It would have been so easy to roll over. They could have come up with a nice rationale--stuff about "balancing diverging points of view" and "the interests of the community as a whole." They could have listened to the St. Paul Companies' siren song about a shiny new corporate building and some 6,000 jobs on the site of the old Orpheum, Coney Island, and Seventh Place Apartments. They could have forgotten that their mandate was to determine historic significance, not to accommodate developers; that if the City Council wanted an office building on Seventh Place, all it had to do was override their vote. It would have been so easy, and yet they had the gall to do their jobs and let Mayor Norm Coleman take his revenge--as he did in firing half of them within two days of their decision to designate the structures as historic. If only the City Council could muster that much gumption.