Now Why Would You Go And Do That?

A Bronx cop gets busted for buying weed — in his own precinct:

A Bronx cop assigned to the “buy-and-bust” division was nabbed for scoring marijuana in the same precinct he was assigned to protect, the NYPD said.

Ten-year veteran officer, Milton Smith, 44, was arrested at 4 a.m. at University Avenue and West 179th Street for buying an unspecified amount of dope — within the boudaries of the 46th Precinct where the officer was assigned to catch dealers in sting operations, according to his wife, Dahlia.

“He was in the ‘buy-and-bust’ division or that’s what he told me,” the shocked woman told The Post. “It’s really unbelievable.”

Although they are separated, Dahlia said Smith is a “devoted father” to their son and “loves his job.”

“I can’t believe he’d be capable of something like that,” she said.

Smith, who was off-duty at the time, was charged with criminal possession of marijuana and official misconduct. He has been suspended without pay and was released without bail last night.

That’s Life In The Historic District

Residents of a condo on a landmarked Tribeca street recently asked the community board for permission to remove the bumpy cobblestones outside their building. The response was perhaps less empathetic than they expected:

“We like the look of the neighborhood, we are only trying to be practical,” Lilli Momtaz, a building resident and president of the condo board, said in an interview. One week earlier she had gone to the Landmarks Committee of Community Board 1 with what she thought was an innocent request — to pull up the ragged cobblestones and replace them with a more even surface.

. . .

“They laughed us out of the room,” said Paul Brensilber, a managing agent for 44 Laight Street who presented the residents’ case. “I’m absolutely surprised about how closed-minded they were.”

Here’s the problem for the condo owners of 44 Laight Street: Their block, which faces the Holland Tunnel Rotary, is part of the Tribeca North Historic District, a city designation that requires that any proposed changes to building facades or fixtures in the old industrial neighborhood be approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

The commission often take its cues from community boards, and below Canal Street that means passing muster with CB1’s Landmarks Committee, whose members include many longtime residents who consider the north section of the neighborhood to be the last unspoiled territory in Tribeca. Here, the cobblestones are protected and enjoy near-sacred status.

Committee member Rick Landman, who also chairs the community board’s Tribeca Committee, marveled.

“I’ve been here for 25 years, and this is the first time anyone has asked to remove cobblestones from outside their building,” he said.

“You should respect what the neighborhood is,” fumed committee member Paul Sipos. “You say it is unsightly. I take big exception to that. And as for the trouble with pushing baby strollers, well that’s life in the historic district.”

The request was swiftly voted down.

“It is rejected, thank you,” said Roger Byrom, the committee’s chairman, cutting off Brensilber as he continued to plead his case.

Keep In Mind That The Yearly Interest On $105,000 Of Credit Card Debt At An APR Of 12% Is $12,600, Or $1050 A Month, Which, If I’m Not Mistaken, Would Get You A Sweet Rental In Many New York City Neighborhoods

Brooklyn man discovers the joys of home ownership:

Even if $260,000 was a steal by New York City standards in 2004, David Petersen found the 1,100-square-foot row house, on 18th Street near Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, stiflingly narrow at 13 feet 7 inches wide, with dim light and low ceilings. “The ceiling fan would have sliced off your head,” he recalled, and the walls and floors sloped at odd angles. The home inspector’s report jumped with exclamation points: “Bowed floors!” “Lead pipe to water supply!” “Roof in bad shape!” “Walls not plumb!”

But for an independent filmmaker with no full-time job and not much in the way of savings — living, as Mr. Petersen says artists do, “in a quaking state of fear” — home ownership was an irresistible lure.

Renovations were in order, and the man put $75,000 towards them, basically the cost of a modest bathroom:

“I started with really low expectations,” Mr. Petersen said. “I wanted level floors and a dry basement.” But soon after construction began, he received a call from his next-door neighbor Vinny DeMarinis, a retired fireman who had grown up in Mr. Petersen’s new house. “How much insurance have you got?” Mr. DeMarinis asked. “I got a hole in my wall the size of a Buick.”

And, Mr. Petersen said, “therein began my sadness.”

. . .

It turned out that the walls between the houses there were only five inches thick; banging on a wall in Mr. Petersen’s house sent tremors down the street, and especially into Mr. DeMarinis’s home. “Any work done in any house,” Mr. DeMarinis said, “it’s really a block activity.” Each time he spoke with Mr. Petersen, he would greet him, “Dave, I’m sorry I ever met you.”

There were more surprises. The foundation wasn’t bad; it was nonexistent. The previous owner, Mr. DeMarinis’s brother-in-law, had carved his own basement by digging below the house and carting out five-gallon buckets of dirt. The house was structurally unsalvageable.

With renovation costs almost tripling the cost of the house, the man resorted to creative, Enron-esque financing:

Having siphoned off some of his loan money to pay for a print of his film “Let the Church Say Amen,” about a Washington storefront church, which was screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004, Mr. Petersen was approaching pennilessness, with the house nowhere near completion. He applied for a $75,000 line of credit through his film company, Beaufort 9 Films. He begged money from relatives, convincing his mother to mortgage her modest Takoma Park, Md., condo and nearly causing a familial rift. “I became like an addict,” he said. “I tried to get money from everywhere.” As renovation costs climbed to $390,000, he resorted to old-fashioned indie filmmaking methods: he used his credit cards.

But ultimately the man survived, whittling down his monthly payments to the cost of one or more used cars:

In the end, it was hardly a disaster. The bank reappraised the house at $1.25 million, allowing Mr. Petersen to take out one last loan, wipe out his $105,000 of credit card debt and lower his monthly payments to the $3,000 range (he has had to work a couple of full-time freelance jobs, as a television editor, to make them). “Suddenly I have this thing called equity,” he said. “I have worth in the eyes of the bank” — and, in theory, a little more leverage when it comes to paying for his next film.

And the man lived happily ever after . . .

Location, Location, Location: Gravesend!

The Times explains how someone actually paid $11 million for a house in Gravesend, Brooklyn:

The multimillion-dollar teardown is generally considered a suburban phenomenon, a peculiar indulgence of the well-heeled in places of grassy splendor, like Greenwich or Great Neck. But there is a quiet, out-of-the-way section of the Gravesend neighborhood in Brooklyn where it has become commonplace for houses to trade for millions of dollars, only to be torn down and replaced with ever more luxurious mansions.

The most eye-popping transaction, the one that still has real estate brokers and appraisers scratching their heads, occurred in 2003 at 450 Avenue S at the corner of East Fourth Street, where a 3,600-square-foot house on a double lot sold for $11 million, according to a deed filed with the city.

Brokers and appraisers said it might be the highest price ever paid for a house in the borough, easily surpassing the $8.5 million paid last year for a brownstone overlooking the promenade in Brooklyn Heights, the neighborhood that is normally considered the ne plus ultra of Brooklyn real estate.

Notwithstanding its high price, the house on Avenue S was torn down last year, and a 10,400-square-foot two-story mansion is going up in its place, at an additional cost of several million dollars. Like the old house, the new one has an orange tile roof — the neighborhood’s signature motif — as well as four bedrooms, five bathrooms, three half baths, a barrel-vaulted ceiling in the master bedroom, a grand double-height domed entryway and a finished basement with an exercise room and a theater.

Keep in mind that a 10,400 square-foot house translates into thirteen 800-square-foot apartments.

But beyond the tasteful grand double-height domed entryways, this case exemplifies the oft-heard maxim “location, location, location”:

In fact, it is a very particular part of Brooklyn, one where some of the wealthiest members of an extremely tight-knit enclave of Syrian Jews compete with one another for properties on a few coveted blocks of large homes around Avenues S, T and U, between the area’s main synagogues on Ocean Parkway and its most prestigious yeshiva on McDonald Avenue.

Because devout Jews are barred from driving on the Sabbath, houses within walking distance of a synagogue carry a premium. And while that has had an impact on real estate values in other Brooklyn neighborhoods, the effect could hardly be more extreme than it is in Gravesend, where house prices have risen to astonishing heights.

“This market is not dictated by interest rates or the price of real estate as a whole,” said Frank Lupi, the president of Wolf Properties, a real estate agency in Gravesend. “The houses over here, they sell very quickly, and you’re almost naming your price at this point.”

More And More We Are Finding That People Are Getting Stupider And Stupider

Unaccountably — amazingly — the pizza chains Domino’s and Papa John’s are making inroads in pizza-rich New York City:

Domino’s and Papa John’s are trying to grab a piece of the New York pizza pie.

More national chains have been popping up in the Big Apple as they try to do to the mom-and-pop pizza parlor what Home Depot and Lowe’s have done to neighborhood hardware stores.

“In the last two years, I have seen a difference, probably 10 percent,” said Dominick Abitino, 38, whose family runs four Abitino’s pizzerias in Manhattan. “It’s mostly Domino’s that eats into it.”

He added proudly, “We make all of our stuff on premises. We use high-end products. It’s a family business. We don’t do mass production in a plant and ship it out like those chains.”

And New Yorkers’ discerning palates can certainly taste the difference between the zesty sauces made by the local pizzerias and the glop slopped on by the cookie-cutter chains.

“New Yorkers know — and demand — great pizza, and the chains simply don’t offer that,” said Adam Kuban, publisher of the cheese-and-sauce-obsessed Web site SliceNY.com. “Independent pizzerias continue to thrive here, and the number of them, in my observation, has grown faster than that of the chains.”

And while the mega-chains may offer good deals, the taste buds of New Yorkers aren’t easily swayed.

“It’s not the same. It’s almost like pre-made pizza,” said Gerard Muscianesi, of Manalapan, N.J., as he chowed down on at the famous John’s Pizza on Bleecker Street in the Village. “New York pizza is still the best.”

While the major chains have seen growth in the Big Apple, there are still only 36 Domino’s, Pizza Hut, Papa John’s and Sbarro’s franchises combined in Manhattan — compared with more than 500 independent pizzerias.

What’s next? An Einstein Bros. franchise?