New York City is considering a plan that would turn Bellevue hospital, the famous mental institution, into a hotel. Just think of the great marketing campaign they could run using the famous “Crazy Eddie” (is he still alive?) of New York radio commercial fame. “Come on down our prices are insane!”

Guests at Bellevue will soon be given bathrobes instead of straitjackets, if the city can convince a developer to turn its most famous nut house into a luxe hotel.

City officials yesterday said they’re confident the hospital’s old psychiatric ward, which until the mid-1980s provided something short of four-star accommodations to countless kooks and criminals, would help fill a void in Manhattan’s East Side medical corridor.

Originally, officials considered turning the 1931 Italian Renaissance-style building on First Avenue between 29th and 30th streets into condos, but oddly, the layout of a mental institution is better suited to a hotel, Melissa Konur, vice president of the city’s Economic Development Commission, told The Post. “There are long corridors, and the rooms aren’t very big,” she said.

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An article in the USA Today called “10 great places to check into movie-hotel history” got me thinking about how much my family (especially my son Mike who is now a film student) have enjoyed the times when our love for movies and our love of travel has intersected.

The DVD for You’ve Got Mail has a tour of the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Zabars, Grey’s Papaya, Cafe Lalo took on a whole new meaning when they are seen not just as interesting places but as sets.

Kauai is not just an island in the Hawaiian Islands, it is where they filmed Jurassic Park. Each valley takes on a whole new look as imaginary dinosaurs run through them.

And the crowning experience for us was when we ran into a film crew on the streets of Sydney, Australia filming a car chase stunt from the film Superman Returns. We watched for hours as they setup the stunt. A car was heading through the pedestrian mall outside of the Metropolis Museum (it was the banners for the museum that first caught our eye) jumping off of a series of steps (and landing in a pile of cardboard boxes). Extras and stunt people were rehearsed. This was not a stunt they wanted to do twice. What took seconds in the film took hours to film.

By the way, the picture at the top of the article is the The Plaza New York.

Overlooking Central Park, the distinctive Plaza — built in 1907 and currently undergoing a $400 million renovation — is a familiar movie star. “Paul Hogan as Crocodile Dundee figured out the function of the bidet here, and Dudley Moore entertained working girls in the hotel’s famous Oak Bar in Arthur,” Reeves says. “But my favorite Plaza scene is the abduction of Cary Grant from the hotel’s lobby in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic North by Northwest.”

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Odd things have been know to happen in New York Subway trains, but I’ll bet you never expected this. According to a story in the Gothamist:

In March, four limber women took to the subway in a quest to win $10,000 from DareJunkies.com. The website offered the prize to the best public pole dance. The video features Laura Lee Anderson, Jessica Wu, Marissa Lupp, Isis Masoud, and regular subway riders as the four grind their way to the $10,000 prize. The scantily clad women were hogging the poles for twirls and using the overhead handles for other dance tricks - one of them even did a split on the subway floor! While there was at least one rider unhappy with the stunt, several other riders seem pleased with the dancing, especially one male rider who received a lap dance. Some riders even missed their stops by six stations to continue watching the show!

The funniest moment in the video is the two guys who (who sound like British tourists) who missed their stop because they did not want to miss the end of the show.

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