The first thing I remember as a reporter, because I used to work nights a lot, I would work midnight to eight in the morning, and it was the greatest time of my life. I'd go running out on murders and everything. It was, I never had more fun in my life. But when we knocked off at 8:00 in the morning at 75 West Street, we'd walk out the back door and turn around the corner and walk up West Street to the old Washington Market. And that market was itself the consequence of earlier development. It was moved up from down by the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel entrance, where it had, a lot of it had been earlier, to build the tunnel. And it was moved up gradually, so it went all the way to North Moore Street, as I remember it. And a lot of the people who worked in the market were Arabs. They were Syrian, Christians, refugees from the Ottoman Empire. We'd go in the morning and I was a kid, I didn't know... Lawrence of Arabia hadn't even come out yet. I didn't know much about Arabs of any kind, except they were very handsome looking.

But they'd be sitting there reading the Arabic paper and drinking little tiny demitasse cups of coffee. And they were very pleasant to these louts from the newspaper. And I would talk to some of them about, what's the headline mean in the paper, and how do you read the paper, do you have a sports columnist, you know, that kind of stuff. And one of the first things to move was that, was that market. You know, it was like a place of life. You went, and there was exotic stuff and banal stuff and these wonderful old guys sitting around, because their day was over by then, we were like, the tail end of their day. They'd been there since two in the morning. And that moved up to Hunt's Point. They moved it all the way up to the Bronx. And I think a lot of the older men retired. There weren't many women working in it. But there were a lot of men. And some people must have been absorbed at Hunt's Point in some way. But that was the first thing where there was an elimination of something human. There's nothing more human than selling food to strangers, you know? Every one of us eats and those markets were full of, first of all, physical beauty, because of the way the fruits and vegetables and meats looked.

But also, it had a "come on in" feeling to it, not "please keep out." It wasn't a private club. It was a market. And New York is a market town and always has been. It's where you come to buy stuff. So that was the beginning of the change. And then I thought, I really felt the assault on Cortlandt Street, because you slowly began to look at the plans as they emerge, and you find out there's not going to be a Cortlandt Street. They're going to have a sign that says Cortlandt Street, and after that it will be nothing but concrete and a plaza into which nobody ever stepped. And knowing that they were taking away this thing that I thought would last forever, the way we thought radio would last forever, and that it was going without any intercession from the government, because there was no Landmarks Commission at the time, it was around the same period that we were going into when we lost Penn Station, which really provoked the creation of the Landmarks Commission.

So seeing Cortlandt Street, you know, a street in which God knows what great historical figures had walked down, but which my father had walked down, being shoveled off to become landfill for Battery, what became Battery Park City, I mean, literally, bulldozers knocked down the old houses and just tipped them over, smashed them over like they were -- like big fists were being leveled from the sky somehow. Among the many things that were lost on September 11th were the final Polaroid photographs of the houses on Cortlandt Street with their prices that were labeled on them by the assessors, what the owners were going to get paid, you know, 9,000, 12,000, 18,000, whatever it was. All those original Polaroids, no negatives, were lost in one of the buildings on September 11th, so that even that, even that record of it is gone. And I hated it, you know, I hated that, the arrogance of it, as a kid. I was young and I didn't like that stuff