From Burkhard Bilger's "Mystery on Pearl Street," New Yorker, January 7, 2008.

This one begins, like a dime detective novel from the nineteen-thirties, in a dingy bar in lower Manhattan. And, like a lot of New York stories, though it may touch on history and backroom politics, sex and the supernatural, though it throws together billionaires and scrap-lumber salesmen, city councilmen and scholars of the occult, it’s mostly about real estate—and the stubborn allure of old buildings and their secrets[...]

[...] New York demolishes more old buildings every month than most American cities have standing. In a single week last September, the list of scheduled demolitions ran to six pages; in an average year, about two thousand buildings are torn down. As you walk through neighborhoods like SoHo or Greenwich Village, it’s easy to imagine Manhattan as one vast historic district, camera-ready for any period from the Civil War on. In fact, fewer than three per cent of the city’s million or so buildings are protected as landmarks.

Lower Manhattan is both the city’s oldest neighborhood and its most rebuilt. “It seems like they knocked everything down there fifty years ago,” Simeon Bankoff, the executive director of the Historic Districts Council, told me recently. If this is where New York began, it’s also where it has most had to reinvent itself. “That’s the peculiar pattern of development in Manhattan,” Bankoff said. “It spreads north and then it doubles back—and then it does it again and again.”

A few months after 211 Pearl Street was sold to Chicago 4, Dave McWater received a legal notice from his new landlords—the first of several. By failing to make necessary repairs and by using the building as a residence, the company argued, Dave was violating his lease. The complaints grew more specific as time went on—one claimed that the elevator shaft wasn’t properly sealed and that some windows had not been replaced in a “first class” manner—but the essential message stayed the same: the building had become an eyesore.

“I said to the judge, ‘This is horseshit,’ ” Dave told me. “ ‘They’re going to make me pay forty thousand dollars to renovate a building they’re tearing down.’ ” The real reason for the lawsuits, he said, was the demolition clause in his lease. If the building was torn down before its term ran out, he was entitled to up to a million dollars in compensation. “They were taking a shot,” he said. “Maybe I’m a loser and they can just evict me. If not, maybe they can harass me so much that they can talk me down from the million dollars.”

Dave managed to fend off the lawsuits for a while. But by the spring of 2000 he had spent tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, and he still had some expensive repairs to make. He decided to fight back. No. 211 Pearl seemed to be one of the oldest buildings left in lower Manhattan. If he could dig up its history, he thought, the city might just declare it a landmark. In the meantime, the mere possibility might scare the owner into settling.

He thought he’d give Alan Solomon a call.

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