A few weeks ago in an interview with The New York Times, Police Commissioner William J. Bratton signaled his distaste for subway showmen, suggesting that their music-fueled cartwheeling was not just a disruption of mass-transit reading habits but, rather, symbolized a sort of latent urban menace. Two decades after he last ran the country’s largest police force, broken-windows policing, the practice of combating minor offenses in an effort to deter more serious ones, hasn’t lost its fascination for Mr. Bratton.

Graffiti has been the target of resurrected attack, especially along the Long Island Expressway in Queens, defacement the commissioner has been said to take in on his way to and from his second home in the Hamptons.

It is hard not to wonder what might become of a more egregious expression of disorder if Mr. Bratton had chosen the Hudson Valley or Connecticut for his weekend retreat, a circumstance that might take him past the Sunday-night party scene that for some years now has frolicked in and around a parking lot in Riverside Park in the West 140s, angering neighbors. Over the past month, I have spent Monday mornings visiting different parks around the city — in addition to upper Riverside, I went to Brooklyn Bridge Park, Prospect Park and Flushing Meadows-Corona Park — to determine what they look like in the aftermath of weekend revelry. Riverside Park in Harlem looks as if every global chapter of Sigma Chi had convened the previous evening, and then sometime after midnight, when its members were sloshed enough, they had invited all of Theta Phi.