New Yorkers have stolen it, painted over it, urinated on it, tagged it, charged for it, venerated it, fought about it, sneered at it, guarded it, sold it to the highest bidder and chased it to corners of the city that they had heretofore never been.

It has been almost a month since the very famous, presumably rich and remarkably still anonymous British street artist and trickster Banksy began making good on his word to spend October festooning the streets of New York with his art.

Nearly every day, as part of what he called his New York “residency,” Banksy has posted to his website and Instagram a photo of a new piece — a wry scrawl, a cheeky silhouette, a cartoony sculpture, an installation — and identified its location by neighborhood. He has wended through all five boroughs with the project, titled “Better Out Than In” — although Staten Island got only one Banksy, and it was a video. As soon as a post goes up, little armies of people set out to find it — Banksy’s work sells for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and here it was hanging free — twittering in triumph when they do.

Borough by borough, and sometimes neighborhood by neighborhood, reactions differed every time a Banksy popped up. In a way, it took this Englishman to remind New Yorkers that parts of our city remain distinct as foreign lands.