DID your mom use slip covers on the living-room sofa and ban food everywhere but the kitchen?
If so, you’re not alone – plenty of parents do that: One doesn’t want wear and tear from one’s maniac kids to turn one’s house into one’s trash-heap.
But, then, what’s the point of having the house? To show off to the book-club ladies – from a distance? It’s not a museum, after all.
This is a dilemma for anyone who owns . . . anything: You want your property to last. But you also want to use it. And unless you can flout the laws of physics, you can’t have both.
Such a conundrum appears to have paralyzed Mama – er, Mayor – Bloomberg for the past weeks with regard to Central Park.
In a larger sense, though, it has throttled much of the city for decades.
For weeks Hizzoner has refused to let 250,000 members of a seemingly psychotic coalition, United for Peace and Justice, use Central Park’s Great Lawn to stage a protest during next month’s Republican National Convention.
Not because the group is bonkers (though its members include groups like Code Pink, FREE CUNY, Missing Kitten TV, The Raelian Religion, 1199’ers for Peace and Justice, House of the Goddess Center for Pagan Wombyn, The Ruckus Society, Justice for Woody, Raging Grannies and Carlessnesshood 101 for Healthier Air, Planet & People; perhaps protest permits should come with psychotropic drugs).
The reason they can’t use the Great Lawn is that . . . they’ll ruin the grass.
Really.
The lawn, you see, was “restored” in the late ’90s for $18 million and given expensive drainage and irrigation systems after it had turned into “The Great Dustbowl” – a place, by the way, where scores of weekend warriors (including me) enjoyed years of touch football until, well . . . the restoration. After which football was banned.
The site also hosted numerous large-scale events – the ’82 anti-nuke protest that drew 700,000, the ’91 Paul Simon concert (600,000), Pavorotti’s ’93 show (250,000), Pope John Paul’s ’95 mass (130,000).
But now, letting 250,000 advocates of car bans, kittens and pagan worship (many of whom also wanted Saddam Hussein left alone) threatens that makeover.
Sure, that’s a problem.
But why restore something if folks aren’t going to be able to use it fully?
“Off limits” does not fit New Yorkers; this is supposed to be a town that never sleeps.
Yet the tendency to rope off areas – to landmark sites, “preserve” neighborhoods and wetlands, restrict land-use to obsolete enterprises (how much stevedoring can the city support these days, anyway?) – is as much a part of the New York spirit as milking every square inch of space and every waking second.
Preservation is why so much of the city – where a small piece of land can be worth a fortune if only it can be developed – lies fallow or underproductive.
It’s why the West Side languishes, along with key sites in Brooklyn and Queens and elsewhere. It’s why projects can take so long to get out of the ground.
Preservation, born of well-intentioned but overzealous deference to history and respect for 9/11’s victims, has even threatened vital rebuilding at Ground Zero.
Again, there’s value in restoring and protecting some sites.
But New York is a city – not a Gaughin. It needs to lose some of its slip covers.
Let builders tear down and build up.
Let grannies and kitten-lovers rage during the convention.
And let weekend warriors (e.g., yours truly) play football on the Great Lawn.
Or Dustbowl.
E-mail: abrodsky@nypost.com