In the streets, student protesters have compelled the country's supreme spiritual leader to order an appeals court review of the death sentence given to a history professor for saying that Muslims should not "blindly" follow clerical authority.
At the corner of 97th Street, students were arriving at De La Salle Academy, a private middle school on the block.
On a rise across the street, students from one of the high school seminaries were cleaning up a playground and planting flowers.
At the school, located with the company on West 55th Street, students can study a wide range of dance styles, from modern to jazz to classical ballet.
But at La Guardia High School, the city's top performing arts school, just across the street, students and teachers were all in costume.
One block east of Stuyvesant on Chambers Street, students would normally have a clear view south down Greenwich Street toward 7 World Trade Center, where a smoldering stack of rubble remains, several stories tall.
Across the street, students bustled around a lawn outside the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall.
Today, eleven city blocks southwest down Beaubien Street, students at the College for Creative Studies file into a cavernous studio space.
It also knew about the clashes in the streets between students and police, when students poured out of the buses and threw rocks at the police cars that had followed them from the bus station.
Outside on the narrow street, Cal students in slacks and windbreakers mingled with aging hippies and street people muttering to themselves.
