Maybe Health Care Reform Isn’t Such A Bad Idea After All

Which looks worse, Eli pimping plagued Toyota cars or Eli bilking St. Vincent’s as it nears bankruptcy? Tough call:

Giant quarterback Eli Manning got a lousy reception yesterday for a secret marketing deal with cash-strapped St. Vincent’s Medical Center that paid him at least $500,000 over the last three years.

After inquiries by The Post Sunday, Manning and the Greenwich Village hospital said they had canceled a $1 million pact that would have paid him $200,000 a year through 2014.

But as late as last December, Manning’s agent requested a $125,000 payment from St. Vincent’s that was months overdue, sources said.

The tardy check was finally sent to Manning’s firm, PWL Inc.

Location Scout: St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan.

This Is Like The Drug Industry Subsidizing An Anti-Health Care Astroturf Campaign

Don’t let them succeed:

An internal letter sent to liquor stores recently by the London-based liquor wholesaler Diageo reveals it has been quietly subsidizing The Last Store on Main Street, the self-proclaimed “mom and pop” coalition pushing to cork Paterson’s wine-in-groceries plan.

Earlier: Modernize New York!; So Why Can’t We Buy Wine In Grocery Stores, Like Basically Everywhere Else On The Planet?; Wine, Whine; News You Can Booze.

Buried Lede: Columbia Law School Not Nearly As Difficult As You Might Have Thought

Its students apparently have a lot of free time:

A thrifty Columbia Law School student has taken to working out regularly at the city’s legion of gyms, yoga studios and dojos — without ever paying.

“All want my nonexistent money, and they’re willing to lure me with the offer of a free session, or sometimes even a free week,” said the hard-bodied Julia Neyman, 24, who blogs about her adventures on bunsofsteal.blogspot.com.

“But I’ve got an ace up my sleeve: desperation, and the willingness to travel all over the five boroughs to make sure my workout is gratis.”

. . .

At David Barton Gym in Chelsea, Neyman struck out when she tried to flirt her way into an extended pass.

“I realized the problem of working out at a predominantly gay gym: My gender had absolutely zero pull,” she wrote on her blog.

A buff employee at the Equinox on 92nd St., where Neyman worked out, said “gym grifters” are common these days and that his branch was cracking down.

The Ballet Of Candy Wrapper-Dropping Teenagers, Beer-Swilling Longshoremen And Punch Bowl-Pooping Sociology Professors

Not so long ago observers hailed the mayor’s foresight in updating the Jane Jacobs school of thought by both preserving a neighborhood’s character and allowing for smart redevelopment. Jane Jacobs herself seemed to disagree, but whatever — it became a useful campaign talking point. Contrarian voices questioned. Then they finally pooped in the punch bowl:

[Brooklyn College sociology professor Sharon] Zukin — whose own book, “Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places,” was published in December — peered through the window at rows of glass candleholders. “Tchotchkes!” she said. “Oh, the sheer ignominy.”

Ms. Jacobs’s continuing influence on the city is clear. As Amanda M. Burden, chairwoman of the City Planning Commission, wrote a few years back, “Projects may fail to live up to Jane Jacobs’s standards, but they are still judged by her rules.”

But if Ms. Jacobs is much hailed as an urban prophet, Ms. Zukin is a heretic on her canonization. She views Ms. Jacobs as a passionate and prescient writer, but also one who failed to reckon with steroidal gentrification and the pervasive hunger of the upper middle class for ever more homogenous neighborhoods.

The pattern in places like Williamsburg and Atlantic Yards, Ms. Zukin said, is dreary and inexorable: Middle-class “pioneers” buy brownstones and row houses. City officials rezone to allow luxury towers, which swell the value of the brownstones. And banks and real estate companies unleash a river of capital, flushing out the people who gave the neighborhoods character.

Ms. Jacobs viewed cities as self-regulating organisms, and placed her faith in local residents. But Ms. Zukin argues that without more aggressive government regulation of rents and zoning, neighborhoods will keep getting more stratified.

“Jacobs’s values — the small blocks, the cobblestone streets, the sense of local identity in old neighborhoods — became the gentrifiers’ ideal,” Ms. Zukin said. “But Jacobs’s social goals, the preservation of classes, have been lost.”

Observers also love — love! — irony, and any story about Jane Jacobs now carries with it requisite colorful there-goes-the-neighborhood details:

Ms. Jacobs, who died in 2006, waged heroic war against planners who dreamed of paving the Village’s cobblestone streets, demolishing its tenements and creating sterile superblocks. Her victory in that fight was complete, if freighted with unanticipated consequences. The cobblestone remains, but the high bourgeoisie has taken over; not many tailors can afford to live there anymore. Ms. Jacobs’s old home recently sold for more than $3 million, and the ground floor harbors a boutique glass store.

. . .

Ms. Zukin recently acted as tour guide on a stroll through Ms. Jacobs’s urban village, where Irish and Italian grandmothers once watched from windows as children played on the streets, and milkmen delivered bottles as chain-smoking playwrights typed in grotty flats. It began just north of Christopher and Bleecker Streets in the West Village, once a working-class haven, then the black-leather heart of Queerdom, and now something like the back lot in a Paramount Studios version of New York.

There’s the Magnolia Bakery, where perpetual lines snake out the door not so much because of its excellent cupcakes as because of its appearance on “Sex and the City.” There’s Marc Jacobs, where the lines are no less endless. A Ralph Lauren, a Madden, and a children’s store with the most adorable petite $250 pants. Ms. Zukin sighed.

“It’s another Madison Avenue, or the Short Hills mall,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “Really, did we need that?”

What If Gossip Girl Were More Like Law & Order?

Then they’d quickly integrate really cool story lines like this into the show:

An Upper East Side all-girls prep school is accusing two elderly women in rent-controlled apartments of stalling its plan to expand to the building next door.

The Nightingale-Bamford School on East 92nd Street said it has done everything by the book since it purchased the adjacent space in 2007 for $9 million, and should be allowed to take over the four-story building.

But two women who have lived at 28 E. 92nd St. for nearly 40 years aren’t so enamored of the eviction and expansion effort.

. . .

“They are harassing two elderly women and trying to drive them out of their homes,” said lawyer David Rozenholc. “I really believe they’re heartless. They knew these elderly people lived there when they bought the building. I think it’s terrible.”