Grigory Potemkin for Mayor!

In more news of the obvious, it was reported last Wednesday that the city might be considering a homeless sweep of the Madison Square Garden area in the weeks before the GOP convention. You know-just so those delegates wouldn't have to be confronted with the fruits of their labors.

City Hall and the Dept. of Homeless Services vehemently deny that there's any such plan in the works, of course. Instead, they claim, they're simply going to be conducting an "outreach effort" to encourage the homeless to go to a shelter and take advantage of some of the many programs available to them. It's something that they do all year round, the DOHS insists.

That may well be the case, but it's curious that the focus of the "outreach program" from now until the end of August is the area between 5th & 10th Aves., from 30th to "somewhere north of 34th" St.

This should surprise no one. Homeless sweeps have been commonplace since the early days of the Giuliani administration. One day they're there, the next-poof. A few weeks later, they start drifting back from lord knows where (we always suspected they were being held in Giants stadium). Sometimes it happened in conjunction with a presidential visit or other major event, sometimes it happened for no reason at all.

The fact that a convention-minded sweep made the news is what surprises us. After all, from what little we've been able to piece together about the city's security plan, it sounds like everybody-not just the homeless-will be swept out of the Madison Square Garden area.