and St. Elizabeth School and J.H.S. 210, Elizabeth Blackwell School, both in Ozone Park.

The DOT studied all 1,471 elementary and middle schools in New York City. One hundred and thirty five had the highest accident rates and were designated priority schools for safety improvements. Of these, 34 are in Queens.

Weiner said the Safe Routes to Schools Program is a nationwide effort aimed at making travel to school safer by reducing traffic congestion, reducing the number of collisions in and around schools and lowering the speed limits in residential neighborhoods by installing signs and speed bumps.

For children ages 5 to 9 in New York City, getting hit by a motorist is the number one cause of death and injury, said Weiner of Forest Hills.

To achieve better safety for the students, each school involved in the program will receive infrastructure additions and upgrades such as speed bumps, traffic signals bicycle lanes, medians and crosswalks. Construction is set to begin next year.

Weiner holds a seat on the House Transportation Committee from which he secured the school safety grant. The total amount of funding needed to improve safety at all 135 priority schools is $30 million.

And John, the dangerous thing about lazily reediting press releases is that these days, they’re all on the internets (“WEINER ANNOUNCES $2.5 MILLION FOR PUBLIC SAFETY AROUND SCHOOLS”):

Today, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn & Queens), a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, announced $2.5 million for public safety improvements around New York City schools, including six schools in the Ninth Congressional District. The funds will be used to add or upgrade safety measures such as crosswalks, signs, speed bumps and medians as part of the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Safe Routes to Schools Program.

Last week, Rep. Weiner joined Mayor Michael Bloomberg, DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein at P.S. 21 in the Bronx where the list of schools slated for enhancements was announced.

The Department of Transportation studied all 1,471 elementary and middle schools in New York City and established a list of 135 schools that are considered priority schools for safety improvements — schools with the highest accidents rates. Of the 135 priority schools, 46 are in Brooklyn and 34 are in Queens.

The project is part of a nationwide effort aimed at making it safer for kids to travel to and from schools by reducing traffic congestion, reducing collisions in and around schools, and decreasing speed in residential neighborhoods. For children ages 5 to 9 in New York City, getting hit by a motorist is the number one cause of death and injury.

To accomplish these goals, each priority school in New York City will receive infrastructural additions or upgrades such as speed bumps, traffic signals, bicycle lanes, medians and crosswalks. Construction is set to being on the first 32 priority schools in 2007.

Rep. Weiner, from his seat on the House Transportation Committee, was instrumental in securing funding for the project. Rep. Weiner’s $2.5 million in federal funds, which comes from federal gasoline taxes, makes up a significant portion of the estimated $30 million needed to complete work at all of the 135 priority schools.

In addition to the 135 schools announced today, Rep. Weiner is working with Commissioner Weinshall to fast track improvements at 10 additional City schools.

“Looking both ways before crossing a street isn’t enough to protect our City’s schoolchildren,” said Rep. Weiner. “We have to stop speeding, reckless driving and collisions around our schools.”

The following schools in Rep. Weiner’s Congressional District are priority schools slated for improvements:

QUEENS

Saint Elizabeth – 94-01 85th St Ozone Park – Ozone Park

P.S. 220 (Edward Mandel School) – Forest Hills

P.S. 71 (Forest Elementary School) – Ridgewood

I.S. 250 (Robert F. Kennedy Community Middle School) – Flushing

J.H.S. 210 (Elizabeth Blackwell School) – Ozone Park

BROOKLYN

Yeshivat Ateret Torah – Ocean Parkway

*I’ll tell you, he’s no Chan.

**Duh!

***Maybe Connie Rosenblum isn’t so crotchety after all.

****And — just a guess here — if instead of “Weiner Gets $2.5 M for Safety Improvements” it read “Queens to Receive $2.5 M in Safety Improvements” I’m pretty sure no one would have bothered to look it up. Moral: If you crib from press releases, at least change the headline!

Your Sister’s Expired ATM Card . . . I Think We Get It

ATMs, like those new-fangled parking meters, are just so darn smart nowadays:

You walk up to the ATM. Feed your card into the slot, and it disappears. Maybe you get an error message.

What do you do? Contact the bank manager? Push the button and ask for customer assistance? Fiddle with the ATM numbers?

Lawrence Grey went a different route, cops say — he got a tire iron and sought vengeance on the machine.

Now he faces a felony charge.

Early on Thursday, at about 2:20 a.m., the 44-year-old Brooklyn construction worker slipped his sister’s expired ATM card into the machine at the SI Bank & Trust at 6975 Amboy Road in Tottenville, according to court papers.

When the machine wouldn’t give the card back, he tried to pry the front plate off with a tool he had on him, likely a screwdriver, then left, according to a source close to the investigation.

A few minutes later, “he came back with a tire iron, and started whaling on the machine,” the source said.

The attack cracked the face plate and damaged the wiring underneath, according to court papers.

One source estimated the damage at more than $5,000.

Bank security notified the police, but Grey was gone before they arrived, authorities said.

But a security camera caught him in the act, and a detective from the NYPD and FBI’s Joint Bank Robbery Task Force used his sister’s card to track him down, according to a law enforcement source.

He ultimately admitted to cops that he realized “what I did was stupid,” but was worried about losing his sister’s card, the source said.

So Many Lame Playground Openings, So Many Inappropriate Opportunities To Use This Lede . . . Until Now!

A perfect example of what John Sutter is talking about is when the big dailies take perfectly crafted ledes like this:

Not too long ago, when people spoke about swingers on the Lower West Side waterfront, they were probably referring to the gay cruising scene on the crumbling former shipping piers. But a new proposal to redevelop Pier 40 at Houston St., if successful, would bring a new kind of swinger to the waterfront — namely tights-clad trapeze artists with Cirque du Soleil, speaking a strange gibberish called Cirquish, no less.

. . . and bowdlerize them to resemble the sort of pablum the Post likes to print:

The acrobats of Cirque du Soleil are jumping at the chance to set up a permanent show on the Hudson River.

The Montreal-based circus — best known for its astonishing Las Vegas spectacles — is interested in opening a theater at Pier 40, at the western end of Houston Street in Hudson River Park, a Cirque spokeswoman said yesterday.

Time Was, You Could Innocently Brush Up Against Your Student’s Breast

Urban students lack even a basic understanding of science, perhaps due in part to fewer (and less!) hands-on learning opportunities:

A physics demonstration landed a Queens teacher a suspension from his job and he now faces allegations of improperly touching a student.

Teacher Leonard Brown says he’s done the demonstration on Newton’s Third Law of Motion in countless physics classes in an 18-year teaching career. But when he called a female student to the front of his class at Benjamin Cardozo High School on Nov. 15 to help illustrate that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, he got a reaction he didn’t expect.

He asked the student — from Cardozo’s elite Da Vinci Math Science Institute — to hold her hands up against his and lean against his hands with all of her weight, he said. He also put his hands on her shoulders before the demonstration.

Brown said he heard the girl claimed he touched her breast during the process — an allegation he denies.

“Assuming I wasn’t moral and ethical, I’m not stupid,” he said. “Do they think I’d be stupid enough to molest a girl in front of 34 witnesses? To me, this is absolutely insane.”

He was yanked from his classroom on Nov. 16, he said. Special schools investigator Richard Condon requested Brown’s removal from the classroom until the investigation is complete.

Kids — so touchy these days!