Girl-counter.(The Talk of the Town)(Danny Gordon, park visitors)

For the past month, the keepers of Bryant Park have employed a system of electronic sensors to count the number of people using the park's public rest rooms. In September, they're going to test the system at a couple of the park's entrances, with the goal of refining their park-traffic assessments, which they rely upon to measure the health of the park and the success of the various programs they've introduced to lure people there.

This would seem to represent a threat to Danny Gordon, whose job it has been, for the past five years, to count, by hand, the daily number of lunchtime visitors. But Gordon has an advantage, which one hopes no machine could nullify, and that is his ability to tell the difference between a man and a woman. In those rare instances when he can't, he just guesses. "Sometimes I'll make it a man, sometimes I'll make it a woman," he said one recent muggy afternoon. "And, if I realize afterward that I was wrong, I'll change the next person." He counts with two clickers: one in his right hand for the men, one in his left for the women. As he clicks his way through the lunchtime crowds, arms out, wrists bobbing, he looks a little like a skier planting his poles.

Recently, Gordon has found that, on most weekdays, there are more women in the park than men. This is how his boss, Dan Biederman, would like it to be. Biederman, the longtime president of the Bryant Park Corporation, was a protege of the urban sociologist William (Holly) Whyte, whose theories about the dynamics of public space included the idea that the presence of women indicates civic health.

"Women pick up on visual cues of disorder better than men do," Biederman said the other day. "They're your purest customers. And, if women don't see other women, they tend to leave." Biederman visits the park several times a day and sometimes goes undercover. (Look out for a fit, middle-aged gentleman in a pin-striped suit, reading "The Red Badge of Courage.") He has discerned that women notice homeless people more than men do, object more to crumbs on picnic tables, and are more sensitive to foul odors, such as that of urine, which signals that there are no clean, functional bathrooms nearby. Twenty years ago, Bryant Park was an infamous shambles. Few ...