And last month, the body of a man wrapped in a carpet was found outside a Starbucks in Harlem.

[A body was found under a manhole cover, baffling the police.]

There are eight million people living cheek-by-jowl here. Sometimes, in a city that never sleeps, a person’s final resting place isn’t where you’d expect.

“I hate to say this, but it’s part of what makes New York exhilarating,” said George Arzt, who owns a public relations firm and was a crime reporter in New York in the late ’60s. “You never know what is going to happen in this city.”

Mr. Arzt added: “There used to be people who committed suicide in the municipal building bathrooms. They would jump out the window.”

It’s been many years since Mr. Arzt was sent to those scenes. What he finds astonishing now is not the bodies falling from above but the bodies rising from below.

“A person is missing for six months and all of a sudden the ice melts and they float to the surface,” he said. “I found it incredibly haunting.”

Some of the so-called floaters had drowned. Some jumped. Others were never meant to be found.

A Manhattan gemologist who disappeared after carrying half a million dollars’ worth of diamonds, according to a 1988 wire story in The Times, was found four months later in the Hudson River, wrapped in plastic garbage bags and bound by the neck, hands and feet.