Venti Steamed Skim Latte with Draftsmen, Hold the Easel (Astor Place, Manhattan)

It's the second Thursday in a row that the Starbucks at Astor Place has been full of earnest draftsmen. #DrawingForCoffee #NYC #ArtistsAtWork

New Bricks for an Old Building (Manhattan)

Anyone who's visited New York City has seen building after building under veils of scaffolding and netting. My building was one of those buildings this past summer as workers re-pointed brick, removed asbestos from the roof and labored to make the fixes needed to keep the 100-plus-year-old structure standing for, hopefully, a wee bit more. Even though most of the scaffolding came down a month ago, workers are still keeping busy, as I couldn't help but notice this morning out our window.

Celebrity Scrum

All lenses are on Charlotte Gainsbourg, at opening night of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema festival at Lincoln Center. We were there tonight to see her in Benoît Jacquot's  3 Coeurs (3 Hearts), a good, interesting, disturbing, if unrealistic in many ways film that felt more like a parable than a portrait of reality.

Snow: the Good & the Bad (Midtown Manhattan)

New York has two faces when it comes to snow storms. There's there the beautiful moment when the snow is fresh or even still falling, and the flakes collect on branches and sidewalks, softening sounds and conveying tranquility. The calm and beauty is especially evident on side streets, like 43rd between 10th and 9th pictured.

Then there are the days post-snowfall, when the white turns gray. Sometimes, at busy intersections, the gray appears instantaneously, especially when the new snow combines with old snow. Such was the case a few minutes ago in Times Square, where a man was trying to squeegee away a huge puddle of slushy snow from the corner of 42nd and 8th Avenue.

Man on subway tracks (34th Street & 7th Avenue station, Manhattan)

The crowd is mesmerized by a man on the subway tracks.

Last night I, my husband and our friends had one of those strange yet eerily familiar moments that seem typical of life in New York City where drama unfolds unexpectedly in front of you and yet at (what feels like) a safe distance.

We'd just stepped onto the subway platform at 34th Street and Broadway when a woman ran to the emergency phone near us and began pressing the call button in a panic. Others began shouting at the clerk in her bulletproof booth, and the rest of the crowd was leaning over the edge of the platform, peering toward the far end of the tracks.

"What happened?" my husband asked the woman on the phone. "There's a guy on the tracks," she blurted, panting with panic. I assumed the man must have fallen or was pushed. My next thought was he might be suicidal. As we drifted with the crowd toward him, we discovered he was either drunk and/or mentally ill. Although dressed like an ordinary citizen of New York, only someone whose thinking was impaired would act as he did: as if he were simply going for a stroll on the narrow wooden platform over the deadly third rail.

People screamed when it appeared he might topple and some were offering their hands to help lift him back onto the platform. I wondered why the Transit Authority didn't shut the power, although I imagined it was probably a complicated process. (A question for officials: shouldn't a simple on-off switch be accessible in emergencies?) Others were mumbling "Where are the police? What's taking them so long?"

A local train and an express train pulled partly into the station, inching along until they came to full stops. For 15 minutes, the man was the star of a scary show, the focus of the crowd's collective panic, voyeurism and agitation. Of course, everyone was snapping pictures and taking video (myself included) which seemed both awful and like a perfectly natural thing to do.

When the police finally arrived, I'm told (because I stopped looking, fearing the man's dance on the 3rd rail could only end in tragedy) that they simply grabbed him and pulled him back onto the platform.

I'm sure there's a lesson in this, but I'm not sure what it is. (That one man has the power to stop two trains?) At least I was happy that the police took decisive action and encouraged that the crowd, rather than demonstrate indifference, showed concern and offered to help, even as we took out our smart phones and documented this strange sad moment from many angles.