“Why are you tearing it down?” A stranger running down 29th had grabbed John’s elbow. He was a little older than John but bald. His eyes were wide.
“It’s old,” John apologized, but he didn’t know what he had to be sorry for. He gently yanked his arm free of the stranger’s hold. “We can’t build it any higher, the pipes are lead, the electrical is all jacked up. It’s a mess. Cheaper to just tear it down and start over.”
The stranger stared up at the building—were those tears welling in his eyes?—and mouthed something. Maybe he was a disgruntled tenant. Some of them had gotten together to fight the demo but the building was in such disrepair they hadn’t had much of a case—you had to be crazy to want to live in there. John looked him over again. He was well dressed, like he was going to work. He looked clean, healthy enough. Like he had money.
Kapinsky buzzed him on the radio. “Yeah, just a sec,” he replied. “Listen, man, I’m not the owner, I don’t know anything about lease buyouts, so if you’re some attorney here to yell at somebody you got the wrong guy.” But the man didn’t really seem like a lawyer. Or like he was angry. He seemed sad. He was still staring up at the building, didn’t seem to even hear what John’d said. John left the guy standing there, on the sidewalk opposite the building.
Fucking New York, John chuckled to himself. Every day there was a story. He’d go home and tell this one while he made meatballs tonight. Sure, some psycho might come and stab you just for doing your job, but probably not. Probably you just got a funny story out of it. Maybe not funny, though.
John saw the strange man the next week on the day of the demolition, one of a few hundred in the gathered crowd. After the building fell he was one of the last to leave, stared up at where it’d been for a while.
Tom hadn’t come anywhere near 29th street in almost two years, but work brought him that way one crisp December morning. He planned to just pass it in a cab, not even glance out the window down 29th. He didn’t want to see the brown stone, art deco facade with stunning arched windows that stretched like the legs of great athletes; he didn’t care to look up at the three gargoyles looming over the entryway, turned to each other, gossiping about passersby; the marble stonework weeped green trails like moss or ivy from where the copper had rusted, but he didn’t need to see it.
They got caught in some construction, though, exactly there. Construction, he realized, on his building. Scaffolding surrounded the outer wall. No. Not construction. ALERT, a gigantic hornet-orange sign read, DEMOLITION 12/11/22.
He paid his fare and got out, just as traffic started going again. He didn’t hear the horns honking at him or the police officer yelling at him to get out of the road until he’d landed on the far sidewalk. He lifted a vacant hand in their direction. His phone rang—just Marsha, his supervisor, calling to see if he’d be getting to the client’s on time. He silenced it, floated toward the building.
“Excuse me—” he saw a man wearing a white hardhat and approached him to ask, “why are you tearing it down?”
The man blinked at Tom, who realized he was accosting a stranger. He took a step back. “It’s old.” The man said dismissively. “Can’t build it any higher ‘n the pipes are fill of lead. The electrical is all jacked up. It’s a mess. Cheaper to just tear it down and start over.”
“Cheaper,” Tom echoed. He turned to look up at the building. When he turned back to ask, knowing it was a strange request, embarrassed to ask it, if it would be possible to collect a memento from the building—he didn’t know what, just a piece of tiling from the lobby or a button from an elevator—the man was jogging across the street, back at work.
He should be going too.
#
He came to the obliteration. Took the day off work. Not very many people were there to see the building go down, but Tom was glad he would be. He was glad too, to notice before the explosives went off that the three gargoyles had been removed. Where to? he wondered. Long ago, when he’d lived there, they’d had names: Barney, Bluey and Oscar the Grouch. Silly names.
The building went down in a scream of dust. He stood a while then, mustering courage to go up and ask one of the workers if he could take a rock, a bit of concrete—anything—home, but he’d spent all his courage just being here today.