Maybe You Like The Idea Of Your Children Attending A School In The Flightpath Of LaGuardia Airport*

Opposition is organizing in and around Queens’ Iron Triangle in the next great eminent domain battle:

. . . 10 businesses have taken a stand and formed the Willets Point Industry and Realty Association, intent on fighting tooth and nail for their rights.

The City plans to relocate all the businesses from the area adjacent to Shea Stadium and start fresh with 5,500 residential units, 1.7 million square feet of retail and entertainment space, nearly 1 million square feet of office and convention center space, a 650-pupil school, a hotel, a park and eight acres of green space.

This is the last thing Dan Feinstein, of Feinstein Steel Works, wants to see happen.

“We’ll use every means under the law to protect ourselves,” he said. “We’ll do whatever we have to, to make sure the city doesn’t screw us.”

This City has said on record that it is looking out for the Willets Point businesses and is in negotiations to relocate them. However, Daniel Sambucci Jr., of Sambucci Bros. Salvage Yards, said this is misleading.

“We’ve had meetings and they’ve shown me properties for $40 million,” he said. “But the city doesn’t own the property and they don’t know how they’re going to get it.”

Sambucci said he is worried there is not enough property in the city zoned for heavy industrial to accommodate all the businesses.

“They don’t have a final development plan, a developer — they don’t know how much it’s going to cost and they don’t know where they can move us,” he said.

. . .

In 1991, a study conducted by the City’s Economic Development Corporation found Willets Point would flourish once sewers and basic services were provided, however, this has yet to happen.

“This place would look completely different by now if they had done what the study suggested,” Dan Scully, of Tully Environmental, said. “But [former Borough President] Claire Shulman ignored it.”

Anthony J. Fodera, president Fodera Foods, said the problems of Willets Point is a story of purposeful neglect.

“We call the police or 311 and once we tell them were we are they say ‘oh you’re in that area,’ and never come,” he said.

Feinstein said the business owners are not so stubborn that they would impede the public good but the redevelopment plans do not serve the public good more than his company does.

“If they were planning on building an airport or needed a state highway here, we’re not happy but we understand,” he said. “But don’t say you don’t like my house and your friend’s going to build another one.”

*But most parents don’t — and that’s saying nothing of the idea of staying at a hotel in the flightpath, or attending a concert in the flightpath (is any soundproofing that good?), much less actually living in the flightpath.

Backstory: “Trendy” Willets Point?; Willets Point Junkyards Threatened!; If By “Vibrant And Attractive New Urban Community” You Mean A Superfund Site In A Flood Plain In The Flight Path To LaGuardia, Then I’m Right There With Ya!; First You Tap That Ass, Then You Tax It; Don’t Worry — That’s Just 20 Minutes Of War In Iraq.

Location Scout: Iron Triangle.

Start Spreading The News . . . He’s Running Today

Because Hillary is so far to the left and Rudy is so far to the right you need exactly the right kind of candidate to thread the needle and sway the roughly eight people in the country who might actually give a poop that Bloomberg would run. And yet the New York Press gives him the full OJ treatment in “If He Did It”:

To all outward appearances, the Bloomberg plan seems to be running exactly according to schedule. Here’s what happens next.

According to several experienced campaign observers, Bloomberg has a few months to continue laying low, periodically bursting into the news and then issuing his presidential denials. He cannot be coy, and he cannot let the anticipation morph into expectation. There is much he can learn — though he probably does not need to be taught — from the experience of Fred Thompson, the former Tennessee senator and “Law & Order” district attorney, who toyed with the idea for so long that the story had already become stale by the time he declared.

Bloomberg and his advisers know something about marketing. If he does run and intends to win, he will need to sell himself as the fresh alternative. Products cannot be sold as new for 12 months. Bloomberg and those around him with their marketing expertise would understand this. Even if Bloomberg has definitively made up his mind to run — as many who have watched him closely believe he has — part of the way to win would be to keep things under wraps for now.

But No, You Just Had To Go Where Everybody Knows Your Name, Didn’t You?

It’s unwise to become a regular at a bar that you’ve held up once already:

News of the first holdup spread quickly: On Sept. 23, shortly after 2 p.m., two men entered Red Hook Bait and Tackle on Van Brunt Street, as laid-back a tavern as they come, with lots of mounted fish and taxidermy specimens. The bartender, a woman, was alone in the place, cleaning a restroom and just opening for the day. The men asked to use a restroom, and when they returned, one was wearing a mask and the other a bandanna over his face, and both held black handguns.

. . .

The bartender banged on neighbors’ doors until someone opened up and untaped her, said another bartender at Red Hook Bait and Tackle, who, fearful of a suspect still at large, gave his name only as Chris P., 30.

The following Sunday, Sept. 30, the men struck again, the police said, this time at Moonshine, a bar nearby on Columbia Street. About 3 p.m., one man entered, used the bathroom, left the bar and returned wearing a hat pulled low and with another man in a mask.

“They made my customer lay on the floor,” said the bartender, Marni Ludwig, 31. “They held a gun to my head and I gave them the money. They were angry that I didn’t have more money.” The men fled with less than $1,000, again in an S.U.V., the police said.

But this time, surveillance cameras photographed the first man as he approached the bathroom, showing a distinctive teardrop tattoo on his face, said Sgt. Joseph LaBella of the 76th Precinct detective squad. Officers circulated a sketch of the man in area bars.

The next Sunday passed without incident. Then, this past Sunday, Chris P., the bartender at Bait and Tackle, was killing the last minutes of his shift, which took him into the early hours of Monday, with seven or eight friends.

“It’s about 3 a.m.,” he said yesterday. “I see a man and a woman walk in the bar.”

“I notice he has the teardrop by his eye,” Chris said. “I think, ‘This is definitely the suspect.’ They ordered some shots of tequila. They wanted limes and salt.”

Chris said he went to the end of the bar and told a friend, “who happened to be one of the more sober people in the place, to call the cops. I told him in a hushed voice.”

The Gowanus Canal Has The Clap

You might be wondering how a body of water can catch a venereal disease. So is everyone:

Scientists have discovered that the long-contaminated Gowanus Canal is not just toxic, it’s also infected with gonorrhea.

The cringe-inducing find was revealed by New York City College of Technology biologist Dr. Niloufar Haque in this month’s Scienceline, an NYU publication.

While developers have envisioned the canal someday turning Brooklyn into a bit of Venice with idyllic gondola rides, Haque’s team found their own emergence of hanky-panky in the Gowanus’ waters.

“One group of students found gonorrhea in a water drop,” the professor told Scienceline.

It’s not the first time the toxic waterway — dubbed the Lavender Lake because of its oily, purplish hue — has come up positive with disease. In the mid-1970s, the channel was found to contain typhus, typhoid and cholera.

Location Scout: Gowanus Canal.

Spent Ten Years In Long Island City And Neither CVS Nor Gristedes’ Felt Any Pity . . . We Carried Groceries From Everywhere! The Bodega’s Prices, They Were Never Fair!

Only in New York will thousands of “settlers” “homestead” a “neighborhood” years before even basic infrastructure needs are met:

The settlers of a neighborhood called Queens West do not exactly have to plow the earth for their sustenance, but they do have to lug their groceries in from Manhattan or Brooklyn, often on crowded subway cars. Many just buy their groceries online.

There is no supermarket in Queens West, the name used by real estate agents and residents of this luxury community rising in the borough’s Hunters Point section, and the selection at nearby convenience stores is limited and pricey.

So in an oft-repeated daily ritual, a white truck stamped with a FreshDirect logo arrives at the doorstep of a high-rise building. A deliveryman hops out to unload box upon box of veggies, cold cuts, cereal and more. The truck is then off to the next multimillion-dollar high-rise.

This fading industrial sector may be experiencing a renewed vitality because of its perch across the East River from Midtown, but its renaissance is at a quirky phase: The influx of residents is outpacing the goods and services that make a neighborhood. It is a car without an engine, a cup of ramen noodles awaiting a splash of hot water.

FreshDirect, the online grocery delivery company whose headquarters are near Queens West, has therefore become essential since it began service to the community in August 2005. But the community’s point-and-click culture faces a drastic — and for some, welcome — change early next year.

Rockrose Development Corporation, one of the major developers in the area, recently signed an agreement with the Amish Market to open a 21,000-square-foot store on the ground floor of one of its buildings. The supermarket, along with a Duane Reade drugstore, is expected to open early next year, signs that Queens West could be maturing from a settlement to a community.