A home health care aide who works in Harlem spent two hours on Saturday trying to get home to the South Bronx. A woman trapped in front of her apartment on Malcolm X Boulevard was an hour late getting to work. And a Harlem woman trying to visit a shoe-repair shop was directed by the police through a circuitous maze of blue barricades, only to find the shop closed for the day.

The people of Harlem found their neighborhood turned upside down by the war of wills between City Hall and the organizers of a rally billed as the Million Youth March.

All day Saturday, the police were posted atop apartment buildings. Block after block was cordoned off, making it impossible for many residents to venture beyond their stoops. And subway service was suspended in and out of the heart of Harlem.

Yesterday, even as normality returned to the neighborhood, many people remained furious. And even those who, like Yvonne Bacott, denounced the rally's chief organizer, Khallid Abdul Muhammad, accused Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of turning what could have been a quiet, uneventful affair into an unnecessarily tense afternoon.