Whether Mr. Cassella’s counterpart in New York will attend is an open question. When Mayor Bill de Blasio was asked on Wednesday if he was going, he said what politicians say when the answer is probably no: “Still working on the schedule.”

Five-Day Pregame Show

Opens All Over Broadway

Elmo has been overrun by the N.F.L.

From Herald Square to Times Square, the N.F.L. on Wednesday transformed 13 blocks of Broadway into a celebration of all things Super Bowl, displacing traffic as well as some of the costumed individuals who pose for pictures there.

With a 60-foot-high toboggan run, an extra-point kicking station, a pavilion housing the Vince Lombardi Trophy and dozens of professional athletes signing autographs for fans who braved bitterly cold temperatures for hours, this stretch of Broadway, temporarily called Super Bowl Boulevard, is just one spectacle of many that the league is staging in the days leading up to the game on Sunday.

E. B. White famously noted that “New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost anything that comes along (whether a thousand-foot liner out of the East or a 20,000-man convention out of the West) without inflicting the event on its inhabitants.”

The Super Bowl organizers seem to be trying to test that maxim.

Since the start of the festivities with a Macy’s fireworks display on Monday night, both official and unofficial events have been held across town — and almost all have come with elaborate sponsorships, using New York City itself as an all-purpose billboard.