The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

SATURDAY night rolls around, and you realize your mom threw out your favorite Cannibal Corpse T-shirt. So you grab your skateboard and head over to Village X, a T-shirt shop on St. Marks Place, off Second Avenue.

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Until the store closes at 1 in the morning, cool-looking teenagers mill about, some of them with wallet-chains and skateboards, some of them with combat boots and blazing Mohawks. The walls are lined with red and black band shirts folded into squares - an enormous quilt of rock. You know a shirt is cool if the band name contains at least one word that sounds as if it could be on the SAT: Incubus, Mastodon, Corrosion of Conformity.

Maybe you'll run into Gus Fernandez, a 17-year-old from Harlem who shops there every weekend. The other night he stopped in, mid-skateboard-ride, with his cousin George Fernandez, who bought a T-shirt of the hard rock band System of a Down.

With his neatly combed black hair, a long-sleeve shirt with flames shooting down the arms, and fingerless black gloves imprinted with an X-ray image of hand bones, Gus looked almost conservative. If he were a more mischievous type, he would have found plenty of items on the shelves to tempt him - shot glasses, glass pipes, leather whips, handcuffs - but he wasn't the least bit interested. "We're just looking for clothes, man," he said.

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Before Victor Correa left Ridgewood, Queens, for the AMC Empire 25 on West 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue, he put on a pair of glossy red and green sneakers, a pristine T-shirt with a splatter-paint design and, to top it off, a gold chain that hung down past his chest. Victor and his friend were headed to the Midtown megaplex to see the horror movie "Hostel: Part II." But more than that, they were going there to be seen. If all went well, Victor would get to use his trusty line: "Hey, beautiful, what's your name?"

By night, 42nd Street is a hip-hop catwalk for young people from all over the city and beyond. This season, T-shirts branded with the "I ♥ NY" logo against a background of classic white or fashionable blue seem particularly popular.

Even for the under age, there are plenty of after-hour diversions in the G-rated Times Square of the Disney era, like a McDonald's with a beaming Broadway-style marquee and earpiece-wearing bouncers, where, on a recent night, a bank of televisions played the Beyoncé song "Déjà Vu" on endless loop.

Outside, portraitists were lined up all along the curb for a chance to immortalize the youthful and beautiful with a few swift strokes of their pencils.

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Elizabeth Gomez and her friends usually meet up in a park somewhere in deepest Brooklyn. Then they get on the train. Then they get off the train. Then they amble over to Prospect Park, where they wander around for a few hours before heading back to their homes. Unless it's cold out, in which case they omit the step of getting off the train. "We train hop," she said. "We just ride for hours because we're bored."

If you're a bored teenager in New York, you belong to a tradition at least as old as the 1970s punk band the Ramones, and there are certain cultural mores you may choose to follow. You may listen to loud guitar-driven music. You may wear torn denim vests. And unlike your suburban counterparts, who probably spend a lot of time in cars, you may walk around for hours at a time.

Elizabeth and her friends do all that.

The other night they filed into the R train at a station in Sunset Park. Elizabeth was wearing a plastic purple gemstone on a string around her neck. Within minutes after she had emerged - somewhere on the edge of Park Slope - her quarter-machine jewel had begun flickering like crazy. In an age-old gesture of ennui, she lit a cigarette.

New York may be an extravagantly entertaining city, but not if you live with your parents and can't get into bars. "We're always getting kicked out of places," Elizabeth said sadly.

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The kids who showed off their cars there called it "the Strip." It was a dark stretch of Amsterdam Avenue next to the woods of Highbridge Park, in Washington Heights. Every weekend night early this summer, when the weather was warm, hundreds of kids in their teens and 20s would park their cars door to door along both sides of the street. Amid souped-up Honda Civics with gleaming rims, they sipped fruity drinks from plastic cups and shook their hips to the boisterous Dominican dance tunes exploding from 10 or 20 stereos at once.

At most New York parties, the magic number is 21, the age when you can legally drink; here, 17, the age for getting a driver's license, was the number that mattered. Revelers cruised up and down in low-riders and S.U.V.'s, piercing the cacophony of bachata and reggaetón with sudden shrieks from their tires. They performed "burnouts" - clamping on the brakes and nailing the gas until clouds of smoke shot from their tailpipes and rose over the crowd like the fake fog at a rock concert.

"You can bug out over there," said Jessica Nunez from Rego Park, Queens, who, for all that, would usually travel to the strip by subway.

A few weeks ago, the police broke up the party. Now the kids meet in small groups at gas stations and cruise the streets of Upper Manhattan. These car clubs have slick names like Top Line and Team Incognito, which basically means they get to advertise their allegiances with spiffy stickers on their windshields.

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