To some natures this stimulant of life in a great city becomes a thing as binding and necessary as opium is to one addicted to the habit. It becomes their breath of life; they cannot exist outside of it; rather than be deprived of it they are content to suffer hunger, want, pain, and misery; they wouldn’t exchange even a ragged and wretched condition among the great crowd for any degree of comfort away from it.
—Tom Johnson
Damon Runyon’s ashes were cast by Eddie Rickenbacker from a plane flying over Times Square.
c) Vlade
Vlade now made a kind of cop’s round of the building every evening after dinner, checking all the security systems and visiting all the rooms lower than the high tide line. Also the top floors under the blimp mast, and while he was at it, anywhere he thought taking a look would be a good idea. Yes, he was nervous, he had to admit it, to himself if no one else. Something was going on, and with that offer on the building looking like a hostile takeover, the attacks might be pressure to accept. It wouldn’t be the first time in New York real estate, nor the thousandth. So he was nervous, and made his rounds with a pistol in a shoulder holster under his jacket. That felt a little extreme, but he did it anyway.
A couple of nights after they had pulled Roberto out of the south Bronx, at the end of his tour of the building, Vlade got off the elevator at the farm and went out to the southeast corner to see how the old man was doing. No surprise to look in through the hotello’s flap door and find Stefan and Roberto there with him, seated on the floor around a pile of old maps.
“Come in,” Hexter said, and gestured to a chair.
Vlade sat. “Looks like the boys got some of your maps back.”
“Yes, all the important ones,” the old man said. “I’m so relieved. Look, here’s a Risse map, 1900. It won a prize at the World’s Fair in France. Risse was a French immigrant, and he took his map back to Paris and it was the sensation of the fair, people lined up to walk around it. It was ten feet on a side. The original was lost, but they made this smaller version to sell. It’s a kind of celebration of the five boroughs coming together. That happened in 1898, and then they commissioned Risse to do this. I love this map.”
“Beautiful,” Vlade commented. It had been much folded, but it did capture something of the gnarly density, the complexity, the sense of human depth crusting the bay. The man-hours that had gone into building it.
“Then here’s the Bollmann map, isn’t this a beauty? All the buildings!”
“Wow,” Vlade said. It was a bird’s-eye view of midtown, with each building drawn individually. “Oh no, he cuts it off right at Madison Square! See, there’s the edge of the Flatiron, but our building is cut off.”
“Not the very top of it, see? Right next to the letter G in the index grid, I think that’s the top of it. You can see the shape.”
Vlade laughed. “The map didn’t go any farther?”
“I guess it was just a midtown map, anyway this is all I’ve got.”
“What’s this colored one?”
“Colored indeed. It’s the Lusk Committee map, the so-called Red Scare map. Ethnic groups, see? Where they lived. Which was where all the horrible revolutionaries were supposed to come from.”
“What year was this?”
“1919.”
Vlade looked for their neighborhood. “I see we had, what is this color—Syrians, Turks, Armenians, and Greeks. I didn’t know that.”
“Some neighborhoods are still the same, but most have changed.”
“That’s for sure. I wonder if you could do anything like this now.”
“I guess you could, using the census maybe. But I think it would mostly be a hodgepodge.”
“I’m not sure,” Vlade said. “I’d like to see. Meanwhile, these are great.”
“Thanks. I’m so happy to have them back.”
Vlade nodded. “Good. So look, that brings me to the little incident with the boys up in the Bronx. Why don’t you tell me about that too. Do you have a map that shows where the HMS Hussar went down?”
Hexter glanced quickly at the boys.
“We had to tell him,” Roberto said. “He pulled me out.”
The old man sighed. “There’s not one map,” he told Vlade. “There are maps of the time that helped me. The British Headquarters map is an incredible thing. The British held Manhattan through the Revolutionary War, and their ordnance people were the best cartographers on Earth at that time. They made the map for military purposes, but also just to pass the time, it looks like. It goes right down to individual boulders. The original is in London, but I copied it from a photo when I was a kid.”
“Show him that one, Mr. H!”
“Okay, let’s.”
The boys got out a large folder, like an artist’s folder, and pulled out a big square mass of paper, treating it like nitroglycerin. On the floor they unfolded two sheets of paper that together were about ten feet by five. And there was Manhattan Island, in some prelapsarian state of undress: a little crosshatching of village at the Battery, the rest of it a wilderness of hills and meadows, forests and swamps and creek beds, all drawn as if seen from above.
“Holy God,” Vlade said. He sat down beside it and traced it with a finger. The area Madison Square now occupied was marked as a swamp with a creek running east from it, debouching into an inlet on the East River. “It’s so beautiful.”
“It is,” Hexter said, smiling a little. “I made this copy when I was twelve.”
“I want to make a map like this for what’s here now,” Roberto declared.
“A big task,” Hexter noted. “But a good idea.”
“Okay,” Vlade said. “I love this thing. But back to the Hussar, please.”
Hexter nodded. “So, this map was finished the very year the Hussar went down. It doesn’t include the Bronx, but it does have part of Hell Gate. And luckily there’s another great map that has the whole harbor, the Final Commissioners’ Plan of 1821. I’ve got a reproduction of it too, see, look at this.” He unfolded yet another map. “Beautiful, eh?”
“Very nice,” Vlade said. “Not quite the Headquarters map, but excellent detail.”