“I feel like people in Tribeca are more environmentally conscious. I see a lot of ‘Go Green’ here,” said Jessie Sung, 20, a receptionist at the Tribeca SoHo Animal Hospital. “We’ve been very adamant about it.”

Sung said she even asked her bosses to include more recycling bins at work.

“People here take it into consideration more,” she said. “When I worked in midtown, they ignored that idea.”

. . .

Tribeca and parts of lower Manhattan recycled 27.9% of their trash during fiscal year 2007, which ended last June 30.

Park Slope and parts of Carroll Gardens and Red Hook came in a close second place by recycling 27.1%.

. . .

The Mott Haven area of the Bronx got the lowest marks. Residents there recycled just 4.9% of their trash.

. . .

New Yorkers recycle about 400,000 tons of paper and about 275,000 tons of metal, glass and plastic each year, according to the Sanitation Department.

Paper, packaging and food waste make up the largest part of the city’s trash.

New York University’s three-year run as the No. 1 “dream” school for college-bound students has been derailed, according to survey rankings released yesterday.

In the last six years, Brooklyn has outpaced the rest of the city in attracting creative entrepreneurs, according to statistics from the Center for the Urban Future.

“It really is quality of life. It’s not as expensive and it’s not as busy as Manhattan. Brooklyn is hip. It has reached that level,” said Scott Adkins, a playwright who opened two writer’s spaces in Park Slope. “You’re guaranteed to have a good coffee shop.”

. . .

About 375,000 workers in the city were self-employed as of 2006 — a 23% increase from 2000, the center found.

In Brooklyn, the number of freelance writers, artists, architects, producers and interior, industrial and graphic designers increased more than 33% in the same period, compared with 6.5% in Manhattan.

That means nearly 22,000 creative freelancers live in Brooklyn – mainly in Park Slope, Williamsburg and downtown, according to the Brooklyn Economic Development Corp.

. . .

“I moved to Brooklyn in 1990 to work for Spike (Lee),” said cinematographer/photographer Frederick V. Nielson II. “At first, I was reluctant to leave Manhattan. I was like, damn, they give you a 718 area code.”

He first settled in Fort Greene, but moved to Prospect Heights after the birth of his son.

“I like the pluralism of living here. I know the guy at the candy shop. People here really patronize the local artists,” he said. “Once they’ve seen me in the neighborhood, or the diner, they’ll come up and buy my work.”

Adkins said the borough has come a long way from only a decade ago.

The shift has occurred in New York since 2000 and even earlier in Los Angeles, Dallas and a few other cities.

Economists consider it striking because the wage gap between men and women nationally has narrowed more slowly and has even widened in recent years among one part of that group: college-educated women in their 20s. But in New York, young college-educated women’s wages as a percentage of men’s rose slightly between 2000 and 2005.

The analysis was prepared by Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College, who first reported his findings in Gotham Gazette, published online by the Citizens Union Foundation. It shows that women of all educational levels from 21 to 30 living in New York City and working full time made 117 percent of men’s wages, and even more in Dallas, 120 percent. Nationwide, that group of women made much less: 89 percent of the average full-time pay for men.

Just why young women at all educational levels in New York and other big cities have fared better than their peers elsewhere is a matter of some debate. But a major reason, experts say, is that women have been graduating from college in larger numbers than men, and that many of those women seem to be gravitating toward major urban areas.

In 2005, 53 percent of women in their 20s working in New York were college graduates, compared with only 38 percent of men of that age. And many of those women are not marrying right after college, leaving them freer to focus on building careers, experts said.

Last Saturday, Williams had his celebrated chest hair measured at a barbeque in his Wil­liamsburg backyard, complete with a grill, a keg, and even a DJ. A group of photographers and a videographer were also on hand, clustered around Williams to get the best shot of the astonishing strand.

The barbeque was the culmination of Williams’s quest to get the hair into the Guinness Book of World Records. He says he didn’t set out to break the coveted record, it just happened.

One morning, Williams was “taking stock” of his nipple hair and noticed one was “really long.” Curious to see what the record was, he looked it up and found out it was only four and a half inches, considerably shorter than the hair sprouting from his own vestigal mammary gland.

Those close to Williams thought it was, well, a little odd.

“Initially, I was a little bit surprised,” said girlfriend Malika Crutchfield. “But after checking out the hair, I realized he had a shot at the record. I’m thrilled.”

. . .

Measuring duties fell to Dr. Sagat Verma, who bent over Williams and carefully extended the strand, holding it against a tape measure. Appraising nipple growths isn’t Verma’s specialty; by day, he’s an internal medicine specialist at Wyckoff Medical Center in Bushwick.

It might seem excessive to bring in a medical doctor for a single hair, but the Guinness Book requires that the measurer is a licensed doctor with “standing in the community.” And that’s just one of many complex regulations imposed on the record-breaking event. Williams filled out pages of paperwork, the hair had to be measured three times and photographed, and it had to be wet during the process.

To meet this last requirement, Crutchfield squirted bottled water on Williams’s bare chest from a couple feet away.

“That’s good,” he said, but she gave it a couple extra squirts, just to be sure.

Then Dr. Verma measured the hair while the DJ stopped the music for dramatic effect, announcing “the world’s largest nipple hair!”

“How many inches?” somebody asked before a hush came over the crowd.