It’s a December evening, and I am awaiting the arrival of out-of-town friends who were insistent upon dinner in Little Italy. Though I told them to meet on the northwest corner of this intersection, I knew that they, like most non-New Yorkers, would be confused by such instructions. So I keep an eye out in every direction. Four large Christmas trees strung with white lights tower above the four corners of the Grand and Mulberry Street intersection. Every thing is red and green, even the parking meters wear yuletide colors. For only a block or two, Mulberry Street is a festive oasis in the middle of drab, rundown buildings.

On the northeast corner waits a stretch limousine with “I JAM” vanity plates and blinking purple neon lights dressing the exterior; the car bobs slightly in time with the techno bass that plays inside. Through the back window, down the obscenely long shaft of the vehicle, I watch the driver play solitaire on his front seat computer. Three buttery blondes wearing coffee-colored suede coats and giggling into cell phones tumble out of a taxi and collide with a stout, middle-aged Chinese woman, her head barely visible beneath her buttoned-up, navy, down coat. Neither party acknowledges the other. They do-si-do out of each other’s way—the blondes continuing conversation, the Chinese woman continuing her stride. The younger women dance away under the street lights past the limo while the older woman, darts into the shadows of the scaffolding that stretches in the opposite direction.

He apologizes three times and waves away the money I offer him to pay for the fare already on the meter.

Traffic crawls down Mulberry Street, but when a pedestrian walks into the path of an oncoming car, brakes screech and male voices rise in anger. A beefy man emerges and advances towards the jaywalker. Both men puff up and posture; neither looking for a fight, yet neither wanting to back down. The standoff lasts only a moment and the traffic moves on. With an idle threat the driver returns to his car, the jaywalker waves him off, and the assembled onlookers disperse. A cop crosses at the intersection, oblivious.

My friends finally arrive. The two women, petite and lively, carry the conversation while their men, (one a boyfriend, the other a husband), both standing well over six feet tall, stoop to engage in the banter. Outside the cab all four immediately light up cigarettes and complain about their maniac driver. Welcome to New York, I tell them.

They peer down Mulberry Street and try to remember where they ate last time they were here—You know, they remind each other, the place with that great Bolognese sauce? They each swear they recognize a different awning. We opt, finally, to choose a new restaurant. Emily glances in a door and declares that it looks like the Sopranos. We’re in. They seat us immediately near the window, directly facing a group of fifteen satiated, middle-aged men who, with loosened belts, finish what was left of an multi-course dinner with a few bottles of cognac.

When our meal ends, we say our goodbyes outside on the sidewalk standing next to the limo, whose driver has moved on to a game of Hearts. The four visitors stub out their post-dinner cigarettes, squeeze back into a taxi and race to make the last train out of Grand Central. I hail a cab of my own and head east on Grand towards the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn. It is beginning to rain now, a little more than a mist. From inside the car the Italian colors of holiday lights blur with the Chinese neon signs, forming a collage of designs and unfamiliar shapes.

Grand Street is shutting down for the night, except for the new club Capitale where things are just getting started. In front of the building—a magnificent neo-classical Stanford White building, which formerly housed the Bowery Savings Bank—wait a line of luxury cars, anomalous in this neighborhood of Chinese fish stands. The cab continues slowly as I peer out the window like a tourist trying to spot anyone who is someone climbing the club’s marble steps. In a long row of brightly lit tents, workers roll up a red carpet and wheel away potted palms while cameramen pack up their equipment. With anyone worth filming already inside, everyone who is left—assistants, handlers, body guards, press, and assorted other hangers-on—duck for cover out of the rain. Beyond them in the darkness, move the residents of the neighborhood, keeping dry, ignoring the scene: another party of no interest to them.

As we pass Sarah Roosevelt Park, the cabbie pulls over and gets out. Flat tire, he says, no good, can’t cross the bridge. He apologizes three times and waves away the money I offer him to pay for the fare already on the meter. I leave him in the rain, digging in his trunk for the spare tire, and head back towards Mulberry to buy a camera at one of the tourist trinket shops. Perhaps that limo is still around.