And, thankfully, they would enjoy a rare respite from the ever-present fear in their lives.
The block is a rare low-slung respite of mostly five-story buildings amid Midtown skyscrapers.
For the 53-year old jurist it was a rare respite, the kind of break his colleagues urged him to take.
But the President himself spent nearly all day inside the home of friends to read, talk on the telephone and enjoy a rare respite from the pressure of office.
I caught up with the band's frontman, Dave Brock, during a rare respite from the road to talk about what keeps the band going, Polish gangsters, and texting with Lemmy.
"I wrote down everything they said," said Patricia Taunton, 51, who said her attendance at the session was a rare respite from round-the-clock CNN monitoring since the war began.
His love of baseball dates from his childhood in Cleveland in the early 1950's, during one of the Indians' rare respites from the second division.
Murray will enjoy rare respite from Nadal until absolutely necessary; in 16 grand slam events they have been on the same side of the draw a remarkable 15 times.
Instead, players from Bernard Gilkey to Butch Huskey to Hundley himself rallied around Valentine, buying the manager a rare respite from the kind of controversy he attracts.
In the rare respites, when the priests stopped to harangue the crowd and revive her for more torture, she felt curiously untroubled.