Manhattan Nocturne Read Online Free

thinking that it would be damn tough to get through—you’d have to have a sledgehammer and a hacksaw, you’d have to back a large truck against it, attach a couple of chains, and pull forward in low gear.

    But it’s where the gate leads that is important. Beyond it, surprisingly, a narrow, arched tunnel doglegs seventy feet back from the sidewalk. Rising and falling, the tunnel passes along the rear foundation walls of three houses dating from the 1830s, all of which have their formal entrances on the next street. This arrangement was written into the original deed of each of these properties, and, according to my real-estate lawyer, represents quite an anomaly in New York City real-estate law. Most residential property, of course, is defined or surveyed from a bird’s-eye view, the footprint of the property or building a matter of lengths and widths. Not so with the tunnel. Legally it is three dimensional, “an arched passageway, of a height of five feet and nine inches,” says the original deed, “with slight variation thereof as it extends westerly.” It is a quiet and mysterious conduit, and on evenings when there is little traffic, you can hear water gurgling down the soil pipes of the adjacent buildings, or a piano being played in one of the rooms upstairs. Or the indistinct sounds of conversation. Thus does the tunnel feel like a dark umbilicus, passing closely and secretly past separate lives before opening at the other end into an irregular lot, twenty-one by seventy-four feet, opening upon what my wife and I fell in love with—here, with the lighted twin towers of the World Trade Center looming not so far away, is what we were amazed to see: a small wooden farmhouse.
    There it stood, despite rotted sills, termite-eaten joists, and a sagging cedar-shingle roof—a fragment from Manhattan’s lost age, built in 1770 when the island was to the south a port for English merchants and to the north a landscape of streams, dirt roads, and farms owned by Dutchmen and even a few Quakers. The house’s ceilings were low and the windows off-plumb, and the original bubbled glass rattled in the old frames during a storm, but for some reason the structure had never been torn down, perhaps because the walnut cabinetry was too beautiful, perhaps because of a stubborn owner, family discord, chance—the reasons had been lost to time. We didn’t care. We wanted it, and the little patch of green in front, which even included a small gnarled apple tree. Anywhere
else, such a house would have been mundane; in Manhattan, it was a miracle.
    Lisa and I were in our early thirties then and had been married only a few years. The house was terrifyingly expensive, but Lisa, who is a hand surgeon, had come home one day with disbelief on her face and told me that the city’s premier thumb man, a conceited maestro in his late fifties, had asked her to join his practice. There was a certain urgency to his offer; after marrying a third time, the good doctor had impregnated his childless, forty-year-old wife, knowing that she had reached the age of desperation but not that she had been taking fertility drugs on the sly. Result: three tiny yet strong heartbeats on the ultrasound. The prospect of so much new life had nearly scared the man to death; like a lot of the grizzled heavy hitters in the city, he had suddenly reached the point where he needed a young person to carry the load. And for this he was willing to pay—big. He knew Lisa would soon want children of her own; that didn’t matter; he trusted her skill and youthful stamina. “What will I do with all that money?” Lisa had blurted. And here the older surgeon gave her a fatherly but potentially wrong lecture about the gigantism of the federal debt and the government’s inevitable need to print money: “Buy as much real estate as you can,” he advised.
    Like a farmhouse in New York City. After stepping up