My girlfriend Victoria and I live on the third floor of a pre-war, red brick building on 19th St. in South Park Slope. Our back windows afford a nice view of all the backyards on our block and those of the homes on the north side of 20th St, which abut ours- each a tiny Kingdom for it’s little Monarch – sometimes with a miniature Versailles, and children running around just as filthy and shoeless as serfs of yore. Each kingdom is separated from the next but by a fence of chain links or tall wood plank.

Some have been maintained, but not many. The once magnificent grounds have fallen to disrepair. Flagstones once used for a footpath to protect a lush green lawn or prizewinning rose garden from unwelcome footfall are now just barely bald-spots in an expanse of weeds growing unchecked and wild.  What mostly remains is hard-packed dirt and dog shit-covered Astroturf; reliquaries of rusted out barrows, barbeques, and the rubble of excess materials from construction projects, decades since passed.

And at the foot of all these yards standing proudly tall are the blind sentinels of each delinquent kingdom- the seemingly pointless ladders to nowhere, the clothesline towers.

When I moved to Brooklyn I had no idea what these were, as all I saw were not actually in use anymore. But then someone told me, “those are for clotheslines.”

JUST for clotheslines?” I thought. It seemed so strange. All that height – the metal and concrete, a towering eyesore, in a city where people's showers are put in kitchens and toilets are put in showers for an extra foot of space; a city where economy of space is a religion. A tower just for laundry? It just seems so improbable.

When my girlfriend and I moved in together, the size of our average load of laundry doubled. We live far from the Laundromat – at least what we consider to be far, which is two long blocks and one short block. For whatever reason, we immediately became incapable of doing laundry. New socks and underwear would be purchased. Travel bags on visits to my parents would become stuffed to capacity without benefit of folding. Occasional emergency wash runs would be made to Vic’s parents in Midwood. But a full load of laundry was apparently impossible. A large pile would sit in the corner of the bedroom, and be cherry-picked again and again for salvageable items until finally consisting of nothing but sheets and towels.

Exercising became problematic with no clean workout clothes. I would run on the track at the Y or in Prospect Park, stink-lines trailing behind me, people falling away like flies. To combat this problem I began taking gym clothes into the shower with me after my run and would vigorously rub Garnier Fructis conditioner into my shorts, adding a squirt of Kiehl’s for good measure. However, with no place to hang them other than on top of the shower, they would drip on the floor or onto the dry towels, staying damp for days, and in the end just smelling mildewy and stale, like a summer camp changing room.

I decided that the problem was NOT in fact insufficient cleaning methods, which eventually became tossing a capful of Ultra Gain into the shower, then stomping and squishing my gym shorts with my feet as I bathed myself, like some disgusting 18th-century vintner trying to achieve an earthier tannin,  while giving his grapes what-for. The problem was that I didn’t have anyplace to properly dry them. I needed a clothesline.

I assumed the installation involved climbing the tower as opposed to firing some kind of harpoon gun from our window, but wanted to make sure. I typed “installing a clothesline tower, Brooklyn.” My search yielded a youtube video entitled “Joseph installs a new clothesline, Brooklyn.”

It did not include Joseph falling to his death as I assumed it would, but it did confirm my assumptions about ascending the tower. I’m sure this was safe when the house and tower were built in 1910, but I questioned the structural integrity of the rusty quarter-inch metal bars at Centenarian age.

I measured the distance from the house to the tower. It was almost exactly 50 feet so I would need a bit more than 100 feet of rope. Of course the hardware store only carried 50 and 100-foot lengths of clothesline, so I begrudgingly purchased two hundred feet as it began to rain.

About a week later, there was a break in the rain and I decided it was time. I could finally wash my gym clothes and hang them out to dry! Victoria refused to be any part of it, not wanting to be witness to me falling to my death, so I had to be my own spotter.

I tied one end of the line to the pulley outside my kitchen window and tossed the coil down into the yard. I had promised Vic I would use a “safety harness” so I cut a length from the extra coil and strung it through the belt loops around my waist, then around the tower. With a good square knot, I leaned back and felt the rope tighten around my hips. As long as I remembered to keep my pants on, I wouldn’t fall away from the tower, but straight down and be able to quickly grab a rung.

Safely securing the end of the rope I had thrown down from the kitchen around my neck, up I went, hand over hand. I had to stop and clear myself of some old cut cable wires and dead ivy to get up. And some tree branches. And some live wires. But soon I was at the top, three stories up on a structure with rungs just wide enough to accommodate one foot. I was gripping tightly, pressing my body to the metal, trying to keep my weight centered to minimize the swaying which did have me a bit concerned. I untied the rope from around my neck, slipped it through the pulley above my head, and secured it to my belt. And down I came, hand under hand.

I released myself from the safety harness and feeling quite satisfied, began walking away with the line, preparing to hoist it up to my window. Then, looking up, I realized I would have to send the rope over the branches, adjacent to the second story of my building, in order for this to actually work. Fuck.

I secured the extra coil, which I would need for additional weight and length when throwing the rope over the branches, safely around my neck, my harness back around the tower, and the end of my future clothes-line to my belt.

Up I went hand over hand, over the old cable wire, dead climbing ivy, tree branches and live wires. I broke what branches I could (they were dead and it’s a neighbor’s tree) to facilitate the process of getting the rope over the tree. Clutching to the tower with the crook of one arm, I bunched up all the dangling rope with other and attached it to the coil tied around my neck. Finally removing the extra coil from my neck, I said a prayer and lobbed it in as high and long an arch as I could, over the branches and into the yard. Success!

Arms shaking, but victorious none-the-less, down I came, hand under hand. After a struggle getting the line over the low-hanging lights and ivy structure the old landlords had by the back of the building, I ran upstairs with the extra coil, secured it to the fire escape and dropped it’s length down to the yard. I ran back downstairs into the yard and tied the two lines together, then ran back upstairs to pull the whole big motherfucking mess up. Finally I slid the rope through the pulley and tied it to itself. Huzzah!

Testing the pulleys however, I discovered that the rope had come off the pulley-wheel at the top of the tower and was pinched at the pin. Fuck.

Up I went, hand over hand, over dead cables and live wires and tree branches. Clinging for life, swaying in breeze, remove and reattach rope to pulley and come down, hand under hand. Finally. Back in my kitchen the tug the rope and hear the satisfying squeak of the pulley taking the line in and out of its grooved body. I can wash my clothes. Once I buy clothespins.

Connor Gaudet lives in Brooklyn and does freelance anything for a living. He writes whenever he isn't reading and is the current Managing Editor of mrbellersneighborhood.com.

From there, it was easy to imagine gliding down the marble staircase into 1930, when ladies dressed for travel and Red Caps ferried their valises on board trains with names like the Wolverine, the Havana Special and the Twentieth Century Limited, which made the daily twenty hour trip between New York and Chicago. Stars like Gloria Swanson, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers and Cary Grant, boarded via a long crimson carpet. Greta Garbo skipped the fanfare, entering unseen with the assistance of discreet railroad personnel. Even in the mid-Eighties, with Grand Central in a state of dismal disrepair, passing through its shabby glamour on the way to see my beau turned a mere sleepover date into an “assignation.”

I would join the harried commuters and inebriated day trippers criss-crossing the concourse, many sucking on post-workday smokes, tangled vapor trails wafting skyward in their wake. In the early months of my romance, the Sky Ceiling was completely obscured by sticky black scum, assumed to be cast-off coal dust and diesel smoke, later proven to be the tar and nicotine residue of countless spent cigarettes and the occasional tycoon's cigar. As I fell in love for the first time, New Yorkers - inspired by Jackie Kennedy Onassis - fell back in love with the newly-landmarked Grand Central, and began a careful restoration, beginning with the symbolic Sky Ceiling. Restorers gently cleaned the mural with soapy water, cotton rags and paintbrushes, in narrow swaths, while standing on a platform hung from a steel trellis, a hundred feet above the unforgiving marble floor.

A small area of ceiling was quickly restored so we could see what was happening above their heads. I was there, aglow with first love, anticipating my boyfriend waiting on the New Haven platform with the single red rose he always brought me. The first time I saw the slip of newly exposed ceiling, I looked for the source of the bright light perfectly focused on the azure and gold rectangle. There was no added illumination; without its nicotine shroud, the blue and gold were so vibrant they appeared lit from within.

Over many months, as the curtain slowly and painstakingly drew back from the Sky Ceiling, my New Haven boyfriend gradually stopped greeting me with roses. Soon he was meeting me in the parking lot, engine running, impatient. Not long after I moved in with him, becoming an official commuter, he stopped meeting my train, leaving me to take a taxi home to what was often a dark, empty apartment. When we broke up, I made a final, numb New Haven-to-Manhattan journey with my belongings in a mismatched assemblage of suitcases and shopping bags. Passing from the dark platform into the weird sunlit night of the Main Concourse my spirits lifted, and, just as Commodore Vanderbilt had intended in 1913, I felt an electric surge of possibility pulling me into the City streets, where anything can happen.

I no longer needed to pass through Grand Central to go home, but still did on occasion. I marked time by the progress of the Sky Ceiling; as its bright beauty was slowly revealed, I aged out of my lovestruck twenties into my ironical thirties and became a New Yorker.

Now that I’ve grown into my wisecracking dame-hood, I never fail to give a nod to the Vanderbilt’s brilliant Caribbean turquoise and 24-karat gold leaf oxymoron. Like me, it has secrets. The sky is backward, flipped from north to south. When early 20th century astronomy buffs pointed out the problem, the railroad tycoon spun like a political pro, claiming the stars were painted from God's point of view. In reality, the original painters held the drawing upside down, but the critics are missing the point. For direction, travelers have the Arrivals and Departures Board. The Sky Ceiling mural is an artist's abstraction, out of scale and topsy-turvy; it is an impossibility, a brain-teaser, an inside joke. Think about it: when was the last time you saw stars twinkling in a cloudless blue-green afternoon sky? The fact that few but the most observant notice this gives me the feeling of belonging to a clandestine, password-only club.

In my outspoken forties, I detour through the Main Concourse whenever possible to pay my respects to the quirky mural. In the west corner over Michael Jordan’s Steakhouse, a tobacco-scarred square of ceiling remains to remind us what was; it is as much a part of New York's history as the patch of cerulean sky still hidden underneath. It is part of my history, too. That’s why, on my wedding day, last November 12th, I asked my new husband if we could pass through the Main Concourse on our way to the Oyster Bar. As always, I paused at the head of the west stairway to take in the splendid waste of space, bathed in the sunny reflection of the impossible Caribbean-blue night with its thousands of misplaced golden orbs. Somehow, despite all the wear and tear, the Sky Ceiling and I are still here, still glowing. Outside the Terminal doors, just as in Commodore Vanderbilt’s time, anything can happen, but one thing remains the same: night or day, this New Yorker always has a place to go when I need to see the stars.

Leslie Nipkow, husband Jeff and Katrina-rescue puppy Robedeaux can usually be found sitting on their Hell's Kitchen stoop collecting stories, some of which have been published in More New York Stories (NYU Press), the New York Times City Section, New York Post, FreshYarn.com and an upcoming issue of O Magazine. She is currently working on a collection of comic essays called How to Kiss Like a Movie Star.
 

Every so often, someone stops me on Clark Street to ask directions to the subway station. It always takes me a second or two to understand that, although it is right there, it is all but invisible. The entrance to the IRT’s first station in Brooklyn, built in 1919, is through what was once the lobby of the St. George hotel. The building’s battered marquees tell the name of the structure above but nothing about the possibilities for transportation found underneath.

It must be hard to imagine the present anonymous warren as the shopping arcade of a fine hotel — not just fine, splendid. Established in 1884, the St. George could claim author Thomas Wolfe, abolitionist Henry Beecher, and presidents Kennedy, Truman, and Roosevelt (F.D.) among its guests. People actually came in from Manhattan to dance under the chameleonic lights of the “world-renowned” Colorama Ballroom. After the addition of the tower building in 1929, the St. George was the largest hotel in New York City and also (very briefly) the tallest building in Brooklyn. In its heyday, the complex included stores of all kinds, a restaurant, a bar, a movie theatre, 14 ballrooms and banquet halls, and an immense, salt-water swimming pool; there was even something billed as “the picturesque Italian village.” But, during the 60s and 70s — the era of my childhood — the St. George deliquesced. Its tenants became an uncomfortable mix of the indigent and the elderly, and the then-owners (“a group of nationalist Chinese investors” wrote the New York Times) allowed fixtures and services to decay. While the grand lobby furniture was dismantled and sold off, the building’s few remaining lifelong residents would reminisce about the days when one could call down to the desk for anything from a cheese sandwich to a diamond ring. In 1980, there was a disastrous attempt at a luxury conversion (lawsuits ensued). Finally, in 1995, a 16-alarm fire devastated the place, paving the way for its current incarnation as a dormitory for college students. I sometimes see them hanging around in front, smoking cigarettes in their pajamas.

I can walk down any street and look through the eyes of an earlier self: at age 6, a manhole cover suggests a hidden world of trolls and tunnels; at 11, the service entrance to my old building looks like a great place from which to spy; and at 17, I walk down Pierrepont Street singing rueful Bob Dylan lyrics to myself. But at the corner of Clark and Henry Streets, I am most definitely 9 years old, approaching the St. George newsstand with sixty-five cents in my hand. I will leave my whole allowance in the worn wooden dish above the pile of Journal Americans, and turn back toward the Henry Street with a Van Houten bar, a packet of Sour Apple gum, and the latest issues of Superman and Pep. Before returning to the street, I will stop for a moment and sniff the fragrance of bay rum and iodine, sawdust and laundry that faintly beckons from the white-tiled stairway beyond the turnstiles. The St. George pool, fed its salty greenish water by underground wells at the rate of 650 gallons per minute, was certainly the first wonder of my Brooklyn-based world.

At that time in my life, my best friend Barbara and I both lived a block away from the St. George. Barbara’s Uncle Max, a neighborhood fixture then in his eighties and, I suspect, nobody’s uncle, was a regular at the underground spa and occasionally brought us both along for the afternoon. He paid our admission fees to a clerk in the dark green, quasi-military serge of the hotel’s bell staff and dropped us off at the towel window where we were each given a scratchy, aggressively disinfected white towel. Barbara also received a hideous one-piece “bathing costume” in the smallest available size. Luckily, even the extra small was still too big for me and I got to wear the “poorboy” turtleneck suit my mother had brought home from B. Altman. (It was 1966; my turtleneck bathing suit was so tuff!) Equipped, Barbara and I went alone to the ladies’ locker room, stopping to gawk and marvel at the antique reducing machines: one of them applied a vibrating hip sling; another concealed all but the head of its victim in a zip-front canvas tent–the reducée, trapped within, looked like a surreal hand-puppet. We also studied the black-and-white photographs on the walls, which memorialized pool visits by Esther Williams, Johnny Weismuller, Buster Crabbe, and other patron saints of physical culture. This place had once been a true spa, a temple of health! But even by 1966 standards, its interpretation of that concept seemed off by a shade: Uncle Max was allowed to smoke cigars while taking the vapors, for one thing. For another, the water in the pool was pumped in from a naturally occurring source. Consider it. The Gowanus Canal?

The salinity of that water was part of the spa concept, too, meant to soothe sore muscles or restore lost electrolytes. It was also supposed to help one float. This I remember because floating was a sore point for me — Barbara said a bar of Ivory soap was purer than I was. Sadly, even at the St. George, I sank. The gilded ceiling looked just as glorious viewed from the depths, I told myself, sulkily. The St. George pool was only thirty-two years old when I first visited, but its origins seemed mythically distant — as far off as the vision of Babylon or Byzantium that had inspired its exuberant décor: old post cards show a mirrored, mosaic-wrapped room three stories high. In my memory, those mosaics are green-and-gold pictures of mermaids and athletes cavorting amid stylized waves, but my memory is not always reliable.

Although my first visits to the pool were with Barbara and Max, my most vivid memory was formed on an outing with my comrades from the Heights and Hills day camp, a group of twenty or thirty kids, most of us under the age of ten. On summer weekdays, we would set off in our yellow school bus for outdoor destinations such as Dyker Beach, Staten Island’s Clove Lake, or the immense but banal Sunset Pool. On the bus, we traded Beatle cards, played hand-clapping games, and sang gospel songs, although I doubt there were many Baptists in the party. The Heights (and hills) were funkier then than now with plenty of Bohemians like my parents, and immigrants like my Greek babysitter, and divorcée moms like those of my three best friends from P.S. 8. There were also some — though not very many — people of color. In any case, one day we all went to the St. George. I guess the bus was being repaired, or maybe it was raining.

We were hustled through the changing process and shooed past the fascinations of steam room and sun lamp, pinball machine and diving board (in fact, there were three). The pool was unusually crowded that day and we were told to stay in the shallow end but, having had the run of the place on past visits, I was unwilling to be penned. Though I could not float, I could swim like a fish underwater, and so I set off for deeper waters, perhaps to cannonball off the high dive.

Midway to the rope-and-float boundary, I came up for air, and, treading water, caught sight of some older boys, laughing and ignoring the “no horseplay” signs near the four-foot mark. My eye was drawn to one boy in particular, wearing an ivory necklace that stood out against his brown skin. I didn’t know what a crucifix was, then (my Bohemian parents were also atheists) but wanted to admire the thing, which did and didn’t resemble the strands of dried seeds and pods my mother often wore. I did know what a boy was then, but not enough to be shy about approaching one. And so I dove back underwater and emerged slick and giggling at the side of my new idol, the better to gaze at his old one. I think I may have even reached up to touch it.

The Catholic boy at the four-foot mark, perhaps shy, or perhaps not a native speaker of English, or maybe just the funniest guy I’ve ever met, then scooped me up into his arms and dropped me back into the water from what felt like a heavenly height. Do it again, I said! Again! Again! And he did. Was he just too kind to refuse me? Was he inspired by our pagan surroundings, invigorated by the health-giving powers of those waters, after all? It doesn’t matter, he gave me ecstasy and I never saw him again. (Unless I have: years later, I came across a reminiscence written by golden-skinned, Catholic-reared actor Jimmy Smits who, with his boyhood pals from East New York, also used to hang out at the St. George Pool. Not only arrestingly handsome, Mr. Smits would have been eleven years old that summer, so it delights me to suppose it was he who sent me flying.) In any case, every time some neighborhood newcomer asks me how to find the entrance to the “red line” subway, I will think about that crucifix, and those arms, and the exaltation I felt amid the mirrors and the mermaids, floating, finally on air.

This piece is excerpted from the recently published anthology Brooklyn Was Mine, which also includes work by Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Lethem, and Lara Vapnyar. Rachel Cline’s second novel My Liar, is about friendship and denial in Los Angeles and will be published by Random House February 19, 2008.

I am the first member of the night tour reporting in for duty and a quick call to the dispatchers’ office solves the mystery of the empty firehouse.

Earlier in the day the entire house B-14, E-60, L-17 and my company L-17-2 had responded to and were still operating at a fire in the railroad yards, so we of the night tour will be traveling there to relieve the day tour.

Shortly after 1800 hours, the division messenger van arrives at quarters; we climb aboard and are driven to the fire scene.

While en route, I realize I’m not the junior man for a change, that dubious honor goes to Russell.

Although we are both 24 years of age, he’s still a proby with only five months on the job compared to my almost two years.

Arriving at the scene we discover that most of the companies had already “taken up” and those that remain are in the last stages of overhauling.

The van pulls up alongside our day tour guys who are taking a break, they’re drinking coffee and eating cups of New England clam chowder alongside the Salvation Army canteen truck that supplied this hot chow; they are filthy, exhausted, wet, cold and very happy to see us.

After recounting to us where the various tools and ladders used during the operation are located, they climb into the messenger van and wave good-bye.

Jonnie is a senior man with almost twenty years on the job; he is also a fantastic human being who has taught me a great deal, not only about fire but also about life in the eighteen months that I have had the honor of knowing him.

He had worked the day tour on a mutual and now he’s continuing on duty with us.

Having responded into the fire on the initial alarm, he tells us of the large three-story warehouse that had gone to a third alarm before being brought under control.

About this time, the chief in charge issues two orders.

1) Restore electrical power to the yard.

2) All remaining companies are to take up.

Only the second order reaches us.

Before we can take up we must gather together and return to the rig all of our equipment.

Tom and I retrieve some tools from the far side of the warehouse and return them to the rig.

From there we start walking back to the warehouse with the intention of lowering our thirty-five foot aluminum extension ladder and replacing it on the truck.

As we approach; to our great delight we spy Jonnie, Russell and a member from an adjoining firehouse who’s working with us tonight on overtime, already in the process of lowering the ladder.

I say great delight because the thirty-five footer is the largest portable ladder in the fire department inventory and rising or lowering it is a bitch.

Tom and I stop spontaneously several yards away to watch the guys perform this difficult task.

In order to lower an extended ladder you must first push it away from the building it’s resting against until the ladder is perpendicular to the ground.

Then while two members hold it steady the third pulls on the rope lanyard to extend the top section a bit further thus releasing the locking mechanism and allowing the top section to retract.

On the ground is Jonnie on one side and Russell on the other each grasping the ladder.

Up on the buildings loading dock the OT guy pushes it as far upright as possible before letting go of the ladder and grabbing hold of the rope lanyard.

They are poetry in motion right up to the moment the ladder becomes electrified by the eleven thousand volt overhead power line and our world turns to shit.

We watch frozen in place as Russell and Jonnie, their muscles contracted by the electricity that locks their hands to the aluminum ladder, stand fully erect and shake violently as the juice courses through their bodies and into the ground.

In what seemed like minutes but in reality could not have been more than several seconds, the fireman on the dock with great bravery and presence of mind uses the rope lanyard to pull the ladder clear of the power line.

Freed from the current holding them to the ladder Russell and Jonnie collapse straight down like puppets whose strings have been cut.

We run over, Tom to Russell me to Jonnie.

Neither of them has a pulse nor is breathing, we start CPR.

Urgent radio transmissions are sent requesting immediate assistance as someone joins me in working on Jonnie.

Fuck, five months ago, Jonnie and I were dancing alongside each other at my wedding, now he is lying dead in the dirt and I’m kneeling by his head trying to breathe life back into him.

Trying, but because I had failed to establish a good airway instead of supplying air to his lungs, I fill his stomach with it.

You can only load a stomach with air to a certain point before it must come back out and back out it came, filling my mouth with clam chowder puke.

I spit it out, turn his head, clear his mouth and resume, this time with a good airway.

In response to our urgent calls for assistance Rescue Company 3 arrives on the scene and immediately I hear a commanding voice order, “Load ‘em aboard, we ain’t waiting for an ambulance, we’re going now!”

As we continue with CPR while packed together in the back of Rescue, I am vaguely aware of a wild ride as we speed towards Lincoln hospital.

Upon arriving, we scramble from the rear of the rig down to the sidewalk where medical teams are awaiting us.

They take over the resuscitation attempt but I attach myself to the stretcher and don’t let go until we are inside the emergency room.

There I stand against a wall out of their way but in a position to observe everything that occurs.

Just as they were in the rail yard, Jonnie and Russell are still side-by-side here in the emergency room, a separate team working on each.

Their turnout coats, boots and clothes are rapidly cut away and discarded, everything humanly possible is being done to save them, but it is not to be.

They are eventually pronounced dead and as the medics move away from them I observe where the electricity had exited their bodies; it must have had something to do with the steel tips of their boots because all twenty of their toes are horribly burned and burst open.

Someone leads me to a chair in the waiting room. I cry. Time stops.

Its hours later and I am back in the firehouse, how I got there I still don’t know, when someone asks if I have called my wife and if not to do so immediately.

She’s crying when she answers the phone.

You see the radio and TV have been broadcasting for hours that two firemen from Ladder 17-2 had been killed in the line of duty.

Since she has not heard from me she was convinced that I was one of those killed and that this was the dreaded notification call from the department to inform her of my death!

As I hang up the phone, a thought hits me, if instead of going to the far side of the building to gather tools, Tom and I had first gone to lower the ladder we would have been the ones killed.

The only reason I can think of for us still being alive is… it wasn’t our turn!

The disembodied voice of the dispatcher booms from loudspeakers throughout the firehouse, “Attention the following units…Engines 83, 60, 41-1 Ladders 29, 17-2 Battalion 14…Respond to…”

The box number and address are given, and then the dispatcher adds, “We are receiving numerous phone calls about a fire on the fourth floor of a five story multiple dwelling reporting people trapped. Be advised, you are responding in to a working fire in an occupied multiple dwelling.”

Our rig is roaring down the street playing “fire music”—the combined sounds of diesel engine, air horn and siren. The old timer sitting across from me starts buckling his coat and pulling up his boots. He says, “Do you smell that… we got us a job, kid.” Moments later, we turn onto the block. He is right. Neighborhood residents pack the street, watching in horror as the terrified occupants of the flaming building swarm down the fire escape, fleeing the eruption of this urban volcano.

The engine pulls up to the front of the building, as we un-ass the rig, grab our tools, and run towards the fire, I realize all my senses are under attack. Sight, sound, and smell are already approaching overload. Additionally, I can taste the primal dread of fire in the back of my throat and a cold fear is clutching my guts. I’m scared! Everyone in that building is running away and we’re going inside, no fucking way!

There are times in life when decisions must be made. These decisions define who you are and shape what you will become. Now was one of my times. Balls calling brains, you are hereby relieved of command; I’m taking over now. And here was my decision, I will fucking die right here and right now before I let these guys down!

The Lieutenant leads the forcible entry man and me to the rear of the building. Back here, the drop ladder has not been lowered and as a result, the fire escape is crammed with people unable to reach the ground.

I follow the boss’s order to lower the drop ladder, and in moments enough people have climbed down off the escape that there is room for us to advance upward.

Between the second and third floors, we encounter a man carrying a console TV. He looks me right in the eyes and says, “Hey fireman grab my kid,” and with a twist of his head indicates a young child maybe 10 years old following behind him.

I look to the Lieutenant for guidance and he says, “Keep moving.” As we reach the fourth floor, the window of the apartment on fire slides upward, releasing a thick, rolling mass of dirty brown smoke. From inside the lethal cloud emerges an unconscious teenaged girl cradled in the arms of the Truckie from L-29 who found her during his search.

He hands her out to the Lieutenant and me as he climbs out of the apartment and onto the fire escape. Holding her limp form between us, I think how peaceful and pretty she looks despite the soot and snot that surrounds her nose and mouth.

Unexpectedly a cascade of broken glass showers down on, us and half a heartbeat later, a Halligan Tool drops from the sky. It smashes into and bounces off the forehead of our young victim producing a large profusely bleeding gash. She ain’t pretty any more.

So many horrific events are occurring so rapidly that my mind screams “enough”. I am on the verge of uselessness.

The Lieutenant hands the girl off to our forcible entry man and the truckie who found her and grabs a handful of my coat, pulling me so close to him that I can see the fillings in his teeth. “Go,” he bellows.

Instantly, I am snapped out of my trance. I follow him as he pushes past me and climbs up the fire escape to the top floor.

Ladder 29’s “above the fire team” is searching the top floor apartment directly above the fire, which is the most dangerous assignment there is in an occupation filled with dangerous assignments. One team member reached the fire escape window only to find a padlocked gate across it preventing his exit.

Unable to escape the apartment or open the window, and with nothing to breath but smoke, he took out the glass by shoving his Halligan through it just as he was overcome by smoke inhalation. That solved the mystery of the flying Halligan. Arriving at the top floor we see a gloved hand sticking out of the apartment through the gate and the hole poked in the glass. In the excitement, I had left my hook on the floor below, so without a tool to use the Lieutenant grabs the gloved hand, pushes it back into the apartment, and starts kicking the remainder of the glass from the window. I catch on quickly, and together we kick in the gate and pull out the fireman.

At this point, time seemingly stopped. I remember nothing more of the fire or the rest of the tour. This was a phenomenon that repeated itself several times during my career. Somewhere there are about three hours missing from my life.

The next morning reporting in for work I am anxious about the reception awaiting me, just how badly did I fuck up? Approaching the house watch booth, who’s sitting there but the old timer with the good sense of smell. He’s smiling. Is it a smile of acceptance or that of a shark about to have lunch? I am more scared now than I was on that fire escape yesterday afternoon, when my trail by fire took place.

Last night around the firehouse kitchen table, I was tried in “absentia” and a verdict had been reached. In our world justice is swift. Have I been forever marked as a useless piece of shit, or oh god please, have I been accepted into this brotherhood of “Nobles Oblige”?

He speaks, “Way to go kid, ya had ya cherry popped first day, welcome aboard.”

It sounds like Harlem when black people in New Orleans talk, but way more so. They open their mouths and cane syrup sounds roll out. “Awright, Sugar. Heego, dawlin’,” said the steam table lady serving shrimp as I lunched at a conference that brought me recently to this gorgeous, mangled city. I asked where she was from. “Law Naan,” she said.

She meant the Lower Ninth Ward, a historic, working-class black neighborhood that was virtually wiped out by Katrina. White people from New Orleans pronounce it this way: “Lowuh Naynt.’ Perfect Brooklynese – an echo of Bensonhurst or Bay Ridge or Sheepshead Bay. Yo! What’s up with that?

“Yeah, we tawk like New Yawk. I hea’ dat a lot,” laughed a cabbie. With his pink, hard jaw and sandy hair, he could pass easily for FDNY or NYPD. He couldn’t explain the accent, but as he described how his house had blown over in the wind, I had a Pavlovian urge to tell how my teenage daughter watched jumpers from Twin Tower 2. Then he said he has no insurance to rebuild, and the government won’t help at all. The levees broke nine months ago, he’s still sleeping on his brother’s floor, the world has forgotten New Orleans, and what can you do. His talk sounded different from post-9/11 talk. In shame I kept my own mouth quiet.

“It could be because they’re not just long time Cajun – they’re also Irish and Italian, a lot like New York,” said my friend (also white) who moved to New Orleans a few years ago. She knows a historian at Tulane. He says that way back when, the city’s races more or less got along. A different scenario than in New York, where the Irish rioted in 1863 and massacred dozens of African Americans. “That was from job competition,” my friend said. “But in 19th-century New Orleans,” she speculated, “people were working instead of fighting.”

Not nowadays.

“See dose projects?” pointed out another white cabbie. We were cruising past blocks of low-slung public housing, inhabited until last year by thousands of impoverished – and mostly black — New Orleans residents. Now the buildings were water-stained, moldy, boarded up, vacant. The Times-Picayune had front-page articles about tents pitched at projects like these throughout the city. The tents are full of people who want the boards off so they can come back from places like Houston. But the city says no. So did my driver.

“As bad as Katrina was,” he commented, “it did one good t’ing. It got rid of d’ element.” He waved again toward the projects. “D’ bad element. Dey cawsed all d’ crime. Now dey’re gone, an’ good riddance. Thanks to Katrina we can make a new start. Widdout ’em!”

My friend got tearful that night, telling me over beers that she’s drinking too much. When I saw her a year and a half ago, she was looking for Mary Jane shoes to go with an outfit she assembled for Mardi Gras 2005. She’d been accepted into a parade crew of some two dozen black grandmothers who’d been marching for years in baby doll night gowns. Many were from the Lower Ninth, and many were scattered by Katrina. Only seven reunited for Mardi Gras 2006. Meanwhile, my friend’s neighborhood has lost its bus service, and she spent months without mail delivery or a nearby supermarket. Most houses in her neighborhood still have that ominous, Passover-Angel-of-Death “X” marked on them, with kabbalistic letters and numerals spray-painted in the four quadrants.

We took a walk one night near her apartment. A white, middle-aged neighbor woman sat on a lawn chair by her FEMA trailer – it was anchored on her driveway, beside a house that was gutted. The woman sported the tasteful clothing and svelte habitus of a society matron. She had the mouth of a Long Island mafiosa.

“Wanna see how we fucking live now?” she asked, and led me into the trailer. It was so cramped that her professional-class husband, lying shirtless in the matchbox bedroom, was a dead ringer for what Southerners of his station call “trash.” “Look at this shit,” the lady said, slamming a plywood kitchen drawer that had popped off its hinges. “Goddamned government.”

“Welcome to the insults of US welfare,” I thought, but she didn’t see it that way. “As bad as Katrina was,” she said, “it did one good thing.” And so on and so forth, including that New Yorkese mantra again: “D’ element.”

Close your eyes and it could have been Canarsie years ago, or a more recent Howard Beach. Open them and it was hibiscus and grits and beignets, gentlemen in summer suits, houses with dreamy colonial porticos. The baroque of old Dixie racism, tricked out in newer carpet bag. On the plane home, my seatmate – who hailed from yankee-ized Washington, DC — boasted of having spent the last few days in the Lower Ninth, measuring every single lot for a company that’s amassed $30 billion to rebuild the ward. The plan, he said, is to bulldoze all the damaged, workingman’s dwellings and replace them with new homes in the $100K to $150K range. Unaffordable for former residents, he admitted. But that’s OK, he said cheerfully. After all, “Katrina did one good thing.”

I’d just bought a New York Times at the airport. How timely: A piece on the National pages talked of recent Census data. It shows that since Katrina, New Orleans has lost giant chunks of its black and poor demographic. Meanwhile, the numbers have jumped for whites and higher-incomes.

The whole thing tempted me to bombard my seat mate with more linguistic New Yorkish. “Drop dead,” I practiced silently, but could not say it aloud. After all, our five boroughs constitute one of the most racially segregated areas in the country. But no one here talks openly about kicking out “d’ element.” Instead, they’re dealt with politely, via sky-high rents and doormen. Meanwhile, disaster is an act of Muslims rather than God or the Army Corps of Engineers. With demons like ours, even d’ element gets tea and sympathy.

So I kept my accent quiet, but wonder what New Orleans will sound like in a generation. Will a dark, dialectal molasses still sweeten the ear? Will even the dese’s and dose’s survive? Or will an influx of out-of-town whites and moneyed yuppies turn the whole place to Network Standard?

Hard to say. I guess it depends on whether brave little community groups like Common Ground (http://www.commongroundrelief.org/) and ACORN (www.acorn.org) can get support – locally and nationally – to rebuild for all the old residents of New Orleans and not just for those with wealth. If democracy prevails, that city will still resound with weird echoes of Harlem and Brooklyn. With people who don’t know why we sound alike, but who want to keep talking in the place they always have.

We would always take the same route and on the way we would pass an old decrepit building sandwiched between two large contemporary buildings. I thought it to be odd and took note of it. Time went on and the older I got the less I would go to work with him. After a seven year absence I went back to his office and on the way looked at the old building, only to find a tall “Modern” in it’s place.

This is a poem dedicated to that old building:

Not abstract, not dificult, no intricate intentions intended, built because it was needed, wanted

At one point in time this building was magnificent It had class and character unlike the moderns

Many colors hid under the chips of other colors like an ice cream cone freckled with sprinkles

Carnation flowers covertly carved in concrete Old Victorian styled swirls and swishes

Stained gray walls with avenues of cracks, avenues that lead to other’s which

had no names, just like the street signed numbers Not a full step, nor a large step, but many is too many short little steps

How many times did one have to step, icy, chisled steps awkwardly loved those succinct seventeen steps

Rounded out concrete bit pieces, missing, different tints, red brick outlined pigeon shitted pieces

I loved that building in all its dread No one else stopped, no one else cared

It stood with broken pride for many a year and now it stands no more.

Now, it’s bravado chested successor stands among the bland.

Through the neighborhood I wandered, a grid of streets imposed upon what I’m told was farmland when this house was built. It was now crowded with houses, fences, carports, patios. It was some kind of aspiring suburbia, a place with no center, a feeling of eerie quiet despite the driveways crowded with the cars of holiday visitors, a quiet broken not by the sounds of anything living but the insistent rush of cars down the main road nearby. Speeding cars could obtain equally fast food there on any day but today.

All that seems to differentiate most places in America from one another are the variations in the sizes of driveways, the crab quotient of grass, the gaud of Christmas decorations. This neighborhood was modest; it was fighting for its notion of suburbia against the odds of limited space and funds. It’s been described to me as the “Queens” of the midsized city it calls home, and I have accepted this analogy as mostly accurate. But as I wandered and took it in I thought with the indignance of a Queens native how not Queens this place was, how many tiny things about it made it a place entirely different from the borough of my birth, how the energy was all wrong, the scale of the highway overpasses was wrong, and there was no sight nor even the remotest hint of a tsunami of skyline looming nearby, no intimations of a shabby proximity to greatness and ruin at once. The reassuring sadness of the Chinese takeout restaurants was not the same here, and why did they not smell of grease from a hundred yards away? This was not the Queens of this other place, there was still only one Queens and thousands of these places, and this is no less true just because Queens is mine and all these others places are not.

But they are. I prowl the streets of an unfamiliar middle-class suburbia one bleak holiday afternoon and I am uncomfortably aware that I am in the place that is stamped on my passport. I know these streets, these cars, these Christmas lights. The Christmas lights in other countries are different. Differently shaped, differently colored. I bought a strand of the big, multicolored kind of Christmas lights in England once to decorate my room, and they were the same as the big, multicolored American ones, but not. How could they be the same? They were called “fairy lights.” (It is not the intent of the British to make us feel like strangers in our own language, but it happens anyway.) It’s the little things that are different in foreign countries, the things you never think about. The light switches, the toilet flushes, the shape of the flat people on signs that mark bathrooms or warn of imminent danger. So why in America, where the light switches and toilet flushes and signage and Christmas lights are all familiar, do I prowl through suburbia, imagining myself alternately as predator and prey to these innocuous raised ranches, feeling so alien and lost and full of menace and numbness?

My only company on the street was the smokers. A thin man with a thinner mustache smoked morosely on the hood of a red sports car. His all-black outfit was too big on him, the leather pants included. I turned the corner and on the next block a woman in a bright red sweater jangled her charm necklace with each drag on her cigarette. Her hair was long and perfectly straight. At first she appeared young, but as I approached, her face revealed her to be older and older. I wondered if she was married or divorced, if she had children or not, how she would fit into the gathering she was soon to rejoin. Was she the single sister who helped aggressively with the dishes? Was her voice raspy from smoking and, if so, was it sexy or sad?

I was walking in circles inside the neighborhood, so I made for the main road. I hate to walk on main roads where the cars punch through the air at highway speeds, and you can’t walk in the middle of the street. On a quiet side street you can walk in the middle of the street, right on the line if there is one and it pleases you.

There was a park not far away, a collection of well-maintained fields for every imaginable youth sport, bleachers for spectators and a tightly locked building for equipment storage and child molestation. On these fields the unseen children in the decorated houses played their organized sports. Runty kids got hits and fat kids bobbled slowly toward third, soccer was viciously mothered and local businesses were advertised on the small, heaving backs of children young enough to have shoulder blades like the stumps of wings. The park was empty. Bits of snow melted here and there, no longer snow but frozen and re-frozen into something resembling Sno-Cone before the colored syrup is added.

I turned around and made my way back across the main road, scurrying as I always do, looking left, looking right, looking left, as I was taught in the streets of the borough of Queens. The street we lived on there was so enormous and dangerous that I was never allowed to cross it. As if to protect us permanently from those hurtling cars, my parents moved us to the holy grail of American suburbia: a dead end. It is the job of parents to keep us out of the street, and off if it, to keep us safe from the street in any and all prepositional phrases, and if we must venture into it, to teach us which way to look. The whole time I was in England, my father would end all our phone calls by reminding me to “look right!” He didn’t have to. The words “LOOK RIGHT” were painted on the ground, because the British Empire fell, and in the empire that rose in its place, we drive on the right and look to the left.

I made for the only house in this neighborhood whose secret interior I knew. I didn’t remember exactly how many blocks it was, or even what street it was on, but as I got closer, I recognized the cross streets. First State, then Federal, then Empire. Empire is where we live.

—Lowell Boileau

Part collage, part museum, part mausoleum, and all constructed around a series of intricately conceived online “tours,” detroityes.com depicts Detroit’s past and present in a library containing thousands of vivid photographic images.

For many, the centerpiece of the website is “The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit,” an online photo album which takes visitors on a tour of the city’s many remarkable abandoned buildings. Including police station houses, misbegotten franchises from the likes of Holiday Inn and Sears, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century architectural gems in a variety of famous styles, ornate hotels that loom forbiddingly over the skyline, and, most of all, historic auto plants, “The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit” is both a lament and a celebration for these buildings and their various states of lonely disrepair. Since the website was founded by Lowell Boileau in 1998, new e-tours of landmarks from the history of soul music (soulfuldetroit.com) and key locations in the city’s once-thriving Jewish community (shtetlhood.com)have also been added.

In 2003, the Detroit Metro Times, the Detroit Free Press, and Hour magazine lauded detroityes.com as the best Detroit website of the year. Recently I talked to Mr. Boileau, erstwhile visual artist and Detroit area native, as well as the founder of detroityes.com, and he was good enough to share his views on the neglect and loss of America’s historic auto plants, recent improvements in Detroit’s economic condition, and the artistic possibilities of the Internet.

Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood: So, I was wondering if you could tell us about the website, and how you started it, and how it has gotten to be so big, what with over 1,000 images and all.

Lowell Boileau: It gets over 2 million visitors a year now and in the range of 30 million page hits . . . The original site ["The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit"] is, well, first, of all, my background is I’m a fine art painter. When the web came along, I started trying to sell my paintings on the web, and I realized it’s an art medium. And so I created what I call “for-art websites” like Detroityes and Soulfuldetroit. And so this was, being an urban landscape painter, Detroityes was in some ways an attempt to paint a giant portrait of Detroit. You see? The web is my new paint and canvas. And then to take it beyond that, then I involve the audience by making them into the question of what went wrong, and how does it go right, essentially.

It also started out a little tongue and cheek—Rome has got ruins, Athens has got ruins. Ours our bigger, but there’s no guidebook to them. And so it was to . . . tell that, and was kind of a different approach, I guess. That’s it in a nutshell.

MBN: The difference between our ruins and their ruins might be that ours seem so much more fragile. If there were an official occasion for this interview, it would be that the Studebaker factory, one of Detroit’s most historic factories, just burned down [on June 21, 2005]. One of the most important sites in industrial history is gone forever. Can you tell us a little bit about why there are not more serious efforts to preserve these sites?

LB: The National Auto Heritage Organization is doing some things with them. The original Model T plant, the preservation group is taking care of that and protecting it. The most important one, in my opinion, that is, the most important factory in history, the Highland Park Model T plant, nothing is being done with that, unfortunately. I mean, this is the one where the moving assembly line construction starts. Everything—the whole birth of the modern car is there, essentially. That’s unfortunate. Detroit’s got pressing problems, they need to redevelop, and it’s complicated—let me put it that way. With Detroit’s poverty.

MBN: I recently picked up Time magazine, and I was dismayed to learn that they had named current Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick the worst mayor in the country [in the April 17, 2005 issue of Time].

LB: Well, one of the three. They didn’t name him the worst, but they said, “These three are the worst.” [The other two worst were, according to Time, Dick Murphy of San Diego and John Street of Philadelphia.]

MBN: Do you think that the economic situation is so advanced that no political efforts to turn it around can possibly succeed? There appeared to have been a lot of enthusiasm around Dennis Archer’s tenure as mayor in the 1990’s, but not very much seems to have come out of that, either.

LB: I disagree with that completely. First of all, I think that Detroit has turned around. It turned around in 1995. It turned around under Archer in 1995, and if you compare downtown Detroit in 1995 and now, it’s day and night. I mean, you could have shot a cannon down most streets in Detroit on a weekend night and not hit anyone. And when you consider the area from the Fox [Theatre, restored in the early 1990's] down to the Renaissance [Center], what’s going on there with the stadiums, the casinos–for better or worse–the residential, the housing that’s going on there, hundreds and hundreds of units of loft conversion, Campus Martius Park, the whole Winter Garden extension to the Renaissance Center, the new Park Hilton, it goes on and on. It’s really quite remarkable. The West side, downtown, is still lagging. And they have lots of others in the greater city itself, but . . . there have also been thousands of residential permits, especially if you compare it to the Coleman Young [Detroit mayor from 1974-1994] low point of zero residential permits.

It’s a got a long way to come up, and the appearance may not be perceptible, but here’s an old timer here—it’s amazing. And it’s continued under Kwame, but somewhat out of . . . but there’s economic reasons, too. The economy, the auto economy, is not doing well right now.

You know, I don’t know if you read the forum on the website, but this is where I get all of my information, basically [Both Detroityes.com and Soulfuldetroit.com have online forums, with over 3,000 registered users between the two of them]. And there’s quite a good article today on how difficult a job it is being mayor, they quoted an article from the Free Press by Bill McGraw [Detroit Free Press columnist], and a discussion’s taken off on it. The big problem with Detroit is that the city of Detroit has to take care of all the poor people, the homeless, the felons, the single parent families, the poor people who can’t pay taxes, while the rest of the communities and the families of Detroit take a walk.

They don’t have to go out and face panhandlers when they go to the store where I live here in Farmington, let’s say, or in other places. Added to that they get high insurance rates and the declining place to live in experience. End of sermon.

MBN: One of the things that I especially like about the site is its lack of sentimentality. In addition to the fact that the neglect of these buildings represents a loss of and lack of respect for history, the truth is that they are also, as the site says, simply “Fabulous.” They have their own kind of grandeur and even beauty.

LB: Absolutely. They’re like the ancient ruins. They have that visual aspect to them and that was what drew them to me in the first place.

MBN: What surprises me about your city paintings is that they have this pristine quality to them. And, at the same time, nature insinuates itself into the cities through puddles, trees in incongruous locations, and so forth. And in your paintings of natural landscapes, by contrast, technology does the same thing—insinuate itself just slightly into the image, as in a single road curving through a vast hillside. Nature and technology seem to have a yin and yang kind of relationship in your paintings.

LB: Well, you know, you picked up on that. These American painters in the mid-nineteenth century, the Hudson River School, all of their work was very similar in certain ways, in the ways that they saw pristine nature being encroached on by civilization, cleared lands, and at the same time they were also very taken by the dramatic aspects of landscape, and sky and light. And this is sort of the other end of it, where nature’s coming back. This is also sort of a theme in a lot of Dutch Renaissance-style paintings, and things like that, and I’m not saying I’m particularly trying to copy those or anything, but I think that I feel moved in a similar way.

MBN: The way that you paint cars reminds me of Futurism.

LB: Maybe it was on a subtle level. A lot of that deals with an excuse for the more abstract issues that I was trying to deal with, in a representational framework, and also to deal with the micropoint painting technique that I use, that only uses the three primary colors, where you use white as a hole in the paint, basically. It’s complex, let me put it that way.

MBN: Would you feel like telling us about any new stuff that’s going on?

LB: I just did a painting and photographic show in January, the first hard-copy painting I’ve done in a while. If you go to detroityes.com/360 you’ll see the presentation of that show. But my art medium and my art effort is mainly digital right now, the for-art websites, and I just did a major revision of shtetlhood.com, the “Lost Synagogues of Detroit”. It’s basically a presentation and a tracing of them and of the African-American congregations that have largely taken them over since then. It’s a completely audience-authored artwork in that I solicit the comments and the memories from the audience, and that becomes the text and the description for the site. And, so that was—I just added about twenty new sites I found to that, and I also improved the ability for people to leave their memories, share their memories, and that has been my main thing lately.

MBN: One of the things that I think is neat about web design is the way it incorporates changes over time, so that a portrait on the Internet can be more fluid and dynamic than a conventional portrait. This especially comes through, I think, in the “Urban Prairies” section of detroityes.com, where the visitor can click between aerial photographs of the same city neighborhood taken in the 1940′s, when rows and rows of houses had been there, and in recent years, after virtually all of them had been demolished.

LB: Well, that’s true. The tremendous thing is the interaction part. That’s what sets this art medium apart totally from painting. Painting as interaction: You hang some work at a show, people come and then they talk about it briefly there, then some rich guy buys it. End of conversation. With them [the websites], there’s, like, an ongoing art opening. Not only between the artist and the audience, but also within the audience itself. And that takes off, they come in, and now the audience becomes a participant in it by contributing to the discussions. And if you look in the discussions at all, you’ll discover numerous pictures that people post in there, you know, so something happens in a certain place, and somebody’s got a picture of it. It goes outside of itself, in terms of artwork, outside of the artist’s control, in a lot of ways. To me, that’s why I’m so sucked into it. I can’t hardly paint anymore.

MBN: Wow, well, thanks a lot. You’ve told us some really neat stuff. First I have to type up this interview, then you’ll be able to look at it on the website if you want.

LB: I will. I checked it [Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood] out, and I see where you’re going with it.

MBN: Great.

LB: OK. Shoot me an email when you’ve got it up, OK?

MBN: I will.

LB: OK. Have a good day.

Founded as a hospice for the poor in 1827, this wedge-shaped landmark is a West Village oddity situated at the oddest of intersections: the point at which two branches of Waverly Place come together, and where Christopher Street and Grove Street diverge off Christopher Park.

Throughout its existence the Northern Dispensary has gone through several incarnations and housed a number of disparate lives. Edgar Allan Poe was once treated for a head cold here in 1836. In 1960, the Dispensary was transformed into a dental clinic, one that would eventually become infamous for refusing to treat a HIV-patient in 1986. A lawsuit, and bankruptcy, followed shortly thereafter.

Today, Gottlieb Real Estate owns the building; its founder, William Gottlieb, left the Dispensary to his sister upon his death in 1999. William had the reputation of never selling his properties nor investing more than the minimum in restoration and management. This is a tradition his sister has successfully upheld: The interior is nothing but chipped white walls, and medical cabinets still remain in the middle of some rooms. Given the building’s history and setting, Gottlieb could make a fortune if the Dispensary were converted into apartments. To this day it remains uninhabited.

Still, sometimes at night I can hear strange things happening about the Dispensary—glass shattering, fights, drunken screaming, guys saying how they’ll give each other hand jobs. And then, one day not long ago, something else: A woman.

It was a Saturday afternoon, and I was still lying in bed from a night of heavy drinking. I was alone. My roommates were out of town. I got up, twisted open my blinds, squinted out the window. The snow from the night before had stopped, but Waverly was still covered in white. I was soaking in the scene when, out of nowhere, I saw her. She was standing on the corner ledge of the Dispensary, staring down onto the street where Waverly intersects with Waverly. Was she getting ready to jump? And if so, who commits suicide by jumping off a three-story building? She did not inch forward; she did not back away. I couldn’t find it in myself to make her stop whatever she was doing. Then again, what could I have done?

A siren went off in the distance. She looked towards Sixth Avenue then turned forward, looking in my direction. Though I knew she didn’t see me, it chilled me just the same. She dipped her head and stepped away from the ledge. She walked to her left, out of my view of the Dispensary.

That was the last I ever saw of her.

It was not the last time I ever thought of her.