At the northwest corner of East 79th Street and Park Avenue stands the 900 Park building (map), a modernist, roughly thirty-floor structure. Should you approach it going south on the avenue, you will be able to get a good look at its spacious lobby, somewhat reminiscent of an airport lounge, through large windows on that side of the ground floor. But the object of our interest is around the corner, within the small island created by the building's rainbow-shaped driveway. There stands sentry Fernando Botero's Cat (possibly one of a litter; there is definitely another cat in Barcelona and one article I perused made reference to "similar works" in Chicago, Los Angeles, Madrid and Tokyo).

The sculpted-bronze feline maintains the Colombian artist's signature style, that of literally well-rounded people with a playful storybook quality to them that belies the occasionally serious subtext of the paintings in which they appear. Even with its features being somewhat less defined owing to the medium, and despite somewhat larger eyes than the artist's painted figures usually have, the Botero face is unmistakable: puffy cheeks, whiskers standing in as a mustache, the straightforward gaze, which may be hoping to catch a glimpse of Bloomberg. (A dicey proposition, as hizzoner lives in the opposite direction.)

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