One was a man lying on the sidewalk (drunk? sleeping? Dead?) with an utterly indifferent New Yorker using his cellphone just a couple of feet away. (The man wasn't dead; when I approached him after taking this picture, he blearily waved me off.)
Onward to Columbus Circle, where Broadway and 8th Avenue connect with 59th Street...packed with camera-bearing visitors, agog at the Time-Warner building, the Trump hotel/condominium on the north side of the circle, and the spectacular (and incredibly expensive) Mandarin hotel.
And there on this bright, breezy afternoon, was one of New York's staunch Conspiratorists, shouting to anyone who'd listen (no one did while I was there) that we live in a pestilential dictatorship under the slippery thumb of Hussein Obama.
This earnest young woman with her warning signs and designer boots AND the models on the bus ad glancing toward her was a fitting juxtaposition.
But spring is edging its cheery way into this big town. Here's a struggling little dogwood throwing out its first tentative blossoms on 3nr Avenue at 73rd street, ignored by one of the locals. While a few blocks west, a more robust flowering erupts behind the statue of World War I heroes storming a trench.
And those are some scattered scenes from New York City on Saturday, March 27, 2010.
