The original text of New York is all below Chambers Street. When I take my walk, I pass, in Battery Park City, the place where my grandfather was an engineer for United Fruit, on the ships that came in, the banana boats in 1910. My mother used to take us across the Brooklyn Bridge from Brooklyn, and she more often turned left into the southern tip of the island than she did right and move uptown, although she did go uptown with us. But she would go there because her father had worked on that pier. So she felt that connection to an earlier New York before she ever arrived in it.

And my father, my father was one of these radio freaks. You know, he -- in those days radios had backs you could take off them and actually take the tubes out. And Cortlandt Street, Radio Row, was the place all these radio freaks in New York would all go to to get tubes. And they had tube testers, and you'd stick them in and lights went up, or, but walking around and seeing those buildings with the markings, 1839 and all that, seemed to me some incredibly distant past as a boy. I was nine or ten years old. And I had my father even tell me, you know, that was a blacksmith shop, and that, you know, he knew somehow. I don't know how he knew. It was part of the lore of the street. If they went once a month, they got to know these guys. And they knew what had been there. And knowing what had been there is essential to forming a sense of the place in which you live, no matter where that is. We are what we were, in many ways. And that part of the city was -- is -- the place that we must know first if we ever hope to know the city, including the outer boroughs and its northern reaches, and Fifth Avenue and all the rest of the things that followed, all comes from down there.