Your street scene reminds me of my on personal street person, Richard, who hung
out on Broadway between 110th and 116th during the early 1980s while I was at
Columbia.  Before being fully acclimated to the "make no eye contact" New York
attitude and being hit up for change all the time, I decided to adopt one street
person in the city.  This allowed me to honestly tell any other street person,
that I supported someone in my neighborhood.  This plan worked well all over the
city, no one ever got pissed off.  Soon my adopted street person, Richard, would
look forward to seeing me and I would hand him all the change I had - weather it
was 37 cents or $1.15.  Eventually, he came to refuse my change, saying that he'd
didn't take money from friends.

One of the high points of our relationship was in the summer of 1982 or 1983 when
there was to be a large anti-nuke march and some group had spray painted outlines
of bodies on the sidewalks and streets as a grim reminder of the vaporized
citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Richard came running up to me as I came out
of the 116th subway stop and headed down to Riverside Drive. "Hey man, they were
here last night. You gotta see."   Richard said that aliens from Saturn had
finally made it to New York and had left these silver sheds. He had found 15 or 16
of them in the Morningside neighborhood and was determined to shown them all to
me.  Following the tour, he said "Hey man we need some beer."   So we sat on a
bench in the middle of Broadway and had a couple of quarts of Schaffer from the
Tak-Hom market as he lectured on the arrival of settlers from Saturn and beyond -
for the folks on Saturn came from somewhere else - but he wasn't saying where.
All-in-all, not a bad summer evening in the city.