New York City

Despite carnage on Wall Street, vacant storefronts on Madison Avenue and pricey restaurants offering "grill menus" (read: cheap burgers), some things remain unchanged in the great metropolis. The price of the average Manhattan apartment is still hovering at more than $1 million.

Shoe Cobbler As the morning Wall Street crowd rushed past Minas Shoe Repair, a group of women in dark business suits stepped inside, sorry-looking pumps in hand. The shoe-shine stations along one wall were full. There was a line of tapping toes and shuffling feet a dozen deep, waiting before the black marble counter. Minas Polychronakis It was 9 a.m. Trading at the New York Stock Exchange, a couple blocks away, would start in half an hour.

Love and marriage, for Kelly Respess, are better suited to a horseless carriage -- specifically, the antique Ford that delivered her to her wedding on a busy Central Park corner. It was a small but eye-catching salvo in the long-running war between animal rights activists such as Respess and her groom, Paul Kercheval, and the horse-drawn carriages that are as much a fixture in Central Park as rats are in subway tunnels. If the Kerchevals have their way, a fleet of electric cars made to resemble vintage automobiles will replace the hansom cabs -- retaining, the couple says, Central Park's old-world flavor while relieving the beasts of their burden and being kind to the environment.

The spotlight is shining more brightly than ever on Jason Wu, the 26-year-old designer who shot to stardom last month when Michelle Obama chose his ivory chiffon confection, embroidered with organza flowers, for her inaugural ball gown. So it's no wonder that there was huge interest Friday in Wu's fall runway show, the first big event of Fashion Week.

Doctors say they've never seen anything like it: A window washer who fell 47 stories from the roof of a Manhattan skyscraper is now awake, talking to his family and expected to walk again. Alcides Moreno, 37, plummeted almost 500 feet in a Dec. 7 scaffolding collapse that killed his brother. Somehow Moreno lived, and doctors at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center announced Thursday that his recovery has been astonishing. He has movement in all his limbs.

Four giant waterfalls will be erected in New York for three months this summer in a public art project city officials hope will create $55 million in tourism revenue. The waterfalls, including one that will fall from the Brooklyn Bridge, are the brainchild of Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. Installation will cost $15 million, funded by private donations to New York's Public Art Fund. "It's about seeing water in a different way," Eliasson told a news conference Wednesday.

It will take up to two weeks to determine the cause of Heath Ledger's death, the New York City Medical Examiner's Office said Wednesday, but police were investigating the possibility of a drug overdose as additional details emerged about the discovery of the 28-year-old actor's body. Authorities said a rolled-up $20 bill was found near Ledger's body on the floor of his loft, and that one of the women who discovered him had phoned actress Mary-Kate Olsen before she called authorities.

The yellow cab pulled over to pick up a passenger across from the Empire State Building as its driver, Mahbub Hossain, chatted on his cellphone headset. If this had been a test, Hossain would have ended up with a $200 fine.

The brutal 1981 slaying of three Bonanno crime family captains could lead to more charges in the big mob investigation that on Thursday resulted in the arrest of scores of Gambino crime family members and associates. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have told Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis that their investigation, which resulted in the arrest of the reputed leadership of the Gambino family and numerous captains and soldiers, is focusing in part on the 1981 slayings.

Federal prosecutors have offered plea bargains to almost all of the 62 reputed Gambino crime family members and associates arrested three weeks ago. Letters containing the plea offers, which legal sources said proposed prison terms of four months to nearly 20 years, were given to defense attorneys Wednesday in Brooklyn federal court in a pretrial conference. The U.S.