The Jollity Building
[this is an original work of fiction]
In the Jollity Building, which stands eight stories and covers a quarter of a block on one of the sidestreets off Union Square, there has been a rodent infestation for over 20 years. Tenants in the buildings 34 offices have tried all sorts of glue traps, poisons and miniature smoke bombs, but the elusive whiskered residents can still be seen scurrying around the hallways, particularly in the evenings, when they can forage for coffee grinds and scraps of Chinese takeout in the garbage bags left overnight near the service elevator.
Sometime in the early 90s, the building briefly implemented a plan to let loose a team of five marmalade tabby cats to roam the buildings linoleum corridors every evening, but, after only one week, all five turned up dead one morning, spooning one another in a neat row in the front lobby. A note beside the bodies read Mice Rule. We Will Take All Comers.
Though no one could prove it, many of the tenants blamed the killings on Billy Wertheimer, the tabloid hero/villain from the 80s, who rents an office on the fifth floor for his anti-vegan prostylization campaign. He is known for his antipathy towards all animals, and was jailed overnight several years ago for poisoning the squirrels in Union Square Park with tainted macadamia nuts. He has run several failed mayoral campaigns, whose only platform was a proposition to deter terrorists by building a steel wall around Manhattan and requiring a special passport to enter.
In any case, the mice continue to roam free in the Jollity, amid the rooms enclosing architectural and interior design firms, travel agents, Braille publishers, freelance industrial engineers, and several webmasters. They usually appear in pairs or groups, suddenly erupting from under a door or whipping up the gold-and-marble stairway or jumping from the airshaft into the bathrooms. New tenants are sometimes thrown by the antics of their feral neighbors, but they adjust in time, and most are only amused by the occasional drop-in visit.
The Jollity Building is representative of perhaps a dozen or so buildings in the area, all built around the turn of the century and originally thought, with their eight and ten stories, to be skyscrapers. They are ornate and beautiful in the way of older industrial buildings, with arched windows and large columns, and several have a strange narrowness to them that suggests a certain willowy vulnerability. Some have dangling cornices, and others have strange continental-style flourishes on their roofs. They are not stately Stanford White edifices built to impress, and they do not house expansive lofts. Many have dark, poorly-designed offices at the end of long, windowless corridors, so the occupants tend to the miscellaneous, holed up for years and years in warrens full of yellowing newspapers and file folders and illegible notes.
These buildings have stood firm through the days of cobblestones and carriages, the war years and radio days, through the depression and the Cold War, and the dark ages of the 60s and 70s and 80s when the park was littered with needles, a haven for schizophrenics, freebirds, punks, hookers and addicts.
The park has been cleaned up since then, of course, and is now the province of dog-walkers, yuppies and office workers smoking cigarettes and eating lunch from plastic deli containers. But there are also the homeless, the NYU students, the goth kids and the skateboarders, and also the ragtag megaphone soapboxers holding Bush=Nazi banners and reviving the myth that Trotskyism could work, if only implemented correctly. One Friday a month there are the Critical Mass bikers, who have lost some steam since their shining moment as the pariahs of the Republican Convention, and some mornings there is the odd group of Falun Gong demonstrators, covered with fake blood and showing pictures of torture victims. Give one penny and make a difference! Just one penny! Feed a fellow human being! shouts an obese man sitting on a folding chair beside an upturned Poland Spring bottle.
The restaurant occupying the ground level of the Jollity, Major Dominguez, almost always has a beautiful crowd sitting at tables outside on the sidewalk, even in the winter, when there are heating lamps radiating down on the models and their hangers-on. It has been there for a number of years, but there is a lot of turnover in the waitstaff. Every time you go inside, there is a beautiful new amazon, fresh from the runways of Milan, gliding gracefully behind the bar, scarcely able to use the cash register.
Nonethless, Domo (as it is referred to on Gawker) is the most solvent and timely-paying tenant of the Jollityand paying far the largest rentand is thus a favorite of the owner of the building, Morty Hufnagel.
Morty has an office on the third floor, where he oversees a team of about fifteen rental agents representing buildings all around the neighborhood and up through the Flatiron District. He is 93 years old and walks with a cane, and no longer runs the nuts and bolts of his business. His heavyset, growling son Isaac has taken over daily operations, but Morty still comes to the office to chat with the security guards in the lobby. When his wife Elda died three years ago, many of the buildings companies closed for the day so that longtime residents could attend her funeral. He is always sharply dressed, in bespoke suits and felt hats, and still is known to throw a tantrum when he senses something in his business is awry, but he carries weight and darkness in his face, and his eyes are often trembling.
Charlie, the daytime doorman, seems nearly as old, and, despite an ever-present smile, has the same teary look in his eyes. As tenants come in and out, he waves at each one individually, saying, Hey, all right all right in his scraggy baritone. His son Anthony, who also works the door from time to time, is far less friendly, and cannot be counted on for greeting or acknowledgement, always seeming to harbor barely concealed resentment while carrying boxes of mail and packages into the storage room or glancing through a freebie newspaper on his little desk.
A small transistor radio carries a soul station through most of the day, all Barry White and Bobby Womack and Minnie Ripperton, and in the late afternoon, Charlie and Anthony are joined by Julian, a round Hispanic man with a lisp and a Negro Leagues baseball cap. The three of them stand outside the building, watching the crush of people, talking about the Mets and the price of gasoline. There is a prune-faced Colombian with a walker and a fedora who sometimes stops by to talk to them in thickly accented English, and also a bedraggled Foot Locker employee, wearing his referee shirt and an expression of deep confusion.
Tenants feel safe, even though the doormen never ask for an ID and dont require visitors to sign in or wear a my-name-is guest pass like some buildings; there is something of the old-time trust, dismissive of the idea that terrorists might pose as bike deliverymen headed for the acupuncturist who works on the second floor. Adding a measure of imagined security are two large, brass statues of menacing lions on either side of the glass front doors. The only complaints about security come from Wertheimer, who occasionally plays host to back-bench councilmanics and disgraced former child stars, the kind of minor celebrities who flatter themselves to think they have a Mark David Chapman waiting to martyr them.
Across the hall from Wertheimer, indie rock blasts during most of the day from the headquarters of a small failing glossy, Driftread regularly only by a certain small coterie of hipsters in Silverlake, Islington, Williamsburg and the Rhode Island School of Design. The magazines founder, Zach Winner, has funded the title for the past two years with his trust fund, but there are rumors that he has defaulted on his rent for the past three months, and a gossip column recently suggested that his well-documented meth habit may be getting the better of him. He can sometimes be seen racing back and forth in the hallways, talking animatedly into his specially made titanium cell phone. Some months ago, he was featured in an eight-page photo spread in his own magazine, posing outside of the Jollity in firefighters boots and carrying his dachshund, Norris.
The Jollity isnt a landmarked building (though there are occasionally half-hearted campaigns to make it so), and Morty sometimes receives offers from real estate speculators who envision an undulating monstrosity of multi-million-dollar condos reaching to the sky and overlooking the park. That has been the trend in the neighborhood, as has the tendency for the smaller buildings to bow out in favor of chain supermarkets, luxe day-spas, movie theaters and shoe stores.
Hufnagel is reportedly uninterested in selling out, content to die in possession of the building, inside of which he has spent the majority of his working life. He has owned the building for 36 years, and, before that, worked as an architecture critic for one of the daily papers out of a small back office on the sixth floor. The building may as well have his face engraved in the marble façade; to tear it down would be like smothering him with a pillow.
Morty lives only a few blocks away, in an equally old building on Irving Place, and he never strays far from the square. He has stories to tell if you ask him, but he doesnt volunteer them, convinced most people are bored by tales of the past. The truth is that most people are, but he was known to have dated his share of Depression-era starlets, and attended some of the last centurys most brilliant parties at the Harmonie Club and the Waldorf. In the 40s, he was known in the society pages as a man about town, and was briefly engaged to a Rothschild heiress whom he still calls the love of his life, despite his devotion to Elda and her memory.
Something of a libertine, and unafraid of the dark side of the city, Morty smoked opium once in a Chinatown dive on the lower end of Mott Street, and can still recall the dark Lower East Side alleyways off of Ludlow, into which he and his brothers would duck for a swig of bathtub gin during Prohibition. In his younger days, he ran a poker game out of the back room of a Ukrainian Social Club in the East Village.
Mortys father, an Orthodox Jew from eastern Poland, owned a soup kitchen on Delancey, and held court at a small synagogue in an apartment building on Avenue A. He had tried to raise Morty to be religious as well, but it never really took, nor did the deep guilt that most immigrants deposit in their childrens laps. Morty was always his own man, as comfortable negotiating with gangsters under the bridges on the Brooklyn waterfront as he was sipping Kir Royales in Montparnasse.
When he first moved into the building, the Jollity was in the center of Union Squares theater district, that generations Times Square, full of vaudeville, actresses, bright lights and honky-tonk, and Mortys Jollity is forever ensconced in that vision of it. Some of the landmarks are still there: the Swannanoa apartments on East 15th and the old Tammany Hall off the North end of the park; there are even a couple of one-story former carriage houses on the sidestreets off Irving. But these lie now in the shadows of the sterile Zeckendorf towers, and are wedged in amid Starbucks outlets.
Morty knows that New York is gone, but he still sees it everywhere.
Angelo Barquin receives $86 per day after taxes to act as a sort of super at the Jollity. He is slow and speaks poor English, and is prone to whistling. This habit grates on many of the buildings tenants, but, no matter how many times they mention it, he cant seem to help himself. Usually the songs he whistles seem to carry a salsa beat, and the trill cuts under and echoes against the doors as he pushes a mop back and forth each day through the buildings hallways. Some tenants blast music to drone him out, or perhaps hint to him not so subtly that he is bothering their concentration, but most just suffer his habit with a simmering, self-righteous angst that is never quite slaked.
In theory, the mice are Angelos responsibility, but there is a tacit understanding that there is not much to be done about them. They belong to the Jollity and have proven hearty enough to remain in it, outlasting hundreds of folded businesses and thousands of workers as they have passed their inheritance, one mouse to the next, from generation to generation. Morty is content to leave them this building, his life.