Summertime, and the kvetching is easy:
- Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and it also helps to keep an eye on Mickey Mouse.
Who would have imagined two decades ago that the scourge of Times Square 14 years into the 21st century would be . . . cartoon characters?
That is, as The Post reported in detail Sunday, free-range hustlers decked out in costumes drawn from a variety of children’s TV shows — from Disney characters to SpongeBob SquarePants to an array of Sesame Street muppets.
They’re all over Midtown, but especially concentrated in Mike Bloomberg’s irksome pedestrian plaza at Times Square — aggressively clogging foot traffic, harassing tourists and occasionally traumatizing toddlers.
Now, as urban pestilences go, this one is one is low-grade. Aggressive policing cleansed the old Times Square of muggers and such (while the Internet and Craigslist siphoned off the porn pervs, and most of the hookers and pimps).
So, things are better.
But if you design a venue attractive to moochers, hustlers and maybe a little worse (which Bloomberg did) and then leave it to its own devices (which Mayor de Blasio obviously has), then what you’ll get are moochers, hustlers and maybe a little worse.
A little Times Square TLC from the NYPD right now would do a lot to restore a sense of order to an attraction of considerable interest to the 55 million tourists who will visit the city this year. With their money.
- Pity poor Shelly Silver. Everybody else is heading for the beach, but New York’s second-most-powerful politician (some would say first) now must buckle down and “earn” the $750,000-plus he hauls down from the tort-law behemoth Weitz & Luxenberg PC.
It’s a part-time gig, and nobody really knows what Silver does for his dough: New York’s outside-income disclosure laws demand acknowledgement of sums received, but little further detail.
Now, Silver & Co. wrote the disclosure law, so this is no surprise.
Senate co-leaders and partners-in-obfuscation Dean Skelos (R-LI) and Jeff Klein (D-Bronx) also have lush part-time gigs. But the speaker is the gold standard here — and, given the secrecy, it’s certainly legit to speculate on what an honest audit of his Weitz & Luxenberg worksheets would reveal.
Probably just a phone call or two from the speaker’s trial-lawyer bosses — congratulating him on one more legislative session without even a hint of tort reform.
Not exactly working hard for the money — but it gets the job done.
- Coming up soon, that back-to-school shopping trip to the local mall. But for many New Yorkers, mostly Upstaters, this might be a little tougher than in the past.
It seems that 42 suburban shopping malls outside of New York City are suffering severe financial stress — the most of any state in the nation, including recession-wracked California.
According to the Web site DeadMalls.com, a privately operated industry touchstone, malls stumble for two main reasons.
First, Internet (Amazon) and big-box (Wal-Mart) competition has walloped traditional mall anchor stores like Sears and Penney’s — and shoppers avoid malls without serious anchors.
Mostly, though, troubled malls reflect economically battered local economies — which basically describes the entirety of Upstate. Indeed, the US Conference of Mayors says five of the 10 slowest-growing metropolitan regions in the nation are to be found upstate.
Gov. Cuomo’s response to this is a mix of high-decibel cheerleading, some politically driven investment of public resources, promises of casinos in the sweet bye-and-bye — and an obdurate refusal to support hydrofracking in the Southern Tier, which would be of particular help to Binghamton.
Thus no wonder the Gallup Poll just listed Binghamtonians as the “least optimistic” residents of fully 190 metro areas nationwide.
- Long Island Rail Road union leaders, maybe the most accomplished train robbers since Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, are getting ready for a Sunday strike.
The LIRR’s labor costs are already 30 percent higher than sister rail line Metro-North, reports the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas, noting that riders cover 60 percent of Metro-North costs — but only 46 percent of the LIRR’s. Tax dollars make up the difference.
Then there is the $1 billion (that’s “b,” as in blinkin’ big boondoggle) disability swindle pulled off by LIRR workers not so long ago. Some of the worst abusers landed in jail, but not nearly enough.
No surprise, then, that an LIRR entitlement culture endures, and that a wholly unjustifiable strike looms.
Cuomo and de Blasio are low-keying it, which may just be tactical, but a responsible resolution of the conflict represents a considerable leadership challenge — and it’s not clear that either man is willing to tackle it.
- Meanwhile, de Blasio is planning an Italian vacation. Good for him; time off clears the head and not to worry — Mickey Mouse will be waiting when he returns, and the trains will be running.
Probably.