Come on, you know Staten Islanders get upset about this kind of stuff*:

Just about everyone on Belmar’s beaches is there for the same purpose: To lounge on the sand in a swimsuit and soak up some sun.

Until, that is, the mayor of the Jersey Shore town says something offensive to pit them against each other.

In this case, it’s the Jerseyans against the Staten Islanders, the natives against the allegedly noisome summer renters.

In the July 4 issue of his weekly newsletter, Mayor Ken Pringle talks about an “SI girl behaving badly” after she got into a fight with a peer at a club.

“As the Staten Island girl was pummeling the Boonton girl’s face, she used the hand she was still holding her drink glass in,” the newsletter reads. “Now, we’re not sure if the glass was stuck to her hand cause of all the hair spray or if this is a technique Staten Island girls learn in Brownies, but we are thankful she left her brass knuckles and straight razor in her other purse.”

The slurs occasioned a furor among Island residents who frequent the shore, even inspiring one councilman to tell people to “avoid (Pringle’s) town like the plague.”

And the newsletter didn’t only single out Staten Island girls. It also talked about “guidos” from just about anywhere — they’re “as welcome as, oh, Canada Geese” — and “blondes” who apparently told a code enforcement officer they had a mountain of garbage in the backyard because they didn’t know how to take out the trash.

. . .

Pringle said he started the newsletter last year to remind renters about the rules after people who bought houses in the area started complaining about noise from summer renters. He said the newsletter goes out to 300 or so summer tenants from the tri-state area and addresses issues such as noise, maintaining clean properties and other quality-of-life laws.

“It was designed to be funny but at the same time give them information and keep them out of harm’s way,” Pringle said. “Mainly, I try to make it enjoyable and interesting to read.”

He said the snarky newsletters have been effective and that the number of noise summonses has drastically decreased, but he added that it’s not worth the commotion he has stirred up and that this week’s newsletter will be his last. It will include an apology to anyone he offended.

Full text here:

In our never-ending quest to keep our summer renters informed and our wider readership amused, we have culled the Belmar police blotter for items of potential educational value to our readers. Which brought us to a reported incident earlier this summer in which two women had a spat in (you’ll never guess) D’Jais. Now, if that isn’t shocking enough, hold on to your seat: One of the women was from Staten Island!! (Unbelievable, right? Only one of the women? We thought all of the women in D’Jais are from Staten Island.). The other woman was from, of all places, Boonton, NJ, which according to Google maps appears to be a suburb of either Towaco or Hibernia. (We’re guessing the Boonton girl was either in D’Jais on some kind of sick bet, or was practicing for an audition on Survivor.

Then again, maybe she just happened by, saw the people on the line out front, and thought, “Cool, a costumeparty!”). Anyway, the spat ended the way most fights with SI girls do. The SI woman grabbed the Boonton woman by the hair (we’re told that in Staten Island, this is the female equivalent of a guy kicking another guy in the groin — only without the warm and friendly connotations) — and began punching her face in. We realize, so far, this is not exactly newsworthy. Journalistically speaking, “SI woman punches other woman” is right up there with “Dog bites man.” But here’s the twist: As the Staten Island girl was pummeling the Boonton girl’s face, she used the hand she was still holding her drink glass in. Now, we’re not sure if the glass was stuck to her hand cause of all the hair spray or if this is a technique Staten Island girls learn in Brownies, but we are thankful she left her brass knuckles and straight razor in her other purse.

*They can be sensitive, you know.

And we’re not talking no fun-and-games “big rock candy mountain” version, either:

Be they surreptitiously sipped from brown paper bags or openly downed from plastic tumblers at movie nights or concerts in an array of parks, drinks of all stripes and potencies surface in force, rather brazenly. And thus the hazy morning of the next summer day is often contemplated through the secondary haze of a hangover.

Citizens of New York City, welcome Brooklyn-born Steve Guttenberg back to the east coast:

About two years ago, Steve Guttenberg walked into the showbiz haunt Crustacean on Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

“I walked in and the maitre d’ made a big deal for me,” said Mr. Guttenberg. The Goot — as he’s known to his friends — appreciated the show. To hear him tell it, eating in public in Los Angeles is a dangerous business for an actor whose last box office hit was Three Men and a Baby in 1987.

“All of a sudden, the maitre d’ says, ‘Get out of the way!’” said Mr. Guttenberg. “And they literally threw me to the side and Tom Cruise came in. And he sat Tom Cruise and said, ‘I’m so sorry, but you know, Tom Cruise.’ And I’m like, ‘Holy fuck.’”

So after three decades in L.A., he bought a place on the Upper West Side. “I came to New York to find a better life,” he said. Uprooting took some time. The 15-year-old golden retriever he loved dearly was old and sick; the golden died a month ago. So two weeks ago, the wavy-haired, Brooklyn-born 49-year-old actor, who describes his career as a “32-year-overnight success,” finally made it back to New York City.

. . .

Mr. Guttenberg was wearing a starched white V-neck, a pair of black aviators hooked at the V, distressed jeans ripped at the knee, and some Wallabees. Textbook Hollywood-casual.

“I turned around, and took a good look at myself, and I didn’t like what I saw,” he continued. “I started to lose some of my values. Hollywood is a place where people spend more than they make to impress people they don’t like, who don’t care anyway. And I have a certain weakness of character, and I’m at this point in my life, I’m not strong enough to live there.

“I pop out of bed at 6:30. And I say my prayers, and every day have a little hot water and lemon, that’s my start,” he said. “And I go take a run in Central Park.” The other day, he met an attractive female jogger. Got her digits. They went on a date. Didn’t work out, but last Thursday he took a blond Cornell grad to the Water Club.

“Nothing sexier than a smart woman,” he said. “The Goot is on the loose.”

. . .

The Goot does have his vices.

“I indulge in wine, and I love vodka, I do,” he said. “And I love scotch, you know. And I love weed. And I love women. And I do have, you know, those … Addiction is such an overused word. Addiction is just someone famous walking around the street. It’s so whacked out, but I think that there are certainly times that I use money to make me feel better.” A couple years ago, he got in a big fight with his mom, and he bought her a $25,000 diamond necklace.

“If I feel lousy, I’ll do what the next president of the United States did: smoke a joint,” he said. “It’s documented in his book. I’ll go into a bar and down two beers. I’ll go out with women, because it’ll make me feel better. Women that I shouldn’t be around, but maybe they’ll make me feel better.”

Screw the stupid frieze:

As players were beseeched by countless members of the news media to eulogize Yankee Stadium as it hosts its last All-Star Game, those sufficiently provoked Monday were willing to discuss what they would not miss about the old — very old — ballpark in the Bronx.

Players from the past had no problem saying goodbye to the Astrodome’s rats and Candlestick Park’s hurricane-force winds. Today’s All-Stars have their own reasons to dry their eyes at Yankee Stadium’s funeral.

“The smell,” the Texas Rangers’ Michael Young said.

“The tiny clubhouse,” Justin Duchscherer of the Oakland Athletics added.

“Hitting my head on the dugout,” the Chicago White Sox’ Joe Crede offered. “Every time somebody scored or got a hit, you jumped up and forgot how low the ceiling is in there.”

Yankee Stadium is holding up about as well as any 85-year-old can be expected to, but the ballpark’s 1970s facelift has begun to droop. Players found reasons for moving on easy to come up with.

Olfactory issues led the voting, although few players were able to identify what the problem has been. Is one of Babe Ruth’s half-eaten hot dogs still rotting under one of the grandstands? Are the foul lines marked with sulfur? And how long does pine tar keep, anyway?

“Especially when it rains, the smell that comes up through the drainage system is not pretty,” said Jason Varitek of the Boston Red Sox. “It affects your sinuses, I’ll tell you that much.”

Young added: “It depends on the day. The last time we were there, which was a couple of weeks ago, a pipe burst. I was going back up the tunnel, and there was a flood — a sewer line broke or something like that. So I still have that kind of in my nose right now.”

Location Scout: Yankee Stadium.

If they let people in more often, maybe they’d see they’d get better press than the occasional Anheuser-Busch local reax story:

Local lore has it that Budweiser is, or at one point famously was, the drink of choice in Breezy Point, a flyspeck of a beach community that sits at the western tip of the Rockaways. The talk is that Breezy Point’s ZIP code — 11697 — once had the highest per capita consumption of Budweiser in the world.

And so it was with bitterness, and resignation, that many Breezy Point locals met the news on Monday that Anheuser-Busch, the St. Louis-based maker of Budweiser, was to be sold to a Belgian company for $52 billion.

“I don’t like it, I don’t like it a bit,” Mr. Dooley said. Then he raised his empty glass, which the bartender, Tom Coady, promptly refilled.

Breezy Point is overwhelmingly Irish-American, with an official year-round population of 4,226, a figure that is estimated to more than double in the summer. It is also fiercely insular, a private community that is run as a cooperative with its own security force.

A reporter and a photographer, setting out to gauge local reaction to Anheuser-Busch’s sale on Monday, were intercepted by a security guard at the community’s tiny shopping plaza, escorted back to the bungalow that houses Breezy Point’s security headquarters (along with several boxes of Budweiser cans confiscated from local teenagers), and tersely told to leave town. Officials later relented, and gave the reporter and photographer the go-ahead, so long as they promised to leave within the hour.

One hour, as it turned out, proved to be enough time to capture at least a fleeting sense of the devoutness instilled in the people of Breezy Point: They are as committed to their favorite beer as they are to their privacy. They would continue drinking Bud, they said, so long as its price and taste stayed the same.

Try explaining this PSA to your children:

City transit officials have prepared a campaign to combat deviants who grope or molest women on the subway — but have been sitting on it because of fears the ads could actually encourage sickos.

The New York City Transit campaign was set into motion after a study last year by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer found that 10 percent of women surveyed reported having been sexually abused in the subway and 63 percent claimed to have been sexually harassed.

Stringer recommended a publicawareness campaign, which NYC Transit quietly prepared. The agency made it as far as developing mock-ups, which never went to print.

Sources said the agency held off on launching the campaign out of fear it could actually provoke deviant behavior.

. . .

Anti-groping campaigns have been launched in cities such as Boston, where trains and buses are adorned with posters bearing such slogans as “Rub against me and I’ll expose you,” and “Flash someone and you’ll be exposed.”

The number of reported groping incidents there did rise with the campaign, officials said. Boston police said there were 38 incidents reported through June of this year compared with 17 during the same period last year — but attributed the rise to increased reporting.

In case you were wondering why there’s dog crap all over 189th street this is all you need to know:

The Bronx teen throws gum wrappers on the street, doesn’t reuse plastic bags from the store and doesn’t have a compact fluorescent light bulb in her bedroom.

A student at University Heights High School, the 17-year-old is like many of her friends in the neighborhood. They don’t care about environmental issues.

“Global warming is going to be coming thousands of years from now,” she said. “We’re not going to be alive, so I don’t care.”

“No matter what, I’m gonna die by growing old or getting shot or something,” said Brian Fermin, 12, of Middle School 206.

Some neighborhood kids said global warming is inevitable, and they don’t see how their involvement could help.

And some teens have other things occupying their minds.

“I am more about boys than I am about my environment,” Brittaney said.

Also, they said, no one they know recycles or even picks up trash from the sidewalk.

It wouldn’t be a Times article if it weren’t dripping with condescension, so slippery when wet:

Tens of thousands of people flocked to Central Park on Saturday to cheer on not only their favorite, oft-ridiculed rock band, but their favorite, oft-ridiculed state: New Jersey.

They crossed the Hudson River from Jersey City, Franklin Township and other parts of New Jersey to attend a free concert by Bon Jovi, the rock group from the Garden State that once released an album titled, simply, “New Jersey.”

“I would say 98 percent of the state loves Bon Jovi,” said Cheryl Vergara, 33, an administrative assistant from Clifton, N.J., one of thousands of people in a line that stretched for about 15 blocks on Fifth Avenue alongside the park on Saturday afternoon as they waited for the entrance at East 72nd Street to open.

. . .

On Saturday, about two hours before the concert began, Mr. Bon Jovi, wearing sunglasses, and three of his bandmates sat on a bench outside their dressing room trailer and answered questions from reporters about scalpers (”We did what we could for our fans,” he said), their set list (”Nothing but hits, baby”) and the experience of playing Central Park.

“It feels fantastic,” Mr. Bon Jovi said. “It’s pretty rarefied air to play the Great Lawn.”

Who knew? I still don’t understand why it’s not in the zoo:

For decades, the proud seal of New York City, with its depiction of a sailor and a Manhattan Indian, of beavers and flour barrels and the sails of a windmill, has celebrated 1625 as the year the city was founded.

There’s just one problem: Most historians say the year has hardly any historical significance.

The first settlers arrived in what would become part of New York City on a Dutch ship as early as 1623; some say 1624. The Dutch “purchased” Manhattan in 1626. The first charter was granted in 1653.

And the most notable event of 1625? Dutch settlers moved their cattle to Lower Manhattan from Governors Island.

“It is simply wrong,” Michael Miscione, the Manhattan borough historian, said of 1625 as the city’s birth date. “The first founding settlers of New York City landed here in 1624.”

. . .

The story of how the city arrived at 1625 as its founding year, however, seems a uniquely New York narrative. It entails machinations to glorify the Dutch, humiliate the British and, some believe, outdo Boston, thereby underscoring how in New York even something as seemingly inviolable as the city’s birthday is subject to political manipulation.

. . . better art nearly drowns and kills:

A pair of kayakers who paddled too close to the New York City Waterfalls installation under the Brooklyn Bridge nearly drowned when swift currents and the falls’ suction mechanism capsized their boat, police said.

“I wanted to get a closer look at the waterfalls, and then it sucked us in,” said Vladimer Spector, 37, one of the two men plucked from the East River by the NYPD Harbor Patrol.

He and Bert Rosenblatt, 36, were part of a group of real estate developers who left Red Hook for a tour of the falls with the nonprofit Long Island City Community Boathouse.

As they approached the waterfall, they started to lose control of their boat, police said.

“They were too enthralled with the waterfalls,” said John McGarvey, one of the outing’s coordinators.

By the time the pair realized the power of the water, it was too late.

“I lost my shoes because the current was so strong,” said Rosenblatt, who lives in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, and owns Vicus Partners on Madison Ave. “My life didn’t flash before my eyes or anything like that, but I was definitely scared.”

The falls were turned off for 15 minutes during the rescue.

Recession widens, detergent makers hardest hit:

Higher fuel and water prices mean the cost of a load of wash is spinning out of control for the city’s cash-strapped residents.

“We try to wash a lot of the clothing in the sink at home,” said Bianca Vaugean, 14, a Harlem ninth-grader who does all the laundry for her family of seven.

The family’s dishes had to share sink space after the price on the large washing machines at the 134th St. laundromat jumped from $3.25 to $5.25, she said.

City residents also report skipping washes and cramming the machines to get the most bang for their buck.

“I saw the price on the large dryer go up two dollars last week and I was shocked,” said Mary Ann Hart, 33, at a Bay Ridge laundromat at 79th St. and Third Ave. “I am going to have to stretch our usage from every week to every other week.”

Laundromats are taking a beating because of rising utility costs, said a trade expert.

“There isn’t another small business that has been hit as hard as the Laundromat,” said Brian Wallace, president of the Coin Laundry Association. “Costs are trickling down to the people in the poorer neighborhoods who can least afford it.”

During the last month, rates have been steadily bubbling up citywide — jumping as much as 40%.

The vestigial cabaret laws that the Giuliani administration used to crack down on quality of life violations may be overhauled by the Bloomberg administration:

City Hall is looking to eliminate — or at least loosen — the cumbersome cabaret license so more bars and businesses can allow patrons to let loose, the Daily News has learned.

“We either want to eliminate the license or establish a different license so that it would be less onerous for people to engage in dancing,” said a source close to the mayor.

The 82-year-old license “as it exists doesn’t offer a reasonable opportunity for New Yorkers to dance at clubs,” the City Hall source said.

The administration is in talks with the Consumer Affairs Department, which issues the licenses, and the NYPD, which enforces them, to make the change.

It is also considering forming a task force to examine the issue.

“I’d be tickled if we could get reform on this. New York City is the only city in the world where there is a law that makes dancing illegal,” said John McGarvey, a spokesman for Metropolis in Motion, a group fighting to change the law.

As the 1926 law stands, three or more people can’t dance unless a bar or restaurant has a cabaret license — even if music and liquor are allowed.

There are 181 licensed cabarets in New York, according to Consumer Affairs, and most are limited to techno-thumping clubs in Manhattan.

During former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s quality-of-life campaign in 1997, police cracked down on venues without a cabaret license and the law became a quick way to shut down out-of-control nightclubs.

Charlie Rangel, strong supporter of affordable housing initiatives:

While aggressive evictions are reducing the number of rent-stabilized apartments in New York, Representative Charles B. Rangel is enjoying four of them, including three adjacent units on the 16th floor overlooking Upper Manhattan in a building owned by one of New York’s premier real estate developers.

Mr. Rangel, the powerful Democrat who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, uses his fourth apartment, six floors below, as a campaign office, despite state and city regulations that require rent-stabilized apartments to be used as a primary residence.

Mr. Rangel, who has a net worth of $566,000 to $1.2 million, according to Congressional disclosure records, paid a total rent of $3,894 monthly in 2007 for the four apartments at Lenox Terrace, a 1,700-unit luxury development of six towers, with doormen, that is described in real estate publications as Harlem’s most prestigious address.

The current market-rate rent for similar apartments in Mr. Rangel’s building would total $7,465 to $8,125 a month, according to the Web site of the owner, the Olnick Organization.

The Olnick Organization and other real estate firms have been accused of overzealous tactics as they move to evict tenants from their rent-stabilized apartments and convert the units into market-rate housing.

Tensions are especially inflamed in Harlem, where the rising cost of living and the arrival of more moneyed residents have triggered anxiety over the future of the historically black neighborhood. And Vantage Properties, a company established by Olnick’s former chief operating officer, has attracted billions in private equity financing by promising investors that it can aggressively convert tens of thousands of rent-stabilized apartments, many in Harlem.

Yet Mr. Rangel, a critic of other landlords’ callousness, has been uncharacteristically reticent about Olnick’s actions.

State officials and city housing experts said in interviews that while the law does not bar tenants from having more than one rent-stabilized apartment, they knew of no one else with four of them.

. . .

Mr. Rangel, 78, declined to answer questions during a telephone interview, saying that his housing was a private matter that did not affect his representation of his constituents.

“Why should I help you embarrass me?” he said, before abruptly hanging up.

Olnick officials declined to discuss when or why they decided to permit Mr. Rangel to lease multiple rent-stabilized units. Asked why he had been allowed to use one as an office, Jeanette Bocchino, a spokeswoman for the company, replied: “This is a private matter for the Olnick Organization and Mr. Rangel to evaluate.”

I don’t know, closing lanes on Broadway to allow for cafe seating sounds like a great way to reduce soaring asthma rates:

In a surprising reshaping of the urban landscape, the city is creating a public esplanade along a portion of one of its most prominent streets, Broadway in Midtown, setting aside the east side of the roadway for a bicycle lane and a pedestrian walkway with cafe tables, chairs, umbrellas and flower-filled planters.

The esplanade, which the city is calling Broadway Boulevard, will run from 42nd Street to Herald Square. Scheduled to open in mid-August, it will change that section of Broadway from a four-lane to a two-lane street.

“I’m envisioning it as a public park on the street,” said Barbara Randall, the executive director of the Fashion Center Business Improvement District, which is working with the city’s Department of Transportation to create the boulevard.

The work, which has begun without a formal public announcement, reflects Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s sweeping vision of reducing pollution and traffic congestion in New York, and particularly Manhattan, by increasing open space and encouraging bike riding and other alternatives to cars.

The plan also makes clear that the Bloomberg administration, after losing its bid in Albany for a congestion-pricing plan that would have fought traffic by charging drivers to enter the area of Manhattan below 59th Street, intends to push ahead with smaller-scale initiatives to wrest at least part of the street from cars and trucks.

Because between Joey the slice guy and a four-bedroom house under $300,000, it’s really no contest:

Atlanta sounded pretty good to Scott Merritt while he was squeezed into his parents’ home on Long Island with his wife and two children.

He took a new job in the Georgia capital and moved his family to a $275,000 house in the suburbs with four bedrooms, a two-car garage, and a yard with a swimming pool. It came at a cost to his New York sensibilities.

“I haven’t found a single slice of pizza I have been remotely satisfied with,” Mr. Merritt, 34, said. “I am not going to the corner pharmacy and being welcomed by name any longer. It was a culture shock.”

The Merritts are among throngs of New Yorkers relocating to Georgia for affordable housing, a lower cost of living, a thriving job market, and warmer winters. Displaced Northerners must adjust to Southern accents, a slower lifestyle, restaurants that close early, a ban on Sunday liquor sales, and a reverence for “Gone With the Wind.”

They’re hunkering down by sticking together. New Yorkers in Atlanta have their own group on MySpace.com, and crowd athletic venues when the Mets, Islanders, or Jets visit. One exile has a Web log called Voted Off the Island.

“We have this pocket of all relocated New Yorkers who hang out together,” Mr. Merritt said. “All damn Yankees.”

About 40,000 New Yorkers resettled in Atlanta between 2000 and 2005, double the number from any other state, according to the Atlanta Regional Commission. An additional 14,000 came from New Jersey. Atlanta gained 1 million people in the past seven years, the most of any American metropolitan area. It added 177,549 jobs from 2003 to 2006.

“There is a huge migration from high-cost areas to lower-cost areas, and Atlanta is a big beneficiary,” a senior economist with Wachovia Corp. in Charlotte, N.C., Mark Vitner, said.

. . . but the wide-open Greenpoint waterfront is a much, much better place to station fireworks barges in front of:

Organizers of the annual pyrotechnics spectacular moved the East River display so far south this year that a horde of sightseers - unaware of the changes - made a last-second dash from Long Island City toward the Brooklyn border to get a glimpse, witnesses said.

Stunned crowds that had waited all day at Gantry Plaza State Park bolted down Center Blvd. and Second St. when they realized the fireworks barges had moved.

“It looked like a slow lava flow of people - thousands of people rushing - women, children, babies,” said Steve Loehner, 45, who watched the scene unfold from his 40th-floor apartment on 48th Ave. near Center Blvd.

“If you’re going to break with the tradition there, you’d like to think that you’re improving upon it, that you’re not really messing it up for a huge amount of people,” Loehner added.

Fikre Ayele, 43, felt sorry for guests at his Fourth of July party, who put up with security checks and parking headaches to get to his sixth-floor apartment.

As it turned out, the best view they got was on TV. “It totally defeats the purpose,” Ayele said.

Equally disappointed were customers at waterfront eateries who hoped to see the fireworks up close.

“We could still see them, but it’s not anywhere near the impact of having them directly in front of you,” said Andrea Botur, 40, vice president of Tennisport, a mixed tennis facility and restaurant at Second St. and Borden Ave.

Macy’s spokesman Orlando Veras explained the move was an attempt to let more New Yorkers — albeit along the FDR Drive and not in Queens — see fireworks that explode only 300 feet high.

Normally, viewing on the FDR Drive is from 42nd St. to 23rd St., but this year it extended down to Houston St. — just a few blocks shy of the Williamsburg Bridge.

. . .

NBC spokeswoman Wendy Luckenbill denied reports the network pressured Macy’s to switch this year’s location.

Hmm.

If they get stuck — and they do — there’s nowhere to go but down:

Dozens of people on the Bronx Zoo’s Skyfari ride were stranded more than 100 feet in the air for about five hours last night when the tram broke down.

“My son was really, really frightened,” said Olga Perez, of New City, who was on the ride.

“I said, ‘Everything’s going to be OK.’

“One of my nephews got scared. He was screaming, ‘I can’t take this anymore!’ ”

The nephews and son were in another car, and Perez had to talk to them by cellphone.

The cars, which glide along cables 112 feet in the air, ground to a halt at 5:27 p.m., with 30 adults and seven children on board, police said.

The last passengers got off at 10:20 p.m. There were no injuries, but a pregnant woman was taken to Jacobi Hospital for observation.

But I guess you have a better view at 15 CPW:

Remember that rumored $90 million listing at 15 Central Park West? It was nothing.

Dolly Lenz, New York City’s most gargantuan real estate agent, broke astounding news at Portofio’s Four Seasons get-together this morning: “There are a few apartments on the market at 15 CPW, a new development on Central Park West, asking somewhere between $80 and $125 million — three different apartments — and one quietly on the market at $150 million,” she said.

Wowzah. Brokers have already made it known that two condos in the Robert A.M. Stern-designed blockbuster building are being offered at $80 and $90 million, so Ms. Lenz’s quote not only means that there’s a third apartment on the market in the building for somewhere between $80 and $125 million, but that there’s a fourth spread whose owner wants $150 million.

That would be more than any single-family residential property in New York City has ever asked for.

See also: Borough of Tenafly, New Jersey 2008 Municipal Budget.

Clyde Haberman can’t say it so I will — Charles Barron is totally fucking disgusting for apologizing for Robert Mugabe in 2008. Wow:

Foreign leaders aren’t routinely honored with receptions at New York’s City Hall. In the last two decades, as best as we can tell, only two Africans have received this red-carpet treatment.

One was the revered Nelson Mandela. That was in 1990, when David N. Dinkins was mayor. Mr. Mandela had been released four months earlier from his 27 years of imprisonment in South Africa.

The other leader was President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. Not many people put his name and “revered” together.

Perhaps they once did, when he led the liberation of his country, then called Rhodesia, from oppressive rule by its white minority. But by 2002, when he was ushered into New York’s seat of democracy, he was a certified human rights disaster.

Rights groups condemned him for jailing and torturing political opponents, for repressing independent-minded judges and journalists, for starving many of his people by denying government food aid to opposition-dominated districts.

His signature program, the seizure of white-owned farms, was blamed for contributing to mass hunger and for amounting to a land grab that benefited only his loyalists.

This was the man warmly welcomed at City Hall under the aegis of the City Council’s Black, Hispanic and Asian Caucus. His main host was Councilman Charles Barron of Brooklyn, a former Black Panther who has lost none of his zest for revolutionary oratory, 1960s-style.

Only a dozen of the Council’s 51 members attended the event. But the many who stayed away, fearing the third-rail potential of a racially sensitive issue, acquiesced with their silence. Gifford Miller, then the Council speaker, issued a statement calling the reception a matter of free speech.

Six years later, the human-rights situation in Zimbabwe has hardly improved. A runoff presidential election set for Friday has been marked by violence, with dozens of opposition supporters reported to have been killed. The opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, though he won the first election round, withdrew from the race and took refuge in the Dutch Embassy. On Wednesday, no less than Mr. Mandela registered strong disapproval, condemning the “tragic failure of leadership” in Zimbabwe.

Given all that, might Mr. Barron harbor second thoughts about having brought Mr. Mugabe into City Hall?

“Absolutely not,” the councilman said.

“Does he do things that I disagree with? Yes,” Mr. Barron said. But he clearly still regards Mr. Mugabe as a liberator more than an oppressor. “You didn’t care about black Africans when whites were killing them in Rhodesia,” he said. As he sees it, the real reason that Mr. Mugabe has come under strong attack from the West is the confiscation of white-owned farms.

Echoing Mr. Mugabe’s party line, he suggested that Mr. Tsvangirai is a tool of “British imperialism and the United States as well.” As for political violence, “I don’t think we can deny people are dying,” Mr. Barron said. “Who’s responsible and how many — we need to really get reports other than from the opposition.”

*Or do you not read the paper, moron?

Wow — they should have a black diamond line for all sorts of things — entering the subway, walking in Midtown, navigating the counter at Katz’s, etc.:

The Transportation Security Administration introduced a new screening system at La Guardia Airport on Wednesday that tries to speed things up — and reduce anxiety and frustration — by asking travelers to choose a line based on their familiarity with checkpoint procedures.

The system relies on travelers to sort themselves into three groups, each assigned a color and shape: a green circle for families with small children and strollers, groups, people needing special assistance and those new to flying; a blue square for casual travelers who are familiar with security checkpoint procedures and have multiple carry-on bags; and a black diamond for expert travelers who are well-versed in the procedures.

Expert travelers fly more than twice a month, travel light, and are “always ready with items removed” (no metal, no shoes). Elite-status members of frequent-flyer programs are included in this category.

La Guardia is the 24th airport to implement the program, which began in Salt Lake City and Denver in February.

. . .

Skeptics have suggested, however, that people are likely to overestimate their abilities to get through a line quickly, and that relying on passengers to sort themselves is a recipe for failure.

Those in charge of the Self-Select Lanes program, as the authorities are calling it, said such worries were unfounded.

“It’s kind of like going to the line for 10 items at the grocery store,” said the program’s national director, Earl Morris. “Nobody wants to be that person with 20 items holding everyone else up. It’s peer pressure.”

This just in — U.N. diplomats still haven’t paid their parking tickets:

More than a decade after Mayor Rudy Giuliani declared war on diplomatic scofflaws over unpaid parking tickets, the city is still owed more than $18 million, leaving many New Yorkers enraged.

“They should pay,” said Carmen Mercer, 35, of Bedford-Stuyvesant, standing outside a midtown DMV office. “Everybody else has to pay. It comes with the responsibility of having a car.”

Deadbeat nations are clearly in no rush to pay off their debts, the vast majority of which were incurred before a 2002 agreement provided more parking spaces for them. That deal has cut the number of new tickets issued by 94 percent and helped lower the total owed to the city from more than $21 million.

Nevertheless, the total owed has been stuck at $18 million since at least 2005. Some 175 countries are to blame for the missing pot of money, with Egypt and Kuwait leading the list of offenders.

After all, $18 million could be used to build one-tenth of the High Line:

City officials and the Friends of the High Line presented the final design on Wednesday for the first phase of the High Line, the $170 million park that is under construction on the West Side of Manhattan and has been called one of New York City’s more distinctive public projects.

The park, modeled loosely on the Promenade Plantée in Paris, is being built on a 1.45-mile elevated freight rail structure that stretches 22 blocks, from Gansevoort Street to 34th Street, near the Hudson River. The rail structure, built to support two fully loaded freight trains, was built from 1929 to 1934 when the West Side was a freight-transportation hub, but has been unused for decades. The tracks are 30 to 60 feet wide and 18 to 30 feet above the ground.

Ground was broken in April 2006. Over the past two years, crews have been constructing the first, $85 million segment of the 6.7-acre park, which is estimated to cost $170 million and is financed by federal, city and private money.

Location Scout: UN, High Line.

. . . but I can’t believe someone is actually named “Jay Gooch”. I can’t believe he’s come this far since the days of terrorizing Gary Coleman:

Gotham took first for overall sweat production in a new study — although it came in only 68th among sweatiest cities per capita. The shining Apple produces an estimated 1.3 million gallons of sweat per hour — enough to fill the Central Park Reservoir in one summer month.

New Yorkers collectively outsweat Los Angeles, Chicago and even Houston.

For the fifth year in a row, Phoenix, Ariz., was named the sweatiest U.S. city with an average summer temperature of 95.1 degrees, according to sweat expert Dr. Jay Gooch.

And Gooch said New York’s humidity doesn’t make New Yorkers sweat more — it only increases the “misery factor.”

Cutbacks at the Times; appearances-oriented couples hardest hit:

Meanwhile, a Sunday institution, the weddings and celebrations pages in the Styles section, is also planning to scale back the number of wedding announcements it has in its pages after two staffers were lost from this year’s round of buyouts/layoffs. “We contemplate a small reduction in the number we run compared with last year at this time,” wrote Catherine Mathis, the paper’s spokeswoman, “but last year represented an expansion of our columns somewhat from the historical norms in our pages.”

And since when is it OK to use the term “guido”? I had no idea:

Making my first trip to the Jersey shore, rattling along the ol’ local North Jersey coast line, felt a bit like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I was journeying farther than civilization’s reach, in search of something mysterious, powerful, awe-inspiring. In short, I hoped to glimpse the mighty and legendary Guido.

Okay, forgive the melodrama, but my New York friends did a good job of hyping this stereotype. “Asshole Jersey folk are cheesy and rude,” they warned, adding that “they have a name for people like you too: Bennys.”

For a Londoner, this sounded all too familiar. Jersey translated to me as Essex. Always in London’s shadow, also by the coast and populated by shirtless lads who love to pound the daylights out of each other, Essex natives tend to be drunk off their heads on luminous-colored alcopops while dancing to some primal beat. To be avoided at all costs. This Jersey voyage promised to bring all of my cowardice flooding out. Thus, when I passed a pack of Guido-looking guys outside a summer house recently in Belmar, I quickened my pace and looked straight at the pavement. Except soon I was unsure of my bearings (I was looking for a place called Bar A), and these guys’ beer-strewn yard made me think they would know the location of virtually every bar on the Shore (they did), so I doubled back and approached with caution.

Within a few minutes, I was kicking back in a deck chair and shooting the breeze with beer in hand.

. . .

I also got to witness the famed (yet still inexplicable) pride. “Jersey’s great, I love Jersey,” one declared. And at that moment, I couldn’t help but agree. So as I said goodbye to my new Guido friends, I’d like to think I bid farewell to some lazy stereotypes as well.

Oh, what I would give for a stronger dollar . . .

That’s a tough one. But does this mean that the state is trying to figure out a way to implement congestion pricing that would cut the city out of the revenue collection process? That would be a gas:

New York City’s congestion pricing plan has new life, and that may mean another major hit to your wallet.

CBS 2 HD has obtained exclusive information on the plan drivers love to hate.

Albany shot it down, but congestion pricing may get the green light anyway.

“I thought Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan was unique and well thought out,” Gov. David Paterson said on Tuesday.

Paterson told CBS 2 HD in an exclusive interview that the controversial proposal to charge drivers who enter the Central Business District of Manhattan a fee between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. Monday through Friday is back.

It may be just the ticket for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s budget woes, and a way to hold down fares and improve service.

“I think it’s a viable solution,” Paterson said.

Months ago Richard Ravitch was named by the governor to lead an independent commission to find ways to fund the MTA. He told CBS 2 HD he’d like to take another look at congestion pricing, too.

“I agree with (the governor) fully,” Ravitch said.

“The idea of raising revenue through the use of automobiles in this city is something that would have to be considered as one of many options.”

. . . stay for the soy milk:

In 2006, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that he was filing suit against 27 out-of-state gun dealers. He called the gun sellers a “scourge on our society,” and claimed that they were illegally selling weapons that kept ending up on the streets of New York.

Most of the dealers Bloomberg sued quietly settled their cases, agreeing to allow the city to place monitors in their stores to oversee transactions. Others shut down their operations or had their cases tossed out of court. But one man, Jay Wallace, owner of a 12,000-square-foot firearms supermarket outside Atlanta, decided he was willing to pay any price to keep New York from sending someone to monitor his store.

So he borrowed $700,000 and moved to New York — a city he’d never been to before.

In May, Wallace, his wife, and three grown sons rented an apartment in Brooklyn, determined to wage war against the city’s lawsuit right from the belly of the beast itself.

And then two strange things happened.

First, on June 2, the very morning that his case was to be heard in court, Wallace threw in the towel, convinced that he wouldn’t get a fair trial from a judge he considered too biased.

And second, even more surprisingly, by the time he decided not to show up in court, Wallace — a gun-loving, rock-ribbed, Second Amendment–quoting Georgian — had fallen in love with the city he’d vowed to fight to his “last breath.”

He’s even thinking of moving here permanently.

“When you sneeze on the street, five New Yorkers say ‘Bless you’!” Wallace says, wearing a satisfied smile. To his surprise, none of the negative things he’d heard about the city conformed to reality.

On a blazing Sunday afternoon, he’s distractedly picking at a chicken sandwich at the Smoke Joint, a Southern-style barbecue place in trendy Fort Greene. The 51-year-old is wearing a green plastic “Save Our Troops” bracelet and an NYPD baseball cap, a gift from a sympathetic police officer who’d contacted him after reading about the case in the news. The cop had even driven the Wallaces out to Long Beach the day before.

Wallace’s wife Cecilia, a blonde in a bright-pink top and wearing a silver necklace with a cross, eats barbecue pork at his side. After three years of obsessing over the lawsuit, the couple would soon be heading back to Georgia, having given up their day in court. But at least they’d always have New York.

. . .

Now that the Wallaces are no longer preparing for trial, they’ve had time for some sightseeing: Times Square, Central Park, Broadway shows, two pilgrimages to Ground Zero. But Wallace wanted more than a tourist’s perspective; he wanted to experience the city the way the locals live it. And he found that some of the best spots were right in Brooklyn. At Red Bamboo, a vegetarian restaurant, Wallace sampled fake meat in the form of “chicken” Parmesan. He also tried soy milk: “I came here, and I noticed New York had a lot of soy milk. I’d never had it before, but I tried it — first the sweetened kind. It was good!”

Even the nursing staff at the hospital on DeKalb Avenue, where Wallace spent Memorial Day weekend because of chest pain, proved to be some of the loveliest health-care professionals he’d met. (He’s composing a thank-you letter to the hospital director. As a small-business owner, he says, he knows the value of a customer’s kind word.) And despite being somewhat “mustardy,” the barbecue sauce at the Smoke Joint deserves an A, he points out.

Wallace is so impressed, he says he could actually consider living here one day. Not that some things don’t need improvement. He and Cecilia are worried about the destruction of the old Coney Island — where they’d eaten a Nathan’s hot dog — and about the taxi drivers who can’t afford the price of gas. Mostly, Wallace finds it unfortunate that such a wonderful city is suffering under a despot-in-chief for a mayor, one who is turning New York into a playground for the rich. “Living here, I know how New Yorkers feel — overtaxed!” Wallace exclaims, half-furious, half-smiling. But nothing seems to detract from his down-to-earth Southern charm.

New Yorkers’ libidos hit hardest:

Only 11 percent of Big Apple residents reported having more than one sex partner in the previous 12 months, according to a report released yesterday.

That left 89 percent in the “faithful” or “not getting any” categories.

And only 5 percent of married couples or those in a relationship reported cheating during the last year. Seven percent of men said they had multiple sex partners, while 3 percent of women reported extra-marital activity.

If the milk price gouging law isn’t working, do the next best thing — raise the price ceiling. Problem solved:

The state-controlled price for a gallon of milk in New York City will rise to $4.37 next Tuesday, state regulators said, in the wake of rising fuel costs and diminishing corn supplies.

State agriculture authorities set the loose ceiling of milk prices, based on the cost of farm production. Individual stores can top the milk-price threshold — now at $3.93 a gallon — if they can show financial hardships, such as extraordinarily high wholesale, rent or delivery costs.

So in practice, the state-set threshold generally applies to the large supermarkets, while neighborhood bodegas tend to have higher prices, officials said.

Next time you’re escaping the police and some buttinsky, keep in mind that this ploy does not seem to work:

The pajama-clad super of a ritzy lower Manhattan high-rise chased a burglar but was mistakenly grabbed by security guards when the wily thief screamed for help, police sources said.

“The guy was yelling at no one in particular, ‘Stop this crazy guy. He’s trying to kill me!’” said super Bobby Gardocki, who admitted he looked somewhat bizarre running barefoot in his jammies after the burglar Saturday night.

Gardocki was grabbed by Manhattan Community College police, who thought he was the culprit.

A building tenant convinced the guards they had the wrong guy and cops arrested the suspect, Michael Estrada, 38, of Queens, nearby.

He allegedly looted a woman’s apartment of more than $3,000 in jewelry before trying to get into the super’s flat.

Next up for New York’s san-men, a sexy calendar:

New York’s Strongest may be showing a lot more leg this summer.

For the first time, city sanitation workers will be allowed to wear shorts during the steamy summer months.

Don’t expect any crazy striped Bermudas or short shorts, though. City sanitmen and sanitwomen will be wearing modest green uniform shorts that hit right at the knee.

“Everybody thought it was a myth, that shorts will never happen,” said sanitation worker Liston (Benny) Judge, who gamely modeled the new shorts for the Daily News.

“This makes a big difference on those humid, 96-degree days.”

. . .

The shorts may be ideal for sanitation workers who sweep the street, or drive vehicles long distances, said Harry Nespoli, president of the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association.

They may not be as useful for workers who lug plastic bags — a favorite target of neighborhood dogs and cats — or metal baskets that can scrape against their legs.