Gradually, and without realizing it, one becomes a wonk. I mention this by way of explaining the unanticipated glee with which I just devoured the new Zoning Handbook issued by the Department of City Planning.

It may be that this book is not for everyone. It may be that there are poor, pitiable souls out there who do not care greatly to know the difference between a side lot and a setback – the sort of fools who couldn’t tell a baseline from a basement! But then there are the rest of us, for whom the ratios of lot coverage to base height are far more interesting than such demotic diversions as “American Idol” or “The Sopranos.”

Well, this is our lucky day. In scarcely 140 pages, the DCP has laid bare the arcana imperii,the secret workings of zoning in the five boroughs.

To the uninitiated, New York looks like the urban equivalent of an act of God, one building set next to another in no real order. The similarities and general conformity of built structures within a given district seem like the result of blind imitation rather than of concerted design. And yet the fact that all the buildings on Park Avenue are of a more or less uniform height, the fact that there is a general conformity to the architectural vocabulary of the buildings of Battery Park City, and the fact that office towers do not rise over Central Park, are all ex amples of zoning at work. The same is true of such other facts of urban life as trees, parking areas, and signage.

A great deal of premeditation underpins all this, and it is laid bare in this new volume. Especially useful are its exposes of the varied regulations for residential, commercial, and manufacturing zones, and its gazetteer of the 30 special purpose districts, from the Garment District and Lincoln Center to Sheepshead Bay.

The old-fashioned, commercial character of Little Italy, for example, is preserved or even, where necessary, reinvented by a number of special regulations. These protect and foster retail on Mulberry Street, while encouraging both the rehabilitation of old residences in the area and the construction of new ones at a scale matching that of their neighbors.

The zoning handbook sets forth all of these things, in prose that reads like this: “C6-4 through C6-9 districts, mapped mostly in the city’s major business districts, permit a maxi mum floor area ratio of 10.0 or 15.0 exclusive of any applicable bonus.)”

The book can be purchased at the bookstore of the Department of City Planning, at 22 Reade Street. Run, don’t walk.

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Last week the Mets unveiled the designs for a new stadium to be built across the street from Shea Stadium. The architects come from a firm called HOK Sport, which, as the official Mets Web site informs us, has “designed and renovated 13 of the 30 major league ballparks in use today and seven of the last eight to open in Major League Baseball.”

If I were any kind of an architecture critic, I would roundly condemn the pat contextualism of the new designs, which seek, in the most naive way possible, to re-enact past glories by creating a postmodern simulacrum of turn-of-the-century stadiums like Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field. I might even be heard to cluck my tongue at the Disneyfication of the universe and the infantilization of our culture at large.

Surely it would be refreshing to have a stadium that made a powerful architectural statement, aspiring to be a work of art that expanded the horizons of the discipline. As to that, I’d have been entirely happy with Kohn Pedersen Fox’s ill-fated designs for the Jets Stadium on the far West Side.

But the new plans look quite pleasant and put me in mind of those faux old telephones with push buttons at the base – all the latest amenities in a context that respects the past. Whereas Shea lacks any sense of orientation, the focal point of the new stadium will be a vast curving rotunda entered through a brick and limestone arcade. The concourses promise to be wider and better lit, while the fans in the stands will enjoy more legroom than they ever had at Shea.

One of the imperatives of the design – oddly – is to provide 15% less seating than Shea has now.The reasons for this are variously given. According to some, the Mets can no longer fill that many seats, what with their lackluster performance over the past few seasons. According to others, it makes good economic sense, permitting the Mets, like many other teams in recent years, to fill fewer seats more easily while charging higher prices.

Whatever the real reasons, I had no idea what desolation felt like until I went to Shea last summer, when it seemed like only 6,000 fans were in the seats. By bringing the fans closer together, the new stadium should create a sense of intimacy that has always eluded Shea. Though many of us will miss the amazingly intense, Yves Klein blue of Shea’s facade, we should welcome the new stadium, which will be up and ready on opening day 2009.

jgardner@nysun.com