metrognome10-7 There's an office tower across the street from Grand Central Terminal where you never see those sad groups of smokers huddling out front like heroin addicts outside a methadone clinic. In front of this building, there are none of those sand-filled cement planters where smokers toss their half-finished cigarettes as they rush back to their desks. Here, at 120 Park Avenue, you never see a cigarette butt on the ground. Why not? Because people who work in this building -- which just happens to be the headquarters of Philip Morris, the nation's biggest tobacco company -- can smoke all they want inside. They can smoke at their desks (the company even provides the cigarettes for free). They can smoke in meetings. And they can smoke in the cafeteria. The only place they CAN'T smoke, in fact, is in the elevators (it's apparently a safety issue). "It's disgusting," said one non-smoker who works for the company (and would not give her name so that her employment status would not suddenly change). "Some of them chain-smoke at their desk! The first thing I smell when I get to the office is the smoke." But the last citadel of unbridled, unregulated, unfettered, unapologetic, unbelievable smoking is about to fall. Buried in the fine print of Mayor Bloomberg's new anti-smoking proposal -- the one that would ban smoking in all restaurants, bars, billiard parlors, private social clubs and even (is it possible?) Bingo halls -- is the ultimate low-blow to the tobacco industry. Smoking would become illegal within the tobacco companies' properties themselves. Hardball politics led to the exemption in the first place. In 1995, the tobacco giant Philip Morris -- which owns a soaring monument to tobacco money across the street from Grand Central -- threatened to abandon New York City (and take thousands of jobs with it) if the city passed the anti-smoking law. The city went ahead anyway -- but Mayor Giuliani and then-Council Speaker Peter Vallone huddled in a smoke-free room and cut a deal: Employees inside tobacco company buildings could continue puffing their lives away. "Neither Rudy nor I was interested in specifically rubbing salt into Philip Morris' wounds by telling them that they couldn't even smoke in their own building," said Vallone, who, like Bloomberg, is a former nicotine junkie. But even though Vallone is as anti-smoking as they come, he had no plans to scrap the Philip Morris exemption -- embedded into section 17-505 of the city Administrative Code -- in tough legislation he introduced in his waning days as Speaker last year. But Bloomberg, who has been known to fire people for smoking too much, is going after the so-called "Philip Morris rule." A spokesman for the mayor said the goal is to eliminate every exemption so that there's no confusion about where smoking is illegal (offices, hotels, parks, stadiums and even Bingo halls) and legal (um, in your apartment -- if your co-op board allows it). Philip Morris did not return calls. (And when I say that, I mean that the company ignored more than 40 phone calls that I placed over the last six months. Not a single call -- whether to Peggy "She's In a Meeting" Roberts, Dave "Stepped Away from his Desk" Tovar, Brendan "He'll Be Right Back" McCormick or a guy named Evan whose last name I never even got -- was returned.) But outside Philip Morris headquarters the other day, even the non-smokers defended their colleagues' endangered right. "They should be allowed to smoke," said one employee. She turned an pointed to the Philip Morris logo and said that she wasn't bothered by her smoking co-workers. "I mean, if you're going to work here, you'd better be able to get used it to." If Bloomberg gets his way, non-smokers won't have to. Not that anyone actually thinks the exemption will ever really be scrapped. "I'll believe it when I see it," said another employee. "They're Philip Morris, after all." --30-- gersh.kuntzman@verizon.net