Yesteryear’s squatters are today’s Generation-Xers lining up outside clubs or just ambling along Alphabet City’s streets talking about movies they’ve just seen or are on their way to see. The angry Tompkins Square protestors of 1988 are the impatient party of five waiting to be seated at a reserved table.

Even the precinct house isn’t the same. The Fifth Street facade that tens of millions of viewers around the world associated first with “Kojak” and then with “NYPD Blue” has been under sledgehammers for some time, and for more than two years cops assigned to the Ninth have been working out of Housing’s PSA 4 at Eighth Street and Avenue C. Unlike the Sixth Pct.’s old base at Charles Street in Greenwich Village, however, there are no condos in the this building’s future; the latest word is that it will reopen for bookings at the end of 2005.

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