merchants rich; improvements in the manufacture of iron; Cornelius Vanderbilt and his Pennsylvania Railroad; the aforementioned purity and ample supply of the watershed north of the city, which could support a mighty population; the construction of great docks along both sides of the island; the discovery of oil in western Pennsylvania; banker J. P. Morgan and his enormous, florid nose, so ugly it scared people who might otherwise have opposed him; Thomas Edison's 1878 invention of the lightbulb, which became instantly irresistible and led to the wiring of the city; the conversion of trains from steam to electric; the Lower East Side's houses of prostitution, which ignited the sexual appetites of innumerable young men; 'Boss' Tweed, who, although he stole $160 million, accelerated the naturalization of aliens, including hundreds of thousands of Italians and Jews from Eastern Europe, many of whom crowded into the Lower East Side and frequented the houses of prostitution; the invention of the electrified elevated train to move these masses; the booming stock market; the documentation, by photographer Jacob Riis, of the Lower East Side's pestilence, crime, and shocking immorality; the arrival of 'patent' medicines, often little more than opium and so pleasurable that their customers forgot they were dying of dysentery; the stock market crash of 1894; the obsolescence of the wooden sailing ship; the development of cast-iron architecture; improvements in the refining of crude oil; the invention of the internal combustion engine; the new and irresistible telephone, which led to the wiring of the city; improvements in the manufacture of structural steel; World War I, which flooded the city with cheap black labor from the South and made merchants rich; the destruction of Europe; the new and irresistible radio; the obsolescence of the horse; the rise of Harlem as the center of black culture, much of it from the South; Prohibition and the appearance of speakeasies; the presence or absence of bedrock upon which high office buildings might now be erected; the booming stock market; the commodification of a certain well-dollared, ironic smugness, which supported various purveyors of this consciousness, among them dozens of celebrated bars, hotels, and clubs; the smoky burlesque theaters, which ignited the sexual appetites of innumerable young men; the new and irresistible ocean liners; the stock market crash of 1929; the Great Depression, during which time the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the Waldorf-Astoria, and Rockefeller Center were completed; the new and irresistible moving pictures; World War II, which made merchants rich; the conversion of the old Times Square burlesque theaters to movie houses; the 1943 riots by blacks in Harlem; the destruction of Europe; the building of the United Nations complex, which introduced the glass-curtain-walled skyscraper to the city; rising Puerto Rican immigration, much of which packed into the Lower East Side as Jews and Italians left; improvements in the refining of crude oil to create a new product called 'jet' fuel; the new and irresistible television; the falling cost of domestic airplane travel; the 1960s riots by blacks in Harlem; the booming stock market; the construction of the American interstate highway system, which helped the trucking industry; the bankruptcy of railroads and the 1966 demolition of the old Pennsylvania Station (looming, neoclassically magnificent, civitas captured in stone), prompting a storm of protest; the arrival of heroin, so pleasurable that addicts would commit daily felonies to support their habits; the conversion of Times Square movie houses to porno theaters, which ignited the sexual appetites of innumerable young men; the collapse and removal of the rotting, obsolete docks on both sides of the island; white flight out of the city; the depressed stock market; the erection of the 110-floor twin towers of the World Trade Center; the suburbs as haven; the Stonewall riots by gay men in the Village; the suburbs as wasteland; the arrival of high-quality cocaine, so pleasurable that people did not mind burning holes inside their heads with it; the booming stock market; population explosions in Haiti, India, and Pakistan; the falling cost of international travel by jumbo jet; the arrival of crack cocaine, so pleasurable it could make men suck happily on the leg of a chair; the dissolution of the USSR; white flight back into the city for the purposes of real estate speculation and convivial association; the soaring, gaudily crenellated edifice of Donald Trump's ego; the stock market crash of 1987; the obsolescence of ocean liners; the 1994 riot by blacks in Howard Beach; the shantytowns in Tompkins Square Park, which contained such pestilence, crime, and shocking immorality that the city fathers decided to clear the land; the commodification of a certain well-dollared, ironic smugness, which supported various purveyors of this consciousness, among them dozens of celebrated bars, hotels, and clubs; a post-Communist wave of stamping, ginseng-chewing Chinese immigration; the new popularity of the Internet, which led to the wiring of the city and ignited the sexual appetites of innumerable young men; the conversion of Times Square porno theaters to tourist hotels; the booming stock market, borne aloft by the Internet; coffee bars filled with people discussing the Internet and the stock market; the postmillenial stock market implosion; and, of course, the crashing of two jumbo jets into the World Trade Center towers, which- some would say- marked the true beginning of the twenty-first century.
Hidden within this metamorphosis has always been the legal antwork of individual humans and corporations, repeatedly buying, selling, leasing, mortgaging, and reparceling every square inch of the island, and even the rights to the smoggy air above it, in greedy pursuit of their own interests. And although the particulars of that greed- the piled and papered secrets of who owns the island's thirty or forty thousand buildings and how much they paid for them- would seem almost infinite, nearly all are contained within just one place: Room 205, Surro-gate Court, 31 Chambers Street, in lower Manhattan.
And that was where I stood the next morning, outside the court under a threatening sky, stamping my feet and nibbling from a warm bag of caramel peanuts bought from a vendor. The building, erected in 1901, was a magnificent beaux arts pile, with giant bronze Puritans guarding its doors. I'd slept poorly, almost not at all, and when the gray light of day crept down the airshaft next to my window, I'd jolted awake, hoping that the events of the previous night might somehow be remembered as benign. Many mornings I woke in my grimy cell on Thirty- sixth Street hoping in the half-second blink to consciousness that I might discover that I was still living in my eight- room apartment on the Upper East Side, with Timothy asleep in his pajamas and Judith involved in her coffee rituals, available for a cottony, dorsal grope in the kitchen, but on this morning a simple return to my lonely, cracked-plaster innocence of the day before would have filled me with relief, even a kind of refracted happiness.
No such luck. The vision of Herschel's frozen, snow-covered grimace- conjurable and godlike as an Easter Island totem- had chased me along Broadway's snowy, shadowed facades as I'd walked the long blocks toward Chambers Street. You don't move dead bodies, I cursed myself, not in the middle of the night when no one's looking. White lawyers, especially, even ones down on their luck, don't move dead black bodies, no matter how plausible the explanation. And then lie to the cops about it. I could only hope that a few days would go by, Poppy and Jay would smooth over any questions from Herschel's family, the man would be buried in peace, and that would be that. If Jay was smart, he'd pay for the funeral.
And if I was smart, I'd have nothing further to do with him, no matter what Allison might say or promise. The problem was that my name had been hijacked onto his documents of sale, forever and ever, and even as his quickie, one-night-stand lawyer, I was obliged, if only to myself, to see that the deal was sound. Having had no opportunity to examine the documents beforehand, and given the dubious activities of the previous night, I wanted a look at the recorded deeds of the building at 162 Reade Street. The word 'recorded' is the key term. A deed has to be executed, tendered, and received, but it's not official until recorded. Only then is the pile of bricks, the box of timbers, possessed. The change in ownership of any property is mysterious, when you think about it; the tangible thing remains unaltered but the description of it, the name attached to it, changes in an instant. Three hundred years ago, under English common law, the sale of real estate used to be marked by the snapping of a stick, which symbolized the specificity and permanence of the moment.
Now the courthouse's brass doors opened and I followed the others up the steps. I'd been to the building years ago, and the place hadn't changed much. Inside, past the posted notices for sheriff's auctions of confiscated cars, you skate across yellowy marbled floors to wide staircases that convey you magnificently into the various rooms of the city's Department of Finance. Here the illusion of grandeur abruptly ceases. Room 205, where paint hangs from the ceiling like peeling sycamore bark, is divided into a records section and an area where those records may be examined on microfiche readers. The room is frequented by two distinct populations: lawyers in good suits and everyone else; the everyone else generally look like drug addicts, drunks, felons, and crazies- the usual shank- shovers and shape-shifters. Derelict as they appear, though, these men and women play a crucial role in the economic life of the city; they are the freelance deed-pullers who work for the title companies and law firms. They know each other in a friendly fuck-you sort of way, and compete for use of the microfiche readers, the computer- record generators, and the attention of the garrulous Russian man who dispenses the microfiche cassettes that are so valuable. (That the definitive records of private property ownership in the capital of global commerce are overseen by a man who grew up under Soviet Communism goes unnoted.) The process is this: You submit the address to the clerk. He gives you the building's block and lot numbers, which are then fed into computers in the adjacent room, which in turn produce mortgage and deed record numbers and their respective microfiche reel and
