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Good morning all.
I have a request for help going out this morning.
A former student of a friend of mine is about to graduate from my alma mater (how’s that for six degrees of separation), but she can’t get her diploma until she pays her last fees.
She’s a good kid who’s been through some hard times, and she’s so close to getting out. Please do whatever you can to
Even if you can’t contribute, please share.
Thank you.
So Fiorello LaGuardia took me back to his office in the City Hall at the center of New York City’s soul.
It’s a weird day when you can write that sentence.
It was a corner office, as you might expect – or you might expect if you live New York, anyway – and its windows each looked out over a different vista of the City, views that changed each time you looked out the window. First look: Civic Center, like you might see from City Hall in the real world. Second Look: Central Park, looking up from the South, you can see all the way to the Sheep Meadow before it becomes just a mass of trees. Third look: looking out over Batter Park and the Harbor, Lady Liberty lifting her torch in the distance. Fourth look: Times Square at night, showing off its brightest colors.
And so on. This really is the Heart of New York. But then, New York has a lot of hearts.
Continue reading “The Economancer Chapter 14 – The Thief and The Thug”
Sitting on the N train
Riding for Coney Island
First visit of the season
A young Hispanic man and I
Me sitting
Him standing and holding a pole
Watch an old woman with a walker
Get up from her seat, carefully steadying herself against the train’s motion as she gets ready to leave.
We meet each other’s eyes
Then look back at her
Respecting her old New York strength
But each of us ready to lunge and catch if the train’s relentless stop-and-start defeats her
As it has the young and surefooted
The train stops. She plants her walker and gets off.
He gets off too. Not with her. He isn’t her nephew or grandson. They don’t know each other.
I go back to reading my book.
Our eyes don’t meet again. We don’t speak.
Three people who never met.
A New York Moment you won’t see on the news.
So last time, I tried to deliver an eviction notice to Bill the Butcher, New York’s personal spirit of violence, on behalf of Boss Bill Tweed, New York’s spirit of greed. It’s exactly as ridiculous as it sounds and it was not my idea. Much to my entire lack of surprise, Bill the Butcher wasn’t having it and kicked me straight out of his headquarters in the Five Points and into the Collect Pond, which was the same place but about 100 years further into the past. Frankly, I counted myself lucky. Still, to get where I needed to be, I would have needed to take two horse carts, a carriage, a streetcar, and a subway, which would have taken time I just don’t have.
So I tapped my emergency stash. I used the power from a gold double-eagle coin from Bill’s time to power my way up through all those layers of New York City’s memory. It got me where I needed to go, but as will happen when you have an emergency and have to spend whatever it takes, I’m completely tapped out. The coin is still worth millions in the physical world, but it won’t buy me a cup of coffee here in the City’s Soul.
So where was it I needed to go so fast?
City Hall.
Continue reading “The Economancer Chapter 13 – City Hall”