The Barefoot Contessa of Lower Broadway

Today I saw a conservatively-dressed woman walk with a similarly clad, also middle-aged female friend, up lower Broadway. The woman carried a shopping bag from Macy's and a purse, while her friend carried a tourist map of the city. They paused to look at a few stores, to gossip about people they knew, the usual. Something, however was missing. That something was the woman's shoes. She was completely and utterly barefoot all the way from, say, Houston up to Union Square. This amounts to about 3/4 of a mile of busy, filthy sidewalk.
 
Mesmerized, I walked behind the pair all the while, staying just close enough to see if the woman stepped on anything. Aside from a few puddles that may or may not have been composed of urine, she seemed to make it to at least 13th St. unscathed. A few things confused me about this:
 
1) Of all streets to walk uptown on barefoot, why Broadway? Lafayette, 5th, anything else would have been a bit less grimy.
 
2) What sort of a statement was intended by this? Being barefoot on the sidewalk in the Village makes a person stand out in a way that any number of piercings, tattoos, haircolors, and deformities do not. So clearly this woman wanted to stand out in a crowd. But for what purpose? Is it sort of a hippie statement, like, "While this may be downtown Manhattan, I picture myself in a field of lilies"? Or is it more of an anticapitalist thing? Surrounded by shoe stores, this woman choses to opt out of the consumerist shoe-centric culture. Yet all other visual clues suggested that this woman is neither a hippie nor especially anti-corporate.
 
3) The obvious: This was a woman who could afford to shop at Macy's, to visit a city as a tourist, who, it was clear from her tasteful but nevertheless sheer shirt, even had the wherewithal to remember to put on a bra that morning. Lower Broadway is not only home of what has to be the most shoe stores per capita anywhere, but is also a street lined with places selling things like socks, bandaids, flip-flops, any number of reasonable remedies. Why, of all these possibilities, was "barefoot" the best this woman could come up with?