Big Ticket | Sold for $21 Million

By MICHELLE HIGGINS

A five-and-a-half-story town house at 26 East 73rd Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, sold for $21 million, the biggest sale of the week, according to city property records.

The town house, located in a historic district on the Upper East Side, is 21 feet wide with a classic limestone facade and a columned entry portico. It has five bedrooms, five full baths and two half baths, a full-height basement, an elevator, five fireplaces, a sweeping staircase and a rooftop garden that offers views of Central Park and the towers of the San Remo apartments.

It was listed for $23 million in mid-2011 as a co-exclusive by Paula Del Nunzio of Brown Harris Stevens and Serena Boardman and Meredyth Smith of Sotheby's International Realty, and it went into contract nearly a year later, in May. The agents declined to identify the sellers, who were listed in city records under a limited partnership, Central Park East. The buyer s were represented by John Burger and Nancy J. Elias, both of Brown Harris Stevens. The buyers also opted for anonymity through a limited liability company.

The house, which was once home to George Doubleday, chairman of Ingersoll-Rand Company, last sold in 2007, for $18 million, after an extensive renovation by Christopher B. O'Malley and Wendy Flanagan, who bought it for $6.5 million in 1999. Peter Pennoyer, who specializes in classical architecture, handled the redo in 2005.

Mr. Pennoyer said it might shock current buyers that the town house was built in the 1890s as a spec house. It was designed by Alexander McMillan Welch, a New York architect trained in the Beaux-Arts tradition.

“It's not what you'd get now as a spec house,” he said.

Ms. Smith of Sotheby's said this latest sale was indicative of the current market, with “properties in prime locations that are in mint condition selling strongly.”

Big T icket includes closed sales from the previous week, ending Wednesday.

Underground Tour Guide Pops Up in Las Vegas

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

One of the urban adventure guides whose tours of New York's sewers and train tunnels were featured in a Times article last year has popped up in Sin City. Steve Duncan's new project is called “Undercity: Las Vegas.” The tunnels he finds there are nowhere near as cool and crumbly and aromatic as the ones beneath New York, but who doesn't love a sewer? Mr. Duncan spoke to The Huffington Post about his explorations.

A Union-Spirited Labor Day Rap

By ANDY NEWMAN

Just in time for Labor Day, the Cablevision workers in Brooklyn who voted this year to unionize have released a rap video chronicling their struggle.

The song, “We Are the Union,” features two Cablevision technicians, McDaniel Paul and Jerome Thompson Jr., and a former customer-service agent, Shatoya Thomas-Flemmings.

“I'll be a pain in the colon / For your boy Jimmy Dolan,” Mr. Thompson declares, referring to Cablevision's chief executive. “His pockets are swollen / Reaping what my labor's sowing.”

In voting to join the Communications Workers of America Local 1109 in January, the Brooklyn workers became the first of Cablevision's cable television employees to unionize, in what remains a largely union-free industry.

Asked to comment on the video, a Cablevision spokesman, Jim Maiella, noted that a subsequent unionization effort, in the Bronx in June, failed. “Cabl evision Bronx technicians voted overwhelmingly, by a three-to-one margin, to maintain a direct relationship with the company and reject the C.W.A. union's misinformation and false promises,” Mr. Maiella said in a statement.

He sent along a link to a counter-music-video, in which workers jeeringly sang “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” to union reps as they left a Cablevision building in the Bronx.

Happy long weekend, everyone.

City Has Sudden Jump in West Nile Cases

By ANDY NEWMAN

Six new cases of West Nile virus were reported in city residents in the last three days, almost as many as in the whole rest of the summer so far, according to the city health department's Web site. There has been one death, a man in his 80s who had recently traveled outside the city, the department said. The new cases bring the total to 14, three more cases than there were last year.

The number of mosquitoes infected with the virus is up sharply this year, the health department said. West Nile has been detected in 254 samples of mosquitoes collected around the city this summer, 40 percent more than the 181 positive samples found by the end of last summer.

The health department said that while the number of human cases “is within the same range that we have seen over the past decade,” 3 to 42 cases, the department was “taking every precaution necessary across the city and is regularly spraying to protect the health of New Yorkers.”

The city sprayed pesticide on parts of the Upper West Side early Friday morning. No further spraying is scheduled anywhere in the city, but when and where there is a need, the health department said, it will spray, always giving 48 hours' notice.

Late August is typically the peak time for West Nile in the city.

An earlier version of this post erroneously included a specific age for the man who died. The health department reported that he was in his 80s, not that he was 80 years old.

Week in Pictures for Aug. 31

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Here is a slide show of photographs from the past week in New York City and the region. Subjects include a shooting near the Empire State Building, a night at a carousel in Greenport, N.Y., and a visit to a town affected by Tropical Storm Irene one year ago.

This weekend on “The New York Times Close Up,” an inside look at the most compelling articles in Sunday's Times, Sam Roberts will speak with The Times's Danny Hakim, David Carr, Eleanor Randolph and Michael M. Grynbaum. Tune in at 10 p.m. Saturday or 10 a.m. Sunday on NY1 News to watch.

A sampling from the City Room blog is featured daily in the main print news section of The Times. You may also browse reader comments, read current New York headlines, like New York Metro | The New York Times on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

A Project to Set Ideas Free

August 31, 2012, 10:46 am

By ANNE BARNARD

Pacing on the High Line one recent afternoon, Kevin Boyle and Rich Horan brandished signs that read, in bold block letters, “Ideas Wanted.”

“Any ideas to share?” Mr. Boyle asked a woman with a nose ring and a silver ponytail.

“No,” she replied.

“What do you do with them?” the next passer-by asked.

“We just give them back out,” Mr. Boyle said as Mr. Horan trotted after a gaggle of fleeing tourists.

“You can't leave without giving us an idea,” he shouted. “It's an American custom!”

The two men solicit ideas across New York City, from Rockaway Beach, where they live, to Wall Street. They get the usual spectrum of New York brushoffs: suspicion, skeptici sm, total lack of interest. But, inevitably, in a city that prides itself on intellectual and entrepreneurial ferment, they also get a lot of ideas.

They have gathered ideas for reflective nail polish, trumpet-shaped baby bottles, and levers to lift public toilet seats with the touch of a foot.

They have compiled suggestions for achieving world peace through soccer, repairing the educational system and even fixing all of New York's streets in a single day.

Their project is part documentary, part experiment, part performance art and part public service. They capture the pitches on video and post them on a YouTube channel called Ideas Improv, a kind of low-production-value cousin of the TED conference Web site that scatters the ideas to the wind.

Why? “Because,” they like to say, “we don't golf.”

If pressed, though, they explain that they have an idea about ideas. They are playing with two contradictory notions. One is that ideas have valu e whether they are executed or not. The other is that many people hoard ideas they will never act on â€" but if they share them, maybe someone else will pursue them.

“The idea will be executed, but the person who first thought about it will never know,” Mr. Boyle said.

That, of course, presents the biggest hurdle: convincing people that their intention is to spread ideas, not steal them.

“We're not going to run home and work on their idea in our garage,” Mr. Horan, 58, explained.

The “Ideas” idea started with failed ideas. Mr. Boyle, 53, had a lot of them.

A self-described dilettante, he says he is supported by “a loving wife” and some lucky real estate deals. He has carried a number of ideas to fruition: writing a book about Rockaway's heavy losses on Sept. 11, 2001, starting a charity called Graybeards and, for a time, editing one of the city's oldest newspapers, the Rockaway Wave.

But just as often, he has been shot dow n. In the 1980s, he wrote a thriller set in a future New York with a far lower crime rate. Too unrealistic, publishers said. Later, he opened a bar, but found he was “better at being a customer.” And last year, he thought he was well on the way to shooting a documentary on Representative Anthony D. Weiner's mayoral bid - Mr. Weiner seemed interested when Mr. Boyle buttonholed him on the Rockaway Boardwalk. But the very next day, the politician's errant Twitter message sank his campaign.

“That idea went down the toilet faster than any idea I've ever had,” Mr. Boyle said. “That got me thinking about ideas.”

He found himself in an intense philosophical debate with his brother, an artist, who argued that an idea's value is “all in the execution.” Mr. Boyle retorted, “Why can't it be just as valuable in my head?”

At the time, he was between hobbies, apart from his weekly motorcycle rides with Mr. Horan. So he decided to collect ideas for idea s' sake.

In that spirit, on the High Line, Mr. Horan told a reluctant pedestrian: “It doesn't have to be useful. It could be whimsical.”

“But that wouldn't benefit anybody but me,” the man said.

“Ah, but is that true?” Mr. Horan intoned.

After some badgering, the man coughed up an idea that was not exactly original: “Solar energy. Get rid of the oil companies.”

The next passer-by, an Australian named Colin Duncan, had a more unusual idea. New York should become a “ghost town for a day,” with all traffic banned except for road engineers from far and wide. Then every pothole in the city could be fixed at once.

Watched one after another, the video clips illuminate an untapped corner of the city's hive mind, a brainstorming session whose mood ranges from lighthearted to grave. In the New York collectively envisioned by the contributors, there would be more arts programs in schools, better waterfront access, culturally accep ted afternoon siestas, and special trash cans to collect dog feces for composting.

“It's a huge resource,” a composting enthusiast told Mr. Boyle.

One man wanted to design an app to enable smartphones to monitor joggers' heart rhythms. Another person suggested paparazzi on demand â€" a rent-a-crowd service for people who want to pretend to be famous. Ed Shevlin, who was interviewed in celebratory St. Patrick's Day garb, wanted to star in a television show called “The Biker Bucket List.” “I'll take you all over the world on the best roads out there,” he said, listing his favorites. “You never have to leave the couch - I'll do all the riding for you.”

“Fake solar panels that you roll out on your roof” was another man's offering. “So you get the sort of social capital of having solar panels and being green but it doesn't cost as much.”

Dan Finger, a patron at the Half King pub in Chelsea, expounded on his own notion for several deadpan minutes.

“My idea,” he said, “is to pave South America and make it into the largest in-line Rollerblading rink in the world.”

Where it's all going, Mr. Boyle isn't sure: “We are executing our idea even though we don't know what it is.”

Mr. Horan added, “This is the best idea we've ever had.”

Any ideas? Share them with the world in the comment box below.

The Gymnast and the Sloth

August 31, 2012, 10:25 am

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

John Orozco, an Olympic gymnast and Bronx native, stopped in at the Bronx Zoo the other day after returning home from London and exchanged technique tips with a two-toed sloth.

Close-Up With Casey Stengel

By ROBERT C. SAMUELS

Dear Diary:

It is 1950, and I'm 12 years old. I'm at the Stadium to see a game with my father. There's a rain delay, but when they finally start rolling up the tarp, my father lets me go down to the Yankees' dugout to try to get some autographs. A short while later I'm on my way back, a huge grin on my face.

“Whose autograph did you get?” my dad wants to know.

“No one, but Casey Stengel spoke to me!” I shout.

“He did? What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Get the hell out of here, kid!'”

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via e-mail: diary@nytimes.com or telephone: (212) 556-1333. Follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

At Some Restaurants, a Letter Grade Is Not Required

August 30, 2012, 12:05 pm

By GLENN COLLINS

Chef's Table at Brooklyn Fare, the eccentric 18-seat restaurant in downtown Brooklyn, has just about everything its customers could want, except more seats. The borough's only three-star Michelin restaurant (one of seven in the city) has a three-star review from The New York Times and attracts a devoted clientele that reserves six weeks ahead.

What it does not have, however, is a New York City Department of Health restaurant-inspection grade of A, B or C in its window, even though it has been open for more than three years.

Is there favoritism here, or skulduggery? Has some special secret exemption been granted?

The answer is no. Since the restaurant is in a mark et that earns 51 percent of its revenues from grocery sales, it is under the jurisdiction of the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets.

Brooklyn Fare is, like 9,568 other markets and grocery stores, covered under Article 20C of New York's agriculture and markets law, which makes it subject to scrutiny by state inspectors. And the state has not adopted the controversial city letter-grading system.

“Chef's Table has been inspected five times since 2009, and has had satisfactory inspections,” said Joe Morrissey, a spokesman for the state agriculture department. Such markets are inspected at least once a year by the state, and wherever applicable, the agency also inspects the production of the food in markets where people sit down and eat. (Mr. Morrissey said the state agriculture department could offer no estimate of how many markets have restaurants in the five boroughs.)

The restaurant's owner, Moe Issa, confirmed that the restaurant is un der the jurisdiction of the agriculture department and is not required to post letter grades.

A spokeswoman for the city health department, Alexandra Iselin Waldhorn, said the department had no comment on restaurant jurisdictional issues between the city and the state in markets.

To make things more confusing, Mr. Morrissey said that some restaurants in markets are required to have letter grades. That's when a market sublets space to a separate business for use as a restaurant. Since it's a restaurant, and not a market licensed by the state, that business is covered by the city health code and must post letter grades.

As for Chef's Table, it is not the only high-end restaurant to escape the strictures of the city's letter-grading system, which has been popular among diners while being excoriated by some restaurateurs as unfair and costly. Eataly, the high-end Italian megastore in Manhattan, has seven restaurants, and six of them post no inspection grades . That seventh restaurant, the beer garden Birreria, is on the roof, technically outside the market. And so it has a letter grade from the city: an A.

Orthographic Misstep Disrupts Political Campaign

August 30, 2012, 12:59 pm

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

The words “negro” and “neighbor” both begin with “ne” and have a “g” and an “r” and an “o” somewhere later on.

But accidentally typing one word for another seems pretty hard - different hands involved and all that. Still, a Democratic candidate for the State Assembly from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, is citing a “typo” in a flier his campaign sent out to thousands of voters blaming the incumbent for allowing “crime to go up over 50% in our negrohood.”

The candidate, Ben Akselrod, who is challenging Assemblyman Steven Cymbrowitz in next month's primary, issued a statement Wednesday night taking “full responsibility for this inadvertent error” and apologizing to a nyone who was offended, reports the blog Sheepshead Bites, which broke the story of the campaign flier last week.

Mr. Akselrod's campaign treasurer, whose address appears on the flier, has now resigned, saying he had not authorized the use of his address and had had nothing to do with the gaffe.

Papers of a Puerto Rican Poet Will Find a Home at Columbia

August 30, 2012, 12:40 pm

By VIVIAN YEE

In 1996, Jack Agüeros, a Puerto Rican author and activist who wrote sonnets about the immigrant poor and Latino street life, would have seemed an unlikely candidate for inclusion in the library of New York City's most prestigious university.

That year, his son, Marcel Agüeros, was one of four Columbia students who staged a hunger strike in front of Butler Library to demand the creation of an ethnic studies program, becoming something of a poster child for the fraught relationship between Columbia - famous for its Western classics-based curriculum - and the diverse communities that surround its Morningside Heights campus.

Yet times have changed: the ethnic studies program Marcel Agüeros fought to establish, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, is in its 13th year, and he is now an assistant professor of astronomy at Columbia. His father, who has been suffering from Alzheimer's disease for nearly 10 years, has all but forgotten a career that included four books of poetry, an eight-year stint as director of El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem and a hunger strike that protested the lack of Puerto Ricans in Mayor John V. Lindsay's government. And later this year, the elder Mr. Agüeros's personal papers will be unveiled at Columbia as the first piece of a new archive of significant New York Latino figures.

“How do I say this diplomatically?” Marcel Agüeros said. “I think Columbia could do better in terms of its relationships with the surrounding communities, and incorporating my father's papers here at the library was a way of connecting the institution with East Harlem in a way that was appealing to us.”

With Col umbia planning to expand north into Manhattanville, an expansion that has provoked anger among some activists, neighborliness is more important than ever. Besides giving researchers valuable insight into New York's Latinos, the collection will be available to the public.

“I think Columbia, given its move up the island, is anxious also to begin to develop a closer tie with the Latino community as they've tried to do with the African-American community in Harlem for quite a while now,” said Michael Ryan, the director of Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where the materials will be housed.

Mr. Ryan and Frances Negrón-Muntaner, the director of the ethnic studies center, believe Columbia can plug a gaping hole in Latino scholarship in the northeast: Although Hunter College houses a Puerto Rican archive and City College has a collection that focuses on Dominicans, no institution in the northeastern United States collects pan-Latino papers. (Such archive s do exist at the University of California-Los Angeles, the University of Texas and other institutions in the south and the west.)

“Honestly, as the country becomes increasingly Latino, in 20-some years, if you're not collecting these materials now, there's going to be huge gaps in knowledge,” Ms. Negrón-Muntaner said, adding that a lack of primary sources is one reason for the dearth of scholarship in Latino studies. “It's a rich moment to think about a whole lot of questions, but we need to have the materials, you know?”

Ms. Negrón-Muntaner says a New York-based archive will be able to gather significant material on the Latino cultural and political movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when many New York activists and artists like Mr. Agüeros propelled what is now known as the Puerto Rican Renaissance.

The Renaissance has a substantial legacy in New York, including El Museo del Barrio and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe - both institutions founded by Lati no artists whose work had been rejected by traditional galleries and literary journals. Many artists were forced to take up activism to ensure their work would be seen, even if they did not think of themselves as activists, Ms. Negrón-Muntaner said.

“The subject matter they incorporated spoke to a different experience of becoming American,” she said. “They were seen as topics that weren't high enough or literary enough - they were about poor people facing hardship and discrimination.”

As the director of a gallery for Puerto Rican artists and then of El Museo del Barrio, which he moved to its current location on Museum Mile, Mr. Agüeros dedicated years to finding a niche for Latino artists in New York. Later, he was primarily a writer. Like other Latino poets of his day, Mr. Agüeros explored subjects like immigration, inequality and poverty in his satirical poems, short stories and plays. But he differed in that he usually used traditional forms, like p salms and sonnets.

“He wanted to use classic forms, because he loved sonnets, but he wanted to write about the things that mattered to him - sonnets about drug addicts or boxers or Christopher Columbus, you know, whatever - Mars!” his son said.

Mr. Agüeros is astonished that anyone would want his papers; he remembers little of his career. His condition has deteriorated far enough that it was his daughter, Nathalie Agüeros-Macario, and son Marcel who decided to donate the collection, which includes correspondence, drafts, recordings of his poetry readings, films of his plays and even hate mail from his activist days. It has given his children new insight into a father who rarely spoke about his past, and who now cannot remember it.

“When you have a relative with Alzheimer's, you suddenly discover how many questions you wish you'd asked and how many holes there are in your knowledge of their lives,” Marcel Agüeros said. “Every little piece you ge t feels like a small miracle.”

Many people at the forefront of the 20th-century Latino cultural and political movement are growing older and may be wondering what to do about their papers, Ms. Negrón-Muntaner said. It is up to her to convince them that Columbia is the right place for community members and scholars alike to study what is still an under-researched academic field, 16 years after Marcel Agüeros's hunger strike.

“I can't stress enough importance of people who do have materials to conserve, preserve and try to get them to an archive,” she said. “There's so much we don't know and so much left to be told.”

Kids Draw the News: Peacock on the Loose

August 30, 2012, 12:21 pm

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

New Assignment

For at least two weeks, an escaped peacock has wandered around Kew Gardens Hills, Queens. He got loose from his home at John Bowne High School, and though his keeper and the city animal catchers have tried to grab him, he keeps getting away, flapping from roof to roof when he's not strolling the streets.

Here is an article about the escaped peacock, and here is another that followed. You may illustrate any part of the story you wish.

To submit drawings by children 12 years of age and under, follow the instructions here: Submit Artwork '

The Last Assignment

Thanks to all of you who illustrated our story about children in the bee r garden - which was featured in a piece about Kids Draw the News on The New York Observer's Web site this week!

Hall of Fame for Great Americans, 3:57 P.M.

August 30, 2012, 11:42 am

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

On the West Side, Marking the Path of a \'Conga Line\' of Rats

August 30, 2012, 11:40 am

By JAMES BARRON

If rats could read, they would now know where to cross West 76th Street.

The block association put up yellow “rat crossing” signs on Wednesday â€" not really for the rats, who have limited vision and probably could not see the signs even if English registered in their little brains, but for frustrated residents of the West Side like John Maineri.

“You walk down the street at night, it's like a conga line,” Mr. Maineri said, describing how the rats went back and forth between a tree planter and a Dumpster outside a brownstone undergoing renovation. “They're brazen. They're not intimidated by anything.”

Joseph Bolanos, the president of the block associati on, attached the signs to the poles for alternate-side parking signs on the block between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. He designed the signs to look like the yellow traffic signs that warn drivers of places where deer or cattle often cross a road. “Rat Xing,” his signs say, with black lettering above and below a diagram of a rat.

Residents of the block said the rats congregated around construction sites on the block. Mr. Bolanos has said that in the last 10 years, at least two brownstones on the block have been undergoing major renovations at any given time.

“You can hear groups of rats in garbage bags,” said Michael Schilke, who attended a gathering to post the signs on Wednesday.

He said he was walking his dogs one night recently when a rat scampered over his foot. “I ended up kicking it, not realizing what it was until it landed in the street and screeched,” he said.

Another resident of the block, Ken Biberaj - a Democrat seek ing the City Council seat now held by Gale A. Brewer, who cannot run for that seat in 2013 because of term limits - said people on the block coexisted uncomfortably with the rats.

“My wife has a dance she does, a stomp, on the way to the front stoop that makes them run away,” he said. “We don't take the garbage down at night because they're there.”

Mr. Bolanos said he had made only a handful of signs. He also said he was not worried if the batch posted on Wednesday disappeared.

“I'm making a lot more,” he said.

Painted on the Walls, the Stories of New York Communities

August 30, 2012, 10:37 am

By CELIA MCGEE

A passing security guard stopped and did a double take. So did some young mothers with strollers. Murals have always been intended to awe, instruct and inspire, and the enormous image of an outspread hand slowly creeping up a naked brick wall at 512 Rockaway Avenue in Brownsville, Brooklyn, was no exception.

Now finished, “Yesterday I was___, Today I am___, Tomorrow I will be___,” as the mural is called, is the work of a team of young mural artists with Groundswell, an organization that pairs the making of public art with underserved New York City neighborhoods. It will be formally dedicated on Thursday.

“I'm afraid of heights,” said Francisco, 17, near the top of towering scaffolding as he w orked on the 27-foot-high mural. “But I'm not afraid anymore.'' He declined to give his last name explaining that he was involved with the criminal justice system “because I was young and stupid and was driving without a license.''

His participation in the project, which pays its apprentice artists $7.25 an hour, came through an alternative-to-incarceration program administered by a group called the Center for Court Innovation. The artists get paid only if they show up promptly and consistently for their seven-hour workdays.

On Thursday, another mural commissioned by Groundswell, outside the Brooklyn Navy Yard, is being dedicated. The artwork, which is called “Here Goes Something,” depicts the area's working-class history and was painted by a group of artists who did much of their research by interviewing residents at the nearby Farragut Houses. Three other Groundswell murals will be dedicated on Thursday, in Hunts Point, th e Bronx, and two other Brooklyn neighborhoods, East New York and Sunset Park.

Since Groundswell was founded 16 years ago by Amy Sananman, a former tenant organizer, the group has commissioned about 400 murals, usually through some form of partnership with a city agency and civic or educational institutions seeking to promote messages about community roots, traffic safety, environmental stewardship, social justice or other pressing concerns.

The Brownsville mural being unveiled this week is notable because the idea for the subject matter came from the young artists who painted it rather than a sponsor.

The subject arose when Groundswell held a retreat last fall and the discussion touched on a project focused on dating violence and young women. The young men present, Ms. Sananman recalled, “essentially said, ‘What about us?'” And so she committed to focusing on what she believed to be the underrepresented perspective of teenage males.

“The idea is to explore male identity and the lack of role models, and to break male stereotypes,” said James Brodick, project director of the Brownsville Community Justice Center of the Center for Court Innovation.

“At the same time, we have a big issue right here at our home base,” Mr. Brodick added, pointing toward the Van Dyck and Brownsville Houses stretching down the street. “The N.Y.P.D.'s stop-and-frisk policy is much higher in this area, and with the shootings at different housing projects, you've got a high imprisonment ratio and kids dying all the time. A lot of the shootings are between young men from different housing developments. By bringing them together on projects like this, there's a chance to work together and heal.”

Neighborhood residents and local representatives are also invited to get involved in the conception and design of Groundswell's murals.

But the mural in Brownsville almost ground to a halt from the start, Ms. Sananman sa id. “Once we found the wall, we had a few lunches with the owner,” she said of the residential building now sprouting Groundswell's handiwork, “and he finally said, ‘I'll sign the contract but the only thing is, I'm Muslim, so there can't be any faces.'''

The resulting design was the wall-size hand, its fingers spread wide in greeting, or outreach. It features the words of its title, as well as others, like “responsibility,” “respect,” “love,” “equality,” “accountability,” “leadership,” “compassion,” “discipline” and “dignity” along the bottom. The mural depicts keys, hearts, books, paired figures, and clasping hands that are meant to represent “unlocking the characteristics we seek in role models, and love, learning, teamwork, unity and communication,” said Jules Joseph, 28, a professional artist who is mentoring the young artists on the project.

Each icon is contained in a drop of water. “Those aren't tears; th ey're raindrops,” Mr. Joseph said. “These young men are a special group. They're all at pivotal points in their lives, where they have to unravel what it means to be an adult, and for black males in this culture that's a pretty difficult conversation to have.''

Another artist, Robert Howell, 24, said he had been documenting the project in photographs and video. “I've been painting and doing art since I was born,” he said, “so this is a new experience for me. I've been with Groundswell since 12th grade. They helped me put together my portfolio for college.”

Mr. Brodick looked up at him on the scaffolding. Under Mr. Howell's watchful lens, the word “tomorrow” started to appear. “The only way to change a community,” Mr. Brodick said, “is to involve the community.”

Ms. Sananman said that's her mission. “Groundswell is my mural,” she said. “About a third of the kids in our summer program of 120 are either court-involved - they're on probation or have been in incarceration - or in foster care. This is where all my creative energy goes.”

At Political Conventions, Stay Tuned for the Archbishop

By CLYDE HABERMAN

For the politically minded, the focus Thursday night will be on Mitt Romney's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. But you may want to keep watching even after Mr. Romney is done and the last balloon has dropped.

The Day

Clyde Haberman offers his take on the news.

New York's archbishop, Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, is up next, to deliver a prayer bringing the convention in Tampa, Fla., to a close. The cardinal will perform the same function at the Democrats' gathering next week in Charlotte, N.C. It will be interesting to hear how political he gets.

Politics? Perish the thought, the New York archdiocese says. No endorsement of any sort will be made at either event, said the archdiocese spokesman, Joseph Zwilling. Cardinal Dolan, he said, is showing up “only to pray.”

That remark ma de me think of a fellow I once knew who was a Playboy subscriber. He, too, used the word “only.” He swore up and down that he bought the magazine only for the Nabokov short stories that it sometimes carried.

The cardinal's very presence in Tampa on Thursday is of itself a political act.

He is not just the leading Roman Catholic clergyman in this country as president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The Republicans invited him and he accepted knowing full well that they are kindred spirits, outspoken opponents of President Obama on matters like abortion rights, same-sex marriage and health insurance coverage for birth control.

The Democrats - a bunch that is ever-fearful, this time of being outflanked in the chase for Catholic votes - then felt obliged to invite the cardinal themselves.

Cardinal Dolan is certainly not one who sees his mission as purely pastoral. He has been blunt about wantin g the church to be muscular in confronting the president, saying early this year that “we are called to be very active, very informed and very involved in politics.”

When has religion not been political at a convention, Republican or Democratic? The lineup of clerics giving blessings in Tampa reinforces that point. Besides the cardinal, it includes a rabbi, an evangelical Christian, a Greek Orthodox archbishop, a Sikh and two Mormons. There isn't a Muslim in sight.

This is surely not a happenstance. Perhaps the convention organizers worried that some delegates would throw decorum overboard and even heckle an imam, much the way Representative Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican, had no compunction about shouting, “You lie!” when Mr. Obama spoke before a joint session of Congress three years ago.

How to slip political commentary into religious supplication was displayed by another New York clergyman, Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik, who delivered the opening prayer for the Republicans on Tuesday.

In addition to asking God to “bless and guide” Mr. Romney and his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, Rabbi Soloveichik said in regard to the United States, “You have called us to be a beacon of freedom to the world and an ally of free countries like the state of Israel, an island of liberty, democracy and hope.”

Think of all the other democratic countries he could have mentioned. By singling out this particular one, the rabbi played to the crowd - to both his co-religionists and others among the Republican faithful who have sought, despite the absence of evidence, to cast Mr. Obama as hostile to Israel.

Rabbi Soloveichik was also eager to show solidarity with an audience that believes nothing good comes from government. Prayers are not usually interrupted by applause. This one was when he intoned, “We Americans unite faith and freedom in asserting that our liberties are your gift, God, not that of government, and that we are endowed with these rights by you, our Creator, not by mortal man.”

So it will be interesting to see what sort of political notes Cardinal Dolan may strike in his blessings, however elliptical and nuanced they may be.

Wouldn't it be compelling if he were to be counterintuitive - like sharing with abortion-accepting Democrats his thoughts on the nature of human life and when it begins? Or, more immediately, reminding Republicans that Jesus preached a lot more about assisting the poor and the hungry than he fretted about who marries whom.

A Poem for the End of Summer

By RICHARD STORM

Dear Diary:

The wealthy, pretty people are all
at the beach, leaving the rest of us
in an ordinary city
with manageable streets.
Soon they'll be back, with
vacation-reading book reviews
and complaints about how
that place has really gone off,
filling the roads with goldenrod cabs,
and we will know,
truer than falling leaves,
that summer is over.

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via e-mail: diary@nytimes.com or telephone: (212) 556-1333. Follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

The Crutches Weren\'t Really Run Over

By ERIC P. NEWCOMER and ANDY NEWMAN

When last seen by about 212,000 viewers on Youtube (228,000 counting the light-saber version), the man in the brown shirt was engaged in a knock-down, drag-out crutch fight with another man in broad daylight in Times Square.

On Wednesday morning, we spotted him sitting on a box in front of The New York Times Building on West 40th Street.

He was trying to raise money for some new crutches.

“Need your help please because my crutches got run over,” he had written on his sign, neglecting to mention that both crutches had flown apart when he and his opponent swung them at each other like Roman gladiators, “so I need fare for bus and subway to see the doctor for the pain and another crutch.”

The man, described by several Times Square regulars as homeless, declined to give his name or to talk about the fight, other than to point out that such things happen.

“People do it every day,” he said. “It's no big deal.”

The man accepted a cup of coffee â€" make that a mocha, he said â€" and $5 from a reporter. But he wanted considerably more money before he would tell his story.

“YouTube is making thousands of dollars over the incident and I ain't making a dime,” he said.

A passer-by offered the man a sandwich. He accepted that, too, and between bites offered some justification for lifting a crutch in self-defense.

“Who's going to protect me?” he asked. “I'm a nobody.”

The Crutches Weren\'t Really Run Over

By ERIC P. NEWCOMER and ANDY NEWMAN

When last seen by about 212,000 viewers on Youtube (228,000 counting the light-saber version), the man in the brown shirt was engaged in a knock-down, drag-out crutch fight with another man in broad daylight in Times Square.

On Wednesday morning, we spotted him sitting on a box in front of The New York Times Building on West 40th Street.

He was trying to raise money for some new crutches.

“Need your help please because my crutches got run over,” he had written on his sign, neglecting to mention that both crutches had flown apart when he and his opponent swung them at each other like Roman gladiators, “so I need fare for bus and subway to see the doctor for the pain and another crutch.”

The man, described by several Times Square regulars as homeless, declined to give his name or to talk about the fight, other than to point out that such things happen.

“People do it every day,” he said. “It's no big deal.”

The man accepted a cup of coffee â€" make that a mocha, he said â€" and $5 from a reporter. But he wanted considerably more money before he would tell his story.

“YouTube is making thousands of dollars over the incident and I ain't making a dime,” he said.

A passer-by offered the man a sandwich. He accepted that, too, and between bites offered some justification for lifting a crutch in self-defense.

“Who's going to protect me?” he asked. “I'm a nobody.”

Yelp Shares Rise After Lockup

While early investors in Yelp got their first chance to sell shares in the online reviews site on Wednesday, it appears they are holding on to their stakes for now.

When a so-called lockup period expires, a stock typically falls as investors sell their shares. In the case of Yelp, the stock is surging. Shares were up nearly 25 percent to more than $22 on Wednesday.

“It's refreshing to see insiders with discipline,” said Michael Pachter, a Wedbush Securities analyst.

Yelp stands out from its peers in this regard. Shares of both Groupon and Facebook slid sharply after the expiration of their lockups. Peter Thiel, the first outside investor in Facebook, spooked investors when he sold an additional 20 million shares at roughly $20, or nearly half the original offering price.

Many analysts were expecting the same fate for Yelp. Since mid-August, shares of the online reviews site have been hammered, dragged down in part by concerns that early investo rs would dump shares once the lockup period expired.

Despite the recent strength in its stock, Yelp still faces the same challenges of other young Internet companies. While Yelp is one of the most popular reviews sites on the Web, it is also struggling to convert more local businesses into paying users. Vendors have the option to spend money to serve advertisements and to manage their business pages. Consumers can access Yelp's reviews for free.

Revenue rose 67 percent in the last quarter to $32.7 million, but Yelp recorded a net loss of 3 cents a share.

The stock action on Wednesday seems to indicate that Yelp's biggest investors are holding on - at least for now. The company's five largest shareholders, Bessemer Ventures, Elevation Partners, Benchmark Capital, Max Levchin, and Jeremy Stoppelman, the company's chief executive, collectively own more than 80 percent of the company's stock. A Yelp spokeswoman declined to comment on Tuesday.

“That's so mething we didn't see with Facebook,” said Mr. Pachter. “Facebook clearly didn't have any control over Peter Thiel.”

Mayor Makes It Official: It Was a Big Year for Isabella and Jayden

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

Looking pink-skinned, diminutive and a little bit wrinkly, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg appeared in City Hall's Blue Room on Wednesday morning to deliver one of the year's more adorable bundles of news: the way we name our babies now.

Flanked by infants and toddlers, the mayor announced the most popular names chosen by New York City parents in 2011: Isabella and Jayden, both retaining their respective gender's top spot for a third year in a row.

Cooing, remarkably well-behaved examples of these leading monikers had been brought to the news conference, parents in tow, to mark the occasion. The mayor, in a more upbeat mood than his often cranky self, seemed delighted with his young guests.

“Don't start crying,” Mr. Bloomberg instructed Isabella Pal, an 11-month-old held aloft by her mother, Natalia Latanzio. “You'll make me look bad.”

Out came the onesies and complim entary bibs, which featured a seal of the city and the insignia, “Official N.Y.C. Baby.” The mayor pinned a bib on Jayden Marthone, who appeared unimpressed.

The city gained 623 Isabellas and 851 Jaydens last year, out of 123,029 New York-born babies in all. Procreative activities waned a bit from 2010, with the number of city births slipping 1.4 percent.

Brooklyn topped the births-by-borough list with 41,303 babies, although few of those will reflect hometown pride: Brooklyn, once a somewhat popular name, ranked 141st on this year's list, behind Santiago and London.

Michael â€" “a fine name,” as Mr. Bloomberg put it â€" moved up two spots to No. 5, a decent showing for a name that had ruled for 51 years as the most popular in the city until being deposed in 2007.

It was a tough year for Sarah, which slipped to No. 11 after charting as high as No. 4 in 2007. Alexander and Aiden cracked the Top 10 after an extended absence. And celebrity names like Ashton, Darwin, Kennedy and Usher popped up farther down in the ranks.

At least one baby in attendance on Wednesday showed a politician's taste for the spotlight.

The baby, Gunnar, began crying soon after Mr. Bloomberg began his remarks. He did not stop until his mother carried him from the audience up to the mayor's podium, where Gunnar took his place in front of the cameras and reporters. He was perfectly content from that point on.

Isabella, which ranked No. 2 nationally last year, is a variant of Elizabeth and means “God's promise.” Jayden, the fourth-ranked boy's name nationally last year, is derived from the Hebrew “Jadon” and means “thankful; God will judge,” according to ThinkBabyNames.com.

Jayden Marthone's mother, Kimberly Harris, was asked after the news conference why she chose that name for her son.

Ms. Harris, of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, laughed.

“I thought it was different,” she said.

Lennon\'s Killer Says, \'I Did Try to Tell Myself to Leave\'

By ANDY NEWMAN

Last week, Mark David Chapman was denied parole for the seventh time in the killing of John Lennon. On Wednesday, the New York State department of corrections released the transcript of his Aug. 22 parole board hearing.

Given that it's the seventh time around and much has been published about Mr. Chapman's activities leading up to, during and since the 1980 shooting, the 39-page transcript (click here if it does not appear above) contains few surprises. But even in the re-re-retelling, decades later, Mr. Chapman's straightforward account still has the power to chill.

He remembers Lennon, who signed an album for him hours before the shooting, as a “very cordial and very decent man” and talks about how he almost didn't go through with the murder:

I did try to tell myself to leave. I've got the album, take it home, show my wife, everything will be fine. But I was so compe lled to commit that murder that nothing would have dragged me away from the building.

Mr. Chapman, 57, tells the parole board, as he has before, that killing Lennon was “a very selfish act and I deeply regret it.” He speaks of his relationship with God. He mentions a miracle that occurred just a few days before, when someone in the penal system helped him and his wife, and says he is still filled with joy from it. He asserts that if released, he feels he would be a stable citizen. “I've had a lot of waves coming through my life and I know how to handle it now,” he says.

And just as before, the parole board renders its decision:

After a careful review of your record and this interview, it is the determination of this panel that, if released at this time, there is a reasonable probability that you would not live and remain at liberty without again violating the law and your release at this time is incompatible with the welfare and safety of the community.

Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Aug. 28

August 29, 2012, 12:00 pm

By COREY KILGANNON

A behind-the-scenes glimpse of Serena Williams practicing on Tuesday at the United States Open.

Proposed Gas Pipeline, Endorsed by the City, Draws Criticism

August 29, 2012, 11:19 am

By STUART MILLER

New York City needs cleaner, cheaper energy. That's the only thing everyone following a proposed natural gas pipeline in the Rockaways agrees upon. But the project - running pipeline from the Atlantic Ocean under the Rockaways and Jamaica Bay into southeast Brooklyn - has drawn concern and outright opposition since it became public earlier this year.

Natural gas saves customers money, eases dependence on foreign oil and is cleaner than other fossil fuels (though extracting it by hydraulic fracturing raises other issues). But in light of recent pipeline leaks and explosions, environmental advocates and Brooklynites worry that the pipeline could damage fragile ecosystems, create safety hazards and compromis e Brooklyn's biggest piece of national parkland, Floyd Bennett Field. And the planning process itself has drawn criticism from community groups who say it has not been open enough to public review.

National Grid, the utility that delivers gas to Brooklyn, says that as the need for natural gas grows, the system must be expanded. “Brooklyn hasn't seen a new delivery point in 50 years,” said John Stavarakas, National Grid's director of long-term planning and project development. “We are at capacity.”

Until environmental impact studies are done, though - especially on the ocean, where the pipeline calls for more invasive digging than on the bay side - many environmentalists are withholding support.

“If we don't reduce greenhouse gases, then the Jamaica Bay marshes will end up under water anyway,” said Glenn Phillips, executive director of New York City Audubon. “But the temporary disturbances could be very damaging to this place, which is critically important for birds, horseshoe crabs and fish.”

On Sunday, opponents of the pipeline, led by a group called Coalition Against the Rockaway Pipeline, plan to hold a rally on the beach at Jacob Riis Park in the Rockaways.

The $265 million pipeline project, which would take about a year to complete, consists of three pieces:

• a three-mile connector, built by the Williams Companies, from its existing Transco pipeline in the Atlantic Ocean to the Rockaways;
• a one-and-a-half-mile line from the Rockaways under Jamaica Bay and Gateway National Recreation Area land to Floyd Bennett Field, the decommissioned airport that is part of Gateway;
• and a metering station built in an unused hangar at Floyd Bennett Field.

Supporters say that the construction would generate 300 jobs and that the finished station would bring the city $8 million annually in property taxes.

The plan was endorsed by the Bloo mberg administration, which calls for expanding the use of natural gas in its PlaNYC 2030 initiative. The city encouraged Representatives Gregory W. Meeks of Queens and Michael Grimm of Staten Island to co-sponsor the federal bill, passed in February, that authorizes the use of national parkland for the project.

The Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit group that studies and comments on local development issues, supports the pipeline. “The city needs natural gas to replace oil for heating, an important environmental goal,” said Robert Pirani, the association's vice president for environmental programs.

But the Coalition Against the Rockaway Pipeline and other critics point to Williams's safety record and worry about an explosion in a national park or in a densely packed neighborhood. The company's pipelines have exploded or ruptured in the last few years in California, Maryland, Mississippi, Ohio and Texas. There was a major Williams pipeline explosion in Alabama last December, followed in the spring by an explosion in a Williams gas compressor station in Pennsylvania and a leak in a Williams pipeline in Bergen County, N.J.

Brian O'Higgins, director of engineering for Williams, said much of the pipeline would be laid using a relatively noninvasive method involving a horizontal directional drill, which drills a small hole, bores underground, then gradually widens the hole. This would avoid digging up Rockaway beaches or Jamaica Bay. But 2.23 miles of pipeline in the ocean will be laid by traditional methods, requiring extensive digging, the company said. A Williams spokesman, Chris Stockton, said the planned route avoided “sensitive habitat.”

Two environmental advocates - Don Riepe, the American Littoral Society's Jamaica Bay Guardian, and Dan Mundy Jr., co-founder of the Jamaica Bay Ecowatchers â€" said they were concerned about the ocean connector.

“It's digging a huge hole in an extremely critical area,” Mr. Mundy said. “There's a lot of life out there - fluke, flounder, lobster.”

Community Boards 14 in Queens and 18 in Brooklyn have also raised objections to the project. For the Brooklyn board, the deal-breaker was the proposal to build the meter and regulator station at Floyd Bennett Field.

At a meeting on Aug. 15 organized by the Coalition Against the Rockaway Pipeline, several speakers said that turning public park land over to private industry set a worrisome precedent.

The planning process itself has been a sticking point, too. In February, after Congress authorized the National Park Service to pursue the project, outrage and conspiracy theories ricocheted around local blogs, listservs and newspapers.

Mr. Stockton of Williams said that using national parkland required Congressional and presidential backing simply to start the process.
“This is an early, early, early step,” Mr. O'Higgins added, with many steps still requir ed, including environmental impact studies, and approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

Activists and environmentalists complained that the plan seemed a fait accompli and that the park service had been secretive, never mentioning the proposal during public meetings discussing Floyd Bennett Field's future. The revelation that Mr. Grimm received a total of $3,000 from National Grid and Williams for his re-election campaign after co-sponsoring the bill also fed the controversy. Mr. Grimm said there was no quid pro quo.

If the project goes forward, another fight looms, over money; everyone involved seemingly has a different idea about how much revenue may be generated and where it would go. Local advocates say that if they have to live with the pipeline, the money should go to Jamaica Bay, not disappear into the National Park Service's general budget.

“This should at least provide some g ood money to the park,” Mr. Riepe said, adding that money was badly needed for marsh restoration. “That's the lifeblood of Jamaica Bay.”

He Skewered Politics and New York, Without Actually Existing

August 29, 2012, 11:12 am

By SAM ROBERTS

Henry James, Henry Adams and Theodore Roosevelt read him regularly. The historian Charles A. Beard said that given the toxic level of public controversies in the early 20th century, he “relaxed the tension of the ‘moral overstrain.'” The columnist Franklin P. Adams called his meditations “merely truth concealed in sugar-coated idiom and dialect” to conceal his loathing of injustice, sham and selfish stupidity. Through hundreds of columns beginning in 1893, he was a national sage and satirist laureate.

All that, and he didn't really exist.

He was Mr. Dooley, and he was a figment of the humorist Finley Peter Dunne's imagination - a saloonkeeper who rarely left Ch icago's South Side, where he opined in a barely decipherable Roscommon brogue in column-length commentaries that Dunne duly transcribed and published.

Mr. Dooley is credited with phrases that endured well beyond his own chimerical life or Dunne's, like “politics ain't beanbag” and saying that a newspaper's mission is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

A century ago this month, Mr. Dooley volunteered that living in New York City (which Mr. Dooley had never visited, but where Dunne had moved by then) would be too violent and intense for him.

“If I was younger an' more bullet-proof I'd take a chance,” he said with characteristic candor and understatement.

“There's no doubt it's the center of American civilization since Dead Horse Gulch quieted down,” Mr. Dooley asserted, in translation. “I'd like to see the late Jesse James or the Younger brothers on Broadway. If they didn't die of nervous prostration from the artil lery practice they'd go home to Missouri and spoil their reputation for truth and veracity by sitting around the fire after a hard night's work robbing a Missouri Pacific train and telling their comrades about the exploits of the New York police.”

As America's satirist laureate, Mr. Dooley dispensed wit and, armed with the benefits of observation and experience, he challenged conventional wisdom.

“Mr. Dooley continues to be the primary spokesman for the early 1900s, and for those consulting historians of that era,” said Grace Eckley, a Dunne biographer.

Which might have come as a surprise to Mr. Dooley.

“I know history isn't true,” he once explained to his perennial bar mate, Mr. Hennessy, “because it ain't like what I see every day in Halsted Street. History is a post-mortem examination.''

Among his fans was Theodore Roosevelt, of whom Mr. Dooley said: “Ye don't hear him hollerin' at posterity. Posterity don't begin to vote till a fter th' polls close.”

Politicians and national party conventions were fodder for his ruminations, but in The New York Times Magazine on Aug. 11, 1912, Mr. Dooley compared life in his often tedious Second City with the strenuousness of New York. “This throbbing home of joy never slows down,” he said of the First City.

Mr. Dooley's commentary on New York came as Mayor William F. Gaynor was warring with the police over corruption, lax supervision and erosion of civil liberties. He, in turn, was accused of hobbling and demoralizing the force and contributing to a crime wave.

New York, he said, “furnishes the only reading material worth printing” and “I wouldn't change it for anything.” He allowed as how “no place in the world offers a better prospect for a career to an ambitious young fellow who can deal from the bottom of the deck and is handy with a gun” than New York did. “No church is allowed to be open within 200 feet of a saloon” an d “everybody has more money than they can use.”

Still, decades before Johnny Carson denigrated New York on “The Tonight Show” or Sinatra rhapsodized about the city that never sleeps, Mr. Dooley complained that he might be ill at ease here, uncertain how to conduct himself or dress, and might even forget to carry a gun in a city that comes alive at night:

“When the first rays of the electric light sign peeps through the blinds and warns the sleeping New Yorker that night has come at last he saunters down to breakfast in his home in the hotel, drinks his customary bucket of Champagne, leisurely opens Black Hand letters and other invitations in the evening's mail, receives the summons of the divorce suit, sends the children off to the performance of ‘Salome,' and then, pasting his identification card in his hat and strapping on his brace of automatics under his swallow tail coat, strolls out to his faro bank or hop joint.”

Mr. Dooley's New York was a caricature where rich people ruled and cops were corrupt:

“The sharp cries of the hawkers of green goods and gold bricks rises above the laughter of the white garbed street sweeper when the millionaire's automobile runs over his foot,” the Second City philosopher said. He damned with feint praise the “police collectors, a fine soldierly body of men carrying familiar hand satchels,” who, he said, “regulate crime and they do it so well that it is now more regular and reliable on Broadway perhaps than anywhere else in the world.”

Until shortly after midnight, that is, when cops, diverted by assignments like suppressing baseball games and dangerous radicals, are ill-equipped to suppress the evening “cannonading.” He carped that street violence was too random. Instead, he mused, permits should be granted to accredited gang leaders, events should be listed in an amusement guide and perhaps when the season opens the governor or mayor “might be in duced to attend and throw in the first revolver.”

“If a man ever goes to New York, he seldom leaves it alive if he can help it,” Mr. Dooley said.

Mr. Dooley insisted that he didn't blame the police: “If you leave it optional with a policeman whether he'll send a fellow citizen to jail or take his money, what is there for a man of real feeling to do?”

While he admitted that most of what he knew about New York, a city of a little more than four million people then, came from newspapers, he also received intelligence from his cousin Miles, who lived here. Miles, Mr. Dooley reported, “said he liked the village quiet of Chicago, but life away from New York was like camping out.”

When pressed for details, Miles acknowledged that he had not been to the theater in 30 years and had never patronized an all-night restaurant or a gambling casino.

“After questioning the poor spirited fellow for a while,” Mr. Dooley concluded, “I made up m y mind that about four million of the people of New York might as well be living in Peewaukee for all they know of the gay life of the capital. Yes, sir, with all this reckless joy and easy reach they spend their time in working 10 hours a day, sending their children to school or church, struggling to pay the groceryman and playing the accordion in their little flats. But you never hear of them. In a city the size of New York, there ain't ever more than a thousand people whose lives are interesting enough to be work talking about and most of these deserve to be in jail.”

Tech Start-ups Look for Space in New Neighborhoods

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Ideeli, an online fashion retailer, moved into offices at 1385 Broadway, a 23-story building in the garment district. 

A decade ago, in the dot-com boom, technology companies flocked to the neighborhoods along Broadway in , with most ending up south of an unofficial cutoff of 23rd Street.

Today, though, that Rubicon is being regularly crossed by a new generation of digital businesses that seem willing to trade Lower Manhattan and its perceived hipness for the more button-down precincts of Midtown.

More than 100 Internet-based marketing firms, retailers and social networking companies are based in the area between the Flatiron Building and Central Park, out of about 1,400 similar businesses across the city, according to data compiled by NYC Digital, an initiative started last year by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to promote the city's technology industry.

“The boundaries of Silicon Alley are definitely pressing outward,” said Jonathan Serko, a broker with Cushman and Wakefield who has worked to bring tech companies to Midtown. He added, “some of the companies are moving out of necessity.”

In pockets of downtown Manhattan, commercial rents have spiked in recent years as increasingly fashionable neighborhoods like Chelsea, Greenwich Village and the financial district have welcomed a surge of new businesses. Residential conversions have also gobbled up the types of industrial buildings that tech companies once favored.

At the same time, fledgling tech companies have become more cost-conscious than their predecessors, many of whom burned through their seed money in a short time, brokers say. Significant savings are possible in Midtown, where rents can be $40 a square foot compared with up to $70 a square foot in trendier areas, according to Cushman data.

GSI Commerce, which provides online services for retailers like Toys “R” Us, was subletting a 10,000-square-foot loft on Broadway in SoHo in 2011 when the company was acquired by eBay, prompting the need to expand.

“There are many spaces out there that are beautiful, don't misunderstand me,” said Jan Dobris, a senior vice president of GSI Commerce. “They just weren't good ways to expend dollars.”

The spaces that Ms. Dobris saw in SoHo, the financial district and Hudson Yards were around $60 a square foot, which was too pricey, she said. Eventually, she settled on 1350 Broadway, a prewar high-rise on West 36th Street.

In March, GSI leased the 25,000-square-foot third floor for about $45 a square foot, according to Malkin Holdings, the building's landlord.

There are other perks about Midtown, like the proximity of Penn Station, Ms. Dobris said. Several of her company's 100 employees travel frequently to GSI's headquarters in King of Prussia, Pa., and she said they liked having trains close by.

Attracting digitally focused companies like GSI is a priority for Anthony Malkin, the president of Malkin Holdings, which has renovated most of its Manhattan portfolio to lure new kinds of tenants.

At 1350 Broadway, he refurbished the marble-walled lobby and elevator cabs, adding small monitors that display weather and news, and upgraded the building's windows, lights and bathrooms. U Marketing, an ad agency with a big focus on digital platforms, moved to the eighth floor in 2009 and recently expanded into a next-door space.

Similarly, at the , which Mr. Malkin supervises, a continuing $550 million renovation has removed the walls on many floors to make offices more open.

The efforts may be paying off. This spring, LinkedIn, a social networking Web site, signed a lease for a 10,400-square-foot space on the 24th floor, Mr. Malkin said, to augment its 32,000-square-foot space on the 25th. Asking rents in the landmark 102-story skyscraper start at $50 a square foot, he added.

In opting for workplaces that are more conventional than the former warehouses where they began as start-ups, tech companies “are moving away from environments that are about creativity into those that are more ‘Let's get to work,' ” Mr. Malkin said.

An Art Exhibit Gets Mixed Reviews

By VIRGINIA ANTONELLI

Dear Diary:

Even though I was suffering that feeling of a sleeping squirrel waking out of a sound slumber and then battling ferociously with itself behind my right kneecap, the weather was so pleasant this August morning I had to leave my hovel and take a walk in my neighborhood, the Upper West Side. There I was, dragging my hobbled right leg up West 84th Street toward Columbus Avenue, when I noticed a colorful display of outdoor art produced by children attending P.S. 9. I whipped out my camera and avidly shot pictures of each sculpture.

A fellow passer-by around my age, over 40 but under death, was walking a hound. While his dog was getting familiar with a hubcap, he stopped to stare at the exhibit with me. I gushed, “Great kid art, don't ya think?”

He sniffed, “Amateurs.”

Mr. McSour did not change my opinion, but I did make a mental note, “When planning fu n, don't invite him.”

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via e-mail: diary@nytimes.com or telephone: (212) 556-1333. Follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

On Tennis Circuit, a Globe-Trotting Fan Sticks to the Cheap Seats

By COREY KILGANNON

Late on Monday afternoon, the first official day of play in the 2012 United States Open, Katrina Williams, 21, was sitting in the top row of a grandstand court at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens.

The day had a leisurely feel and the grandstand was half empty. A fan was lying down sleeping next to Ms. Williams, who was giggling at the shows of emotion from the two women playing, Andrea Petkovic, a German, and Romina Oprandi, a Swiss-Italian.

Ms. Williams browsed her smartphone for news from the other matches, and sent Twitter messages with any drips of drama from the match, like when Ms. Petkovic smashed her racket on the ground. When a group of Swiss fans wearing red wigs a few rows down cheered Ms. Oprandi, Ms. Williams sent posts mocking their cheers.

In other words, Ms. Williams was in her element, in the thick of the buzz of tennis fandom. Ms. Williams, who is from Melbourne, Australia, came under the grip of a vicious tennis obsession last year, abruptly quit her job as a receptionist and started using her $23,000 in savings to travel the world following the big tennis tournaments on the cheap, staying in hostels and avoiding high-price stadium food and premium tickets.

“It's like seeing your favorite TV characters come to life,” Ms. Williams said of attending the tournaments. She said she had been on the road basically since going to the Brisbane International Tennis Tournament in late December. After that came the Australian Open in January, followed by the other three tournaments that make up tennis's Grand Slam: the French Open in May, Wimbledon in June and the United States Open now, with a half-dozen smaller tournaments and side trips along the way.

At the moment, she is staying at a $40-a-night hostel in Long Island City, sleeping in a bunk bed and sharing a room with nine other people. She takes the No. 7 train to the tournament each day.

Ms. Williams said she had spent about $13,000 so far on her tennis odyssey. The United States Open will cost her about $3,000, she said, even with her denying herself the more costlier stadium and later-round matches.

She figures her money will last her until the Paris Indoors tournament in November. Her parents, big tennis fans themselves, are resigned to her mission, she said, and have promised to at least pay for her flight home when her bank account runs dry.

Ms. Williams attributes much of her over-the-top tennis interest to Novak Djokovic, the second-ranked player in the world, who became her favorite as soon as she saw him play Roger Federer â€" now her least-favorite player - in the semifinals of the 2008 Australian Open.

Watching Mr. Djokovic brazenly stare down an umpire after being called for a violation “changed my life,” she said. The love has led to a trip to Serbia, Mr. Djokovic's homeland, a nd a new favorite clothing brand, Uniqlo, which sponsors Mr. Djokovic.

When Mr. Djokovic faced Rafael Nadal in the French Open final this year, Ms. Williams quickly bought an entire Uniqlo outfit for herself, to bring Mr. Djokovic luck. He lost nonetheless.

As important to Ms. Williams as who wins is who is dating whom and who is wearing what. Ms. Williams has hard-to-miss red hair and often sits close to the court in early-round matches and sure she is on the radar screens of some players she has crossed paths with.

When she runs into players on the tournament grounds or in airports, she said, “I usually run away because I'm very shy and I don't want them to think I'm stalking them.”

Ms. Williams said she was never part of the social scene associated with high-profile tournaments and often goes for days without speaking to anyone, just watching tennis.

Having been to all the big tournaments, Ms. Williams takes note of the differences. The United States Open, she said, has a less boisterous crowd than the Australian Open, is less crowded than the French, and is much more casual than Wimbledon.

She walked past the food court â€" she is a vegan and carries a salad from Whole Foods in her purse into the tennis center each day â€" and went to watch Fernando Verdasco of Spain play Rui Machado of Portugal.

After winning the first two sets, Mr. Verdasco sat courtside and stripped off his soaking shirt and squeezed the sweat out of it until a puddle formed on the court.

She grabbed her phone and posted to Twitter: “Verdasco just wrung out his shirt. A bucket of sweat on the court.''

West 62nd Street, 7:37 P.M.

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Eight West Nile Cases Reported in City, Similar to Level in 2011

By CHRIS PALMER

During a summer in which West Nile virus has jumped to record levels nationwide, eight city residents have contracted the mosquito-borne illness - a similar level to the number infected by this time last year, according to the city's health department.

On Monday, the city added one case of West Nile fever in Brooklyn to its tally, along with a case in Brooklyn in which a blood donor's blood was found to be carrying the virus, according to Anne-Katrin Titze, a parks advocate in Brooklyn who monitors the health department's Web site. The health department would not say when the cases were added.

Of the eight city residents, spread across all five boroughs, in whom West Nile fever or the more serious West Nile neuroinvasive disease were diagnosed, five were male and three were female, the city said; the city would not disclose their ages.

Last year, there were 11 human cases of West Ni le citywide, down from 42 cases in 2010, according to city figures. Since the disease was first detected here in 1999, the number of cases in the city has ranged from a high of 47 in 1999 to a low of 3 in 2009.

At least six state residents outside the city have been infected this year, according to the state's Health Department, and two of them â€" both elderly people from Long Island â€" have died. Last year, there were 33 cases in state residents outside the city, one of them fatal.

West Nile is transmitted to humans by infected mosquitoes; symptoms typically include fevers, headaches or stomach pain, which generally pass after a few days. The virus can be fatal for those with weaker immune systems, particularly the elderly.

Nationwide, more than 1,100 human infections and 41 deaths have been recorded this year. Federal health officials said last week that 2012 was on pace to be the worst outbreak of the disease since its arrival on the continent 13 yea rs ago.

As in past years, New York City has been spraying insecticide across neighborhoods since June. On Tuesday, the city was scheduled to spray the southeastern Bronx and northern Queens near Long Island Sound.

Dolan to Offer Prayer at Democratic Convention

August 28, 2012, 12:29 pm

By SHARON OTTERMAN

Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York has accepted an invitation to deliver the closing prayer at next week's Democratic National Convention, following through on a promise that he made when accepting the same role at the Republican convention.

His appearance in Charlotte, which was announced Tuesday by the Archdiocese of New York, may lead to one of the most intriguing tableaus of this convention season. Cardinal Dolan, an opponent of abortion and gay marriage who is among the Catholic bishops suing the Obama administration over its contraception health care mandates, will bless a gathering of thousands of delegates who passionately disagree with him.

Cardinal Dolan is scheduled to deliver the closing prayer at the Republican convention on Thursday night, after Mitt Romney accepts the nomination. He had said that his appearance should not be seen as partisan and said that he would accept an invitation to pray with the Democrats as well.

“It was made clear to the Democratic Convention organizers, as it was to the Republicans, that the Cardinal was coming solely as a pastor, only to pray, not to endorse any party, platform, or candidate,” Joseph Zwilling, the spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York, wrote in a press release on Tuesday.

In recent years Catholics have emerged as an important swing vote. Long predominantly Democratic, Catholics have increasingly shifted to the Republican party drawn by conservative positions on social issues.

Though a pointed critic of the Obama administration, Cardinal Dolan frequently speaks about the importance of engaging with those one disagrees with. On Monday, he even issued a challenge to the Democratic and Republican nominees for president and vice-president, asking them to sign a pledge to behave “with civility” this election season.

That pledge, written by the Knights of Columbus, asks the candidatesâ€" as well as the media, advocates and other commentatorsâ€" “to employ a more civil tone in public discourse on political and social issues, focusing on policies rather than on individual personalities.”

Cardinal Dolan also raised conservative eyebrows several weeks ago when he announced that he had decided to invite both President Obama and Mr. Romney to the annual Al Smith Dinner, a charity event in New York in October.

He was inundated with stacks of angry mail after issuing that invitation, he said, many from anti-abortion advocates who believed he was offering a stage to someone they believe is complicit in the deaths of unborn children. In 2004 Cardinal Edward M. Egan, then archbishop of New York, declined to invit e the presidential candidates to the dinner because of his concern for the positions held by the Democratic nominee for president, Sen. John Kerry, who is Catholic.

But Cardinal Dolan wrote on his blog in response: “It's better to invite than to ignore, more effective to talk together than to yell from a distance, more productive to open a door than to shut one.”

I.B.M. Mainframe Won\'t Die, But Evolves

is introducing on Tuesday a new line of mainframe computers, adding yet another chapter to a remarkable story of technological longevity and business strategy.

The new model, the zEnterprise EC12, has strengthened the traditional mainframe's skill of reliably and securely handling vast volumes of transactions. That is why the mainframe is still the digital workhorse for banking and telecommunications networks - and why mainframes are selling briskly in the emerging economies of Asia and Africa.

The new models have added capabilities for computing chores that are growing rapidly, like analyzing torrents of data from the Web and corporate databases to predict consumer behavior and business risks. Name a trend in corporate computing - cloud computing, data center consolidation, flash-memory storage, so-called green computing - and I.B.M. executives point to tailored features in its mainframe that deliver the goods.

The death of the mainframe has been predicted many times over the years. But it has prevailed because it has been overhauled time and again. In the early 1990s, the personal computer revolution took off and I.B.M., wedded to its big-iron computers, was in deep trouble. To make the mainframe more competitive, its insides were retooled, using low-cost microprocessors as the computing engine.

Like any threatened species that survives, the mainframe evolved. It has been tweaked to master new programming languages, like Java, and new software operating systems, like Linux.

“The mainframe is the most flexible technology platform in computing,” said Rodney C. Adkins, I.B.M.'s senior vice president for systems and technology.

That flexibility is a byproduct of investment. The new I.B.M. mainframe, according to the company, represents $1 billion in research and development spending over three years.

I.B.M. has also invested beyond its corporate walls. Nearly a decade ago, fearing that its mainframe business would wither if retiring mainframe engineers were not replaced, I.B.M. went out to universities, advocating for mainframe courses and offering support. Today, more than 1,000 schools in 67 countries participate in I.B.M.'s academic initiative for mainframe education.

The sale of mainframe computers accounts for only about 4 percent of I.B.M.'s revenue these days. Yet the mainframe is a vital asset to I.B.M. because of all the business that flows from it. When all the mainframe-related software, services and storage are included, mainframe technology delivers about 25 percent of I.B.M.'s revenue and more than 40 percent of its profits, estimates A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein.

The I.B.M. mainframe story offers a glimpse of why manufacturing can be crucial to an American company - and to the economy as a whole - even though high-end manufacturing does not employ large numbers of factory workers.

Over the last 15 years, I.B.M. has aggressively globalized its operations and work force, and pulled out of manufacturing businesses including personal computers and disk drives.

But I.B.M. held on to its core mainframe business, whose development is supported by thousands of engineers and scientists. Mainframe parts are produced in I.B.M. facilities in the United States, in Endicott, N.Y., and Fishkill, N.Y., and in Germany and elsewhere. The final assembly work is done in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where I.B.M. opened a $30 million mainframe plant in 2010.

A mainframe costs more than $1 million, and higher-performance models with peripheral equipment often cost $10 million or more. Yet even young companies and emerging nations, analysts say, find the expense worth it for some tasks.

Comepay, for instance, is a fast-growing company that says it operates more than 10,000 self-service payment kiosks in Russia, where consumers pay for products and services ranging from Internet service and cellphones to electric bills. Comepay handles millions of transactions a day, and the volume is rising. The Russian company bought an I.B.M. mainframe in 2010.

“Mainframes are extremely reliable,” said Ruslan Stepanenko, chief information officer of Comepay. “It keeps working even when the transaction load is very high.”

Last year, the Senegal Ministry of Finance bought two I.B.M. mainframes to help monitor all the imports, exports and customs duties at the African country's 30 border checkpoints.

Performance, security and reliability were the main reasons for selecting the mainframe, said Momar Fall, a manager and mainframe technical specialist in CFAO Technologies, an I.B.M. partner in Senegal. But another advantage in a developing nation, he said, is that the mainframes are constantly communicating over the Internet with a remote I.B.M. support center.

“So seven days a week, 24 hours a day, I.B.M. is looking after them,” Mr. Fall said.

Longtime mainframe customers say the technology has done a good job keeping up with the times. Last year, Primerica, a financial services company, purchased its 19th mainframe in 30 years.

David Wade, chief information officer, has worked for Primerica, based in Duluth, Ga., since its first mainframe arrived. With more than four million life insurance customers and more than two million investment-account clients, he said the company needs the reliable processing technology of the mainframe. “It works like nothing else,” Mr. Wade said.

Amazon Reshapes Business With Cloud Service

SEATTLE - Within a few years, 's creative destruction of both traditional book publishing and retailing may be footnotes to the company's larger and more secretive goal: giving anyone on the planet access to an almost unimaginable amount of computing power.

Every day, a start-up called the Climate Corporation performs over 10,000 simulations of the next two years' weather for more than one million locations in the United States. It then combines that with data on root structure and soil porosity to write crop insurance for thousands of farmers.

Another start-up, called Cue, scans up to 500 million e-mails, Facebook updates and corporate documents to create a service that can outline the biography of a given person you meet, warn you to be home to receive a package or text a lunch guest that you are running late.

Each of these start-ups carries out computing tasks that a decade ago would have been impossible without a major investment in computers. Both of these companies, however, own little besides a few desktop computers. They and thousands of other companies now rent data storage and computer server time from Amazon, through its Amazon Web Services division, for what they say is a fraction of the cost of owning and running their own computers.

“I have 10 engineers, but without A.W.S. I guarantee I'd need 60,” said Daniel Gross, Cue's 20-year-old co-founder. “It just gets cheaper, and cheaper, and cheaper.” He figures Cue spends something under $100,000 a month with Amazon but would spend “probably $2 million to do it ourselves, without the speed and flexibility.”

He conceded that “I don't even know what the ballpark number for a server is - for me, it would be like knowing what the price of a sword is.”

Cloud computing has been around for years, but it is now powering all kinds of new businesses around the globe, quickly and with less capital.

Instagram, a 12-person photo-sharing company that was sold to Facebook for an estimated $1 billion just 19 months after it opened, skipped the expenses and bother of setting up its own computer servers.

EdX, a global online education program from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, had over 120,000 students taking a single class together on A.W.S. Over 185 United States government agencies run some part of their services on A.W.S. Millions of people in Africa shop for cars online, using cheap smartphones connected to A.W.S. servers located in California and Ireland.

“We are on a shift that is as momentous and as fundamental as the shift to the electrical grid,” said Andrew R. Jassy, the head of A.W.S. “It's happening a lot faster than any of us thought.”

He started A.W.S. in 2006 with about three dozen employees. Amazon won't say how many people now work at A.W.S., but the company's Web site currently lists over 600 job openings.

Amazon's efforts are just the start of a global competition among computing giants. In June, Google fully introduced a service similar to A.W.S. Microsoft is also in the business with its offering, Windows Azure.

If only for competitive reasons, Amazon does not say much about A.W.S. However, it is estimated to bring in about $1 billion to Amazon. Its three giant computer regional centers in the United States, in Virginia, Oregon and California, each consist of multiple buildings with thousands of servers.

There are others in Japan, Ireland, Singapore and Brazil. And the pace of its expansion has quickened. It opened four of those regions in 2011 and is believed to be building a similar number now. Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, is interested in setting up cloud-computing installations for other governments.

According to an executive with knowledge of Amazon's operation who was not authorized to speak publicly, just one of the 10 data centers in Amazon's Eastern United States region has more servers dedicated to cloud computing than does Rackspace, a public cloud company serving 180,000 businesses with more than 80,000 servers.

Eventually, however, Mr. Jassy said, “we believe at the highest level that A.W.S. can be at least as big as our other businesses.” Amazon recorded nearly $50 billion in revenue last year. Mr. Jassy thinks A.W.S. is probably less than 10 percent of its eventual size.

The lower cost of computing, along with overnight deployment of machines, drives the business. Germany's Spiegel TV paid A.W.S. to make digital copies of 20,000 programs. It cost less than Spiegel would have paid for the electricity powering its own servers.

GoodData, based in San Francisco, analyzes data from 6,000 companies on A.W.S. to find things like sales leads. “Before, each company needed at least five people to do this work,” said Roman Stanek, GoodData's chief executive. “That is 30,000 people. I do it with 180. I don't know what all those other people will do now, but this isn't work they can do anymore. It's a winner-takes-all consolidation.”

All that data running through Amazon's cloud also has value. People leave bits of data about themselves that others then analyze. At any given time on A.W.S., there are about one million uses of a powerful database, called Elastic MapReduce, that is used to make predictions. Some suggest a new movie or video game to play, while others log behavior for advertising, credit history or suggestions about whom to date. (Companies have to permit their data to be analyzed, and Amazon says it applies the same security standards it uses on its retail site.)

The efficiency of this hyper-aware environment is already remaking jobs for many and will most likely dislocate more. “You can now test a product against millions of users for just a few thousand dollars, or start a company with just one or two people,” said Graham Spencer, a partner at Google Ventures, which invests in data-heavy start-ups that rely on such cheap computing. “It's a huge change for Silicon Valley.”

That vision is in line with the way Mr. Bezos sees A.W.S., say executives who have worked with him. “Jeff thinks on a planetary level,” said David Risher, a former Amazon senior executive who now heads a charity called Worldreader, which uses A.W.S. to download books to thousands of computers in Africa. “A.W.S. is an opportunity, as a business. But it is also a philosophy of enabling other people to build big systems. That is how Amazon will make a dent in the universe.”

Considering Political Corruption and, Perhaps, a New City Motto

By CLYDE HABERMAN

My colleague Sam Roberts wrote on Monday about a Latin motto woven into the Bronx borough flag. It's from Virgil. “Ne cede malis,” it goes. “Do not yield to evil.”

The Day

Clyde Haberman offers his take on the news.

Considering the number of Bronx politicians sent to prison for criminal possession of sticky fingers, the irony of those words is self-evident. Perhaps a new motto is in order, not just for the Bronx but for the entire city. Other boroughs have hardly been slackers when it comes to producing officials who look more natural in orange jumpsuits than in pinstripes.

One slogan that seems appropriate has the advantage of being both familiar and to the point: “Ostende mihi pecuniam.” You probably know it better in its English form:

“Show me the money.”

What better timing for this idea than the day after yet another office holder, State Senator Shirley L. Huntley of Queens, ended up with hands cuffed behind her back, charged with conspiring to siphon taxpayer dollars from their intended purpose and divert them to the pockets of allies and relatives.

The roster of the indicted and the convicted among New York's political class is appallingly long, and keeps growing. Nearly two dozen officials, most of them Democrats, have been brought up on corruption charges in the last few years. The names of many who fell from grace can be found in a “Day” column that ran not long ago. They run the gamut from A to Z - from A for Alan G. Hevesi, the former state comptroller, to Z for Miguel Martinez, a former city councilman. (Where is it written that the name has to begin with Z?)

Separate from the criminal charges brought against Ms. Huntley on Monday, Assemblywoman Naomi Rivera of the Bronx is reportedly in the sights of ethics officials because of claims that she put her lovers on the public payroll and used a nonprofit organization that she controlled as her personal ATM.

As if old-fashioned greed weren't enough, we have lust to consider as well.

The avatar of this deadly sin is Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez, the Democratic political boss in Brooklyn. On Friday, the Assembly leadership stripped Mr. Lopez of his privileges, based on findings that he had groped, kissed and verbally harassed female staff members. It turns out, though, that the same leadership â€" namely Speaker Sheldon Silver - had earlier doled out in secret more than $100,000 of the public's money to quietly settle allegations of sexual harassment against the 71-year-old assemblyman.

Ah, Albany.

Though Mr. Lopez denies any wrongdoing, many leading Democrats, including the governor, say it's time for him to go.

All of this is enough to make a grown man blush. Not everyone's sensibi lities, however, are quite so delicate. District Council 37, the city's largest union of public employees, is made of sterner stuff.

Last week the council announced its endorsements for legislative primaries that will be held on Sept. 13. Among the candidates it considers stellar are Ms. Huntley and Ms. Rivera. Oh, and also Assemblyman William F. Boyland Jr. of Brooklyn. Besides possessing the worst attendance record in Albany and displaying no interest in introducing bills, Mr. Boyland has twice been indicted on federal charges of bribe-receiving.

He beat one set of charges last November. That was a perplexing turn of events. One jury had previously pronounced the head of a health care organization guilty of bribing the assemblyman. But now a different bunch of jurors couldn't agree that Mr. Boyland had in fact received those payoffs. Call it the immaculate reception. Federal prosecutors aren't through with Mr. Boyland, though. They have brought new corruption charges against him.

So, why are officials of such questionable character deemed worthy of a giant union's approval?

District Council 37 confined itself to passing along a prepared statement from its executive director, Lillian Roberts, to the effect that its endorsement process was “transparent.”

“Candidates are not rated on any single issue but on the entire record of issues related to labor,” Ms. Roberts said.

All in all, it looks as if we're a long way from seeing the end of “Ostende mihi pecuniam” as a guide to New York politics. Mr. Lopez's situation is another matter. If the groping charges are true, his seems more a case of “Da mihi corpus tuum.”

“Give me your body.”