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Borough President Howard Golden has diagnosed another case of Manhattanitis, the disease that makes its victims forget that New York has five boroughs.
This time, the patients are Transit Authority executives who are spending billions of dollars to rehabilitate the city's dingy subway stations.
Golden points out in a recent report that Brooklyn has more subway stations than any other borough, 170 to Manhattan's 146. It has more stations than Queens and the Bronx combined.
But of the 61 stations that have been modernized, 26 are in Manhattan (43 percent of the total), 17 in Queens, 7 in the Bronx and just 11 in Brooklyn (or 18 percent).
Unfortunately, one of the classic symptoms of Manhattanitis is that its victims go into a state of denial and resist therapy.
When told of Golden's criticism, Transit Authority spokesman Bob Slovak insisted that subway station rehabs are "based on need, not geographic location." He said that "stations are looked at objectively in terms of which needed...