Cop-speak is a point of pride among officers, a key element of NYPD style and, as is particularly true of numeric “radio codes,” a way for cops to communicate so civilians won’t understand.

For outsiders, “a lot of it goes over your head or you don’t pick up the nuances or in-between meanings,” Bosak said, “but guys on ‘The Job’ pick up on it right away and understand.”

The radio command “10-4,” meaning “acknowledged,” has established itself in the vocabularies of many civilians. Others, not so much — like “10-98″ (back on patrol), “10-30″ (robbery in progress) and the urgent “10-13″ (officer needs assistance).

Then there’s the favorite, “I’m going 63.” It’s short for “10-63″ — a meal break. “That’s the most popular — they gotta eat well,” a retired officer said.

[Brooklyn College sociology professor Sharon] Zukin — whose own book, “Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places,” was published in December — peered through the window at rows of glass candleholders. “Tchotchkes!” she said. “Oh, the sheer ignominy.”

Ms. Jacobs’s continuing influence on the city is clear. As Amanda M. Burden, chairwoman of the City Planning Commission, wrote a few years back, “Projects may fail to live up to Jane Jacobs’s standards, but they are still judged by her rules.”

But if Ms. Jacobs is much hailed as an urban prophet, Ms. Zukin is a heretic on her canonization. She views Ms. Jacobs as a passionate and prescient writer, but also one who failed to reckon with steroidal gentrification and the pervasive hunger of the upper middle class for ever more homogenous neighborhoods.

The pattern in places like Williamsburg and Atlantic Yards, Ms. Zukin said, is dreary and inexorable: Middle-class “pioneers” buy brownstones and row houses. City officials rezone to allow luxury towers, which swell the value of the brownstones. And banks and real estate companies unleash a river of capital, flushing out the people who gave the neighborhoods character.

Ms. Jacobs viewed cities as self-regulating organisms, and placed her faith in local residents. But Ms. Zukin argues that without more aggressive government regulation of rents and zoning, neighborhoods will keep getting more stratified.

“Jacobs’s values — the small blocks, the cobblestone streets, the sense of local identity in old neighborhoods — became the gentrifiers’ ideal,” Ms. Zukin said. “But Jacobs’s social goals, the preservation of classes, have been lost.”

Observers also love — love! — irony, and any story about Jane Jacobs now carries with it requisite colorful there-goes-the-neighborhood details:

Ms. Jacobs, who died in 2006, waged heroic war against planners who dreamed of paving the Village’s cobblestone streets, demolishing its tenements and creating sterile superblocks. Her victory in that fight was complete, if freighted with unanticipated consequences. The cobblestone remains, but the high bourgeoisie has taken over; not many tailors can afford to live there anymore. Ms. Jacobs’s old home recently sold for more than $3 million, and the ground floor harbors a boutique glass store.

. . .

Ms. Zukin recently acted as tour guide on a stroll through Ms. Jacobs’s urban village, where Irish and Italian grandmothers once watched from windows as children played on the streets, and milkmen delivered bottles as chain-smoking playwrights typed in grotty flats. It began just north of Christopher and Bleecker Streets in the West Village, once a working-class haven, then the black-leather heart of Queerdom, and now something like the back lot in a Paramount Studios version of New York.

There’s the Magnolia Bakery, where perpetual lines snake out the door not so much because of its excellent cupcakes as because of its appearance on “Sex and the City.” There’s Marc Jacobs, where the lines are no less endless. A Ralph Lauren, a Madden, and a children’s store with the most adorable petite $250 pants. Ms. Zukin sighed.

“It’s another Madison Avenue, or the Short Hills mall,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “Really, did we need that?”

Zaarath and Christopher Prokop — and their two cats — live in the smallest apartment in the city, a 175-square-foot “microstudio” in Morningside Heights the couple bought three months ago for $150,000.

At 14.9 feet long and 10 feet wide, it’s about as narrow as a subway car and as claustrophobic as a jail cell. But to the Prokops, it’s a castle.

. . .

The couple wakes up every morning in their queen-size bed, which takes up one-third of the living space.

They then walk five feet toward the tiny kitchen, where they pull out their workout clothes, which are folded neatly in two cabinets above the sink. A third cabinet holds several containers of espresso for their only kitchen appliance, a cappuccino maker.

They turn off their hotplate, and use the space on the counter as a feeding area for their cats, Esmeralda and Beauregard.

“We don’t cook,” Zaarath said, adding that their fridge never has any food in it. “So when you don’t cook, you don’t need plates or pots or pans. So we use that space for our clothes.”

Once in their running attire, the two change the cat litter box (stored under the sink) and start their small Rumba vacuum — which operates automatically while they’re out, picking up cat hair.

They then jog to their jobs in Midtown, picking up along the way their work clothes, which are “strategically stashed at various dry cleaners.”

According to a 2005 NYC Housing and Vacancy survey, 40 percent of Big Apple citizens live in one-bedrooms or studios. While there’s no breakdown of how many of those dwellings house kids, anecdotal evidence indicates that a lot of families are making do — and making whoopee — in uncomfortably close quarters.

It happened again — this time, leaving horrific images of the consequences.

But despite the grim photos of a jaywalker pinned beneath a double-decker tour bus, New Yorkers’ death-defying habit of darting into traffic against the light is unlikely to ever be broken.

While technically against the law, law-enforcement officials determined long ago that writing tickets does little to stop such a widespread practice. Some veteran cops say they have never issued a single jaywalking ticket.

“Jaywalking is an urban cultural issue. There are certain cities where jaywalking has been accepted for 50 years or more, so to stop it is like trying to stop the tide from coming in,” said one ex-cop familiar with transportation issues. “You can’t address the whole culture through policing.”

In fact, one source conceded, “There’s no one person assigned to give jaywalking tickets in a precinct.” A recently retired cop with 25 years on the job said he “wouldn’t know how to write a jaywalking ticket.”

For at least five years, Muslim families originally from Beirut and Bangladesh to Khartoum and Kuala Lumpur have flocked to Chuck E. Cheese on Eid, which marks the end of the month-long Ramadan fast. The tradition has spread from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Bay Ridge entirely by word-of-mouth.

Jessica Weinschenk and her boyfriend Justin Urra, 24, woke up at 3 pm and were shocked to learn that Mormons had briefly descended on their neighborhood.

“Really? Mormons?” asked 22-year-old Jessica Weinschenk. “I guess it’s not that weird because religious people do stuff like that. And hey, it’s cool if someone wants to clean our park for us. But why Williamsburg?”

. . .

The act of largesse confused Weinschenk, who said she had not volunteered since high school. Urra has never done community service and even chose to go to jail rather than do a court-mandated subway cleanup.

“I threw my bike through some guy’s window who hit me and they ordered me to clean-up the Houston street station. I got the date, and went there, and some guy handed me cleaning stuff,” he said. “I sat down for a minute, thought about it, and was like, ‘I’m out of here.’ So I went to brunch at Café Colonial.”

One recent afternoon, the writer Amy Sohn sat at the Third Street Playground in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, a few blocks from her apartment, and explained the central paradox of her neighborhood. “Every mother knows what a Park Slope Mother is, but no one thinks she is one,” she said.

. . .

Ms. Sohn and Mr. Miller moved to Park Slope in 2005, paying around $600,000 for a two-bedroom third-floor walk-up in a co-op on a block between Eighth Avenue and Prospect Park West — prime north Slope territory, though Ms. Sohn prefers not to reveal the exact street.

. . .

The apartment has a graceful layout, and the sort of prewar details sought after by the characters that populate “Prospect Park West,” like a working fireplace and an antique wood radiator cover in the living room. The kitchen was recently renovated because Mr. Miller likes to cook. The walls are covered with his paintings — striking portraits of old-time boxers. A pair of boxing gloves dangles from the fireplace mantel.

It’s a masculine look for a home where a 4-year-old girl is often running the floors. “I like the fact that it doesn’t feel like a day care center,” Ms. Sohn said. It’s difficult to be totally chic with a toddler, however. Asked about the peculiar, low-rise coffee table, Ms. Sohn explained that it has a chalk surface, which is used by the youngest in-house artist.

That Ms. Sohn has such concerns might come as a surprise to people who remember her “Female Trouble” column from the late-’90s in New York Press. In sexually explicit language, she chronicled her escapades as a single woman in New York — dates and dalliances with a litany of pale, wispy, downtown artist-types. One reader, in a letter to the newspaper, likened her writing to Penthouse Forum in that “I can’t believe it’s true, but I can’t stop reading, either.”

Ms. Sohn was a literary girl-about-town, but she said that even then she wanted a family. “When I was 25, I felt like a spinster,” she said. “That was where a lot of the comedy from my column came from — I wanted to marry every guy I met.”

In the span of two dizzying years, Ms. Sohn met and married Mr. Miller and became pregnant. Asked if she misses her old life, she said: “I don’t miss the anxiety. My joke is that the conversations around infant sleep are like the conversations around when-should-I-call. It’s like, ‘Last night he slept from 9 to 12, and then he woke up at 12.’ It’s the same as: ‘He said he’d call on Thursday. Then Friday came. By Saturday I called him.’ It’s ultimately very boring.”

It’s an impressive space they live in, and one that is decidedly “grown-up” for a neighborhood teeming with party-loving youths who share messy apartments four or five to a lease. They have two floors. High ceilings. Terrace off the master bedroom. Brand-new everything, including granite countertops in the kitchen. By any measure, their domestic life is one that any young couple living in New York City would envy, with the exception, perhaps, of one small detail: They have a roommate.

His name is Juan Carlos “J. C.” Villars, and he was sitting on an adjacent couch with his legs kicked up on an oak-colored coffee table, a stubbly faced fellow in a dark blue dress shirt and jeans fiddling alternately with a set of hex head wrenches and a controller for the Nintendo Wii.

Mr. Bronstein, 31, a marketing consultant in dark-rimmed glasses (you might also remember him as a former editor-at-large at FHM magazine, or from Road Rules season four), and Ms. Hoge, 27, a pretty event manager for Lincoln Center who wore her brown hair clipped up, said that they couldn’t imagine ever not living with Mr. Villars, 32, an engineering project manager — even if, one day in the not-so-immediate future, marriage and kids entered the picture.

“We talk about not moving, and we talk about not imagining J. C. leaving,” said Mr. [Jake] Bronstein, who’s been close friends with Mr. Villars for more than three years, longer than he and Ms. [Kristina] Hoge have been dating. “So I think, by transitive property, that all adds up to getting married and still staying with J. C.”

“We’ve joked about it, and none of those things seem like a reason why we’d wanna get rid of him,” Ms. Hoge said with a laugh.

“I can’t even imagine how I’ll ever get there, quite honestly,” Mr. Bronstein said. “How I’ll ever get beyond . . . this.”

Still, the prime time for murder is clear: summertime. Indeed, it is close to a constant, one hammered home painfully from June to September across the decades. And the breakdown of deadly brutality can get even more specific. September Saturdays around 10 p.m. were the most likely moments for a murder in the city.

The summer spike in killings is just one of several findings unearthed in an analysis by The New York Times of multiyear homicide trends. The information — detailing homicides during the years 2003 to 2008 — was compiled mainly from open-records requests with the New York Police Department, and a searchable database of details on homicides in the city during those years is available online for readers to explore at nytimes.com/nyregion.

. . .

Summer is when people get together. More specifically, casual drinkers and drug users are more likely to go to bars or parties on weekends and evenings, as opposed to a Tuesday morning. These people in the social mix, flooding the city’s streets and neighborhood bars, feed the peak times for murder, experts say.

And the trend occurs in other cities, in places like Chicago, Boston and Newark, according to criminologists.

Some of the same trends are on display around Christmastime and are believed to be behind the slight increases in murder that occur then, criminologists say.