When the New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham came to the podium Monday to accept the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Award for Public Service, the 600 guests in the Waldorf-Astoria's grand ballroom turned the tables on him by taking pictures of their own, at the count of three, with disposable cameras.

RELATED: Photos and Audio and Text from the Citizens Committee for New York City gala.

The moment was a small example of the spirited grassroots community activity that defines the Citizens Committee for New York City, which presented the award.

For 35 years, the committee has given "small grants to small groups all over the city to do good work in their neighborhoods, and to build a civic infrastructure and the public life of a great city," the committee's president, Peter Kostmayer, said.

Bill Cunningham's columns on fashion and fund-raising events in the Sunday New York Times have documented this civic life, at both the grassroots and grand scales.

"He's not playing out there. He's coming to events like this one. He comes on little cat feet, and sometimes his bicycle. He crouches, he aims, he shoots," a founder of the committee, Osborn Elliott, who is also a former editor of Newsweek, and a former New York City deputy mayor of economic development, said. "His dedication to New York and its institutions has contributed enormously to the well-being of this city," he said.

Mr. Cunningham had few words on the occasion. Working through the Peter Duchin Orchestra's last number, Donna Summer's "Last Dance," he took aim at his fellow honorees— Amanda Burden, Karen Cohen, Peter Gelb, Jack O'Kelley, and Karen Washington — as well as committee staff members, such as Pinky Vincent, who works on Cash Back, a program that connects eligible New Yorkers with free tax-preparation services. He did stop for a few minutes to eat some chicken potpie.

The event raised $1.3 million. "That will keep us going for another year," the committee's chairman, Henry Cornell, said.

agordon@nysun.com