Is this worth fighting for?

On the fringes of Green wich Village sits a sea of for lorn green space, concealed from the street by fences and sterile towers. The windswept spot looks as if it belongs in Westchester — or outer space.

Yet this is the intersection of prosperity and oblivion. We are standing at the epicenter of the latest battle for the soul of New York.

Hidden at the far end of a clutch of ethnic cafes and taverns pushing $4 beers, this site on La Guardia Place is where gray-haired activists and hipster gardeners, sons and daughters of privilege, and the community leaders who crave their votes are waging a quaint, ’60s style war against Big Brother.

But it’s not the introduction of a chemical facility that’s exercising the gaggle of aging Yuppies. It’s a plan by earnest and green New York University to build four towers on neglected and inaccessible land.

That’s right. The university wants, over the next two decades, to develop a moneymaking and tax-generating series of buildings. The upside is that the towers would increase the value of property in an area already out of reach for most New Yorkers. Except, that is, for the protesters and public officials who flocked to the site this week to use their bodies as human shields. At least until happy hour.

The downside, in a city where people are known to fight like hyenas against the opening of an envelope, is change of any kind.

“No one wants change, not in my back yard, so to speak,” said a clerk at Washington Square Wines and Liquors, which sits on the development’s edge. His business, he said, would improve with the project.

“It will help property values, which makes it more expensive to live here,” said Katherine Jordan, who lives in the Village and takes classes at NYU. “Everyone’s going to be unhappy.”

An NYU business-school professor treasures the quiet patch of green in Manhattan. Yet she acknowledged that the university needs to stretch out.

“Students want nice facilities for $40,000 a year,” she said.

NYU is unique in that it occupies property built into the urban streetscape. People who gathered for an anti-NYU rally, including Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, were incensed that the university planned to remove a dog run that sits, ironically, just a block from Washington Square Park’s two dog runs.

Folks feared that a fenced-in community garden, where urban hipsters tend organic veggies, might wind up on the chopping block. But NYU said there are no plans to kill the garden.

NYU spokesman John Beckman explained that the university owns and rents some 150 buildings around the city — 15 million square feet of property — including its medical center. That’s simply not enough for a student population of 40,000, and growing.

“We have half the academic space per student as Columbia — before the Manhattanville expansion. One-quarter of Harvard’s, one-sixth of Yale’s,” he said.

The plan is to increase that space by 6 million square feet by the year 2031 — half of it in Brooklyn and the East 30s, the rest in the Village. And most of that centers around the Morton Williams supermarket, a sagging, one-story structure that has somehow survived.

“I’m against building,” said a white-haired shopper pinching a tomato. “I like this market.”

“We feel universities are very important to the city’s economy,” said Beckman. “We’re a source of good jobs, a top 10 employer in New York City. Plus, building projects we proposed bring in thousands of construction jobs. NYU believes it has the responsibility to grow responsibly.”

Now a pitched battle moves to city agencies that must approve construction — and to the courts. Remember the epic battle in Brooklyn against the much-needed Atlantic Yards?

Maybe someone should just build a waste-treatment plant in the Village.

PROFILE IN COURAGE

Fernando Mateo, president of the New York Federation of Taxi Drivers, said this about the heartless shooting of Queens livery driver Trevor Bell:

“Profile your passengers, it’s very important. I don’t care about racial profiling. You know, sometimes it’s good that we are racially profiled, because the God’s honest truth is that 99 percent of the people that are robbing, stealing, killing these drivers are blacks and Hispanics,” said Mateo, who identifies himself as black and Hispanic.

Muslim-American journalist Asra Nomani favored racial and religious profiling as an alternative to cop-a-feel pat-downs at airports.

“I realize that in recent years, profiling has become a dirty word, synonymous with prejudice, racism and bigotry,” she wrote in The Daily Beast. “But while I believe our risk assessment should not end with religion, race and ethnicity, I believe that it should include these important elements.”

Racial profiling. Dirty deal — or necessary evil? This is what potential targets of profiling have to say.

The Kennedy Center dishonors

I’d never deny Sir Paul McCartney and President Obama’s BFF Oprah Winfrey another trophy to stick on the mantel. But entertainers who were handed Kennedy Center Honors by Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg last weekend join a hall of fame that includes kiddie-porn-loving pervert Pete Townshend and Bush-basher Barbra Streisand, whose obscene onstage rants were mixed into a hilarious dance tune available on YouTube.

And Mel Gibson? He thinks the Jews are withholding his award.

The paper chastened

The New York Times said in an editorial that President Obama should have “fought harder” to raise taxes. Makes me glad nobody in Washington pays attention to The Paper of Record anymore.

Leyritz’s ‘broke’-n morals

Former Yankee-turned-drunken-driver Jim Leyritz groused that his Florida trial, preceded by a successful battle for custody of his three sons, cost him more than a million dollars. “I’m broke. Flat broke.”

Leyritz, 46, who bragged about having gone out to dinner with his BFF Derek Jeter and other Yanks, who no longer take his calls, drove to baseball’s winter meeting in Orlando, Fla., this week to troll for work. “I’ll take anything.” He said he sold his World Series ring to make ends meet.

In 1996, Leyritz hit a home run that helped the Yanks take the Series. In 2007, Leyritz hit a woman with his car. She died. He was convicted of driving under the influence, which earned him not one minute in jail.

So, of course, he’s the victim.

I’m airing a pet peeve

A cuddly, 12-pound Manchester terrier named Mandy transformed into a snarling Cujo on a US Airways flight from Newark to Phoenix.

Mandy bit a passenger before running up an aisle and sinking her teeth into a flight attendant after the beastie’s sedatives wore off, forcing the plane to land in Pittsburgh.

The good news for the canine is that no hero professional athletes were maimed during the in-flight adventure. If that were the case, Mandy would be sentenced to roam the great dog run in the sky — without an airplane.