The new law is aimed solely at those who come with trucks or cars — not people who simply rummage through trash looking for treasures.

Mr. Klemek has been pondering the question over the past several months as he put together an exhibition on Jane Jacobs, the onetime Village resident who became an urban prophet simply by gazing out her window a few doors away from the tavern. Actually, the question does not take much to ponder. Just use Jacobs’ primary method of research: look around.

“When Jacobs was here, this was a neighborhood which included old working-class tenants from old immigrant stock, new immigrant groups, particularly Puerto Ricans who were just coming into New York in large numbers, middle-class families like her own, some affluent residents, as well as bohemian counter-cultural figures,” Mr. Klemek continued. “This is not a neighborhood that can support that broad swath of social diversity any longer. There are a few people grandfathered in there with rent control, but not new arrivals.”

In 1961, Jacobs penned one of the most famous passages in urban planning literature — maybe the only famous passage — by describing the “ballet” on that stretch of Hudson Street. Merchants swept the sidewalk in front of their stores; teenagers dropped candy wrappers as they walked by; and longshoremen dropped by the White Horse for a pint.

Now, it’s as if the packaging is the same but someone switched the contents — or maybe it’s the other way around. The small and modest buildings are, thanks to a historic district designation, not only small and modest but also twee and quaint. There are still a lot of people on the street and there are still a lot of independently owned stores.

But the teenagers are largely absent, as are the longshoremen. The deli and the hardware store passed away; the laundromat has either disappeared or turned into a dry cleaner. In the building where Jacobs, a journalist, once lived with her family is a children’s clothing store where T-shirts with a picture of the Statue of Liberty playing the guitar sell for $36. At the corner stands a Portuguese restaurant that serves “organic beef filet mignon stone-grilled at the table” for $32 — which, given the trouble they seem to go through to make it, actually sounds like a bargain. The White Horse is just about the only place that has remained the same.

. . .

Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and Astoria, Queens, come out looking pretty good, Mr. Klemek said: “Diverse people on the street at diverse times for diverse reasons.” The West Village, by contrast, is just too gentrified — or, as Jacobs, who died last year at age 89, would have called it, “oversuccessful.”

At the same time, a review of the city’s budget since 1980 shows that Mr. Bloomberg has been presiding over one of the greatest expansions of city government since the John V. Lindsay administration, fueled by an extraordinary surge in real estate revenues, both from higher property taxes and transfer taxes from sales.

Since Mr. Bloomberg took office in 2002, the city budget, adjusted for inflation, has swelled faster than it has under any other mayor during the last 27 years, increasing by 23 percent, to $60 billion.

The ruling by the judge, Richard J. Holwell of United States District Court in Manhattan, was a victory, albeit a narrow one, for the New York State Restaurant Association, which had sued the city Board of Health to challenge the regulation. In his ruling, Judge Holwell said he had banned the city from enacting the regulation because federal law already covers some of the same provisions it sought to put in place.

It was unclear whether the city would try to adopt a regulation that might satisfy the judge.

The regulation, formally known as New York City Health Code 81:50, would have forced restaurants that already voluntarily make public the nutritional information of their dishes on, say, Web sites, posters or tray liners to post that information either on their menus or menu boards.

They started bringing in exterminators weekly rather than once a month, sealing up every hole they could find, and reminding employees to keep food containers shut and garbage packed tight.

But one fast-food chain went even further. At half a dozen White Castles in the city, the surrounding shrubs have been ripped out and the parking lots have been paved over.

During a visit last month to the White Castle on Webster Avenue in the Tremont section of the Bronx, a few weeks after the offending greenery had been removed, John Vogt, regional director of the chain’s restaurant operations, said he lives in fear that someone will catch sight of a rat outside.

“If you were in the drive-through and saw a rat scurrying next to a wall, no matter where it came from, you would think it was from the restaurant,” Mr. Vogt said. “It might turn you off from ever coming back.”