SHAKEDOWN STREET.(The Talk of the Town)("Sex and the City" Tour)

"Sex and the City" stopped shooting in 2003, but for the residents of Perry Street between Bleecker and West Fourth the show hasn't gone away. Twice a day (three times on weekends), around fifty tourists, the majority of them women and about half of them foreign, stream down the block and form a line across the street from No. 66: Carrie's house. (Although Carrie Bradshaw, the character played by Sarah Jessica Parker, was said to live on East Seventy-third Street, her comings and goings were actually filmed on Perry.) The tourists take turns sitting on the stoop and posing for pictures, and after twenty minutes or so they return to a bus on Hudson, near the Magnolia Bakery, eager to move along to Hotel Venus, the next stop on what's known as the "Sex and the City" Tour. They pay thirty-seven dollars for the privilege.

The tour has been operating for almost four years, but recently, in the absence of any new episodes, its popularity has surged, to the point where a thousand camera-wielding strangers now visit the block each week. Try as they may to be unobtrusive (and the tour guides have established some ground rules about keeping in a single file and whispering), the sightseers can't help but disturb the neighbors, some of whom like to sit on their own stoops and read the newspaper.

"We keep hoping they'll get bored and go away, but they don't," Betty Rinckwitz, the president of the Perry Street Block Association, said the other day. "So, since they didn't, we called them up and said, 'Come on, you're a real pest.' "

Greenwich Village residents, who tend to like everything just so, have long been familiar with the inconveniences brought on by movie and TV crews, and also with the effectiveness of a little petulance in extracting a "contribution" to the cause of neighborhood beautification. You take a bad situation, add a few hundred dollars, and make it good--call it the Village shakedown.

So Gerald Banu, the vice-president and treasurer of the Perry Street association, met earlier this month with Georgette Blau, the head of the tour company, to talk philanthropy. Banu was aware, for instance, that a disruptive presence on nearby Charles Street--MTV's filming of "Making the Band 2," during which a dog fell to its death--had been mitigated by "a very nice donation," as he put it, which made possible the installation of a retro Bishop's Crook lamppost in place of the standard cobrahead. Perry Street, meanwhile, was still stuck with cobraheads, and, as a matter of fact, there's one right in front of No. 66. Just think how much nicer all those photos would look with an elegant lamp in the foreground.

"I told them, 'You know, ...