A HANDYMAN'S GIFT.(The Talk of the Town)

Joe Temeczko kept his past mostly to himself. In Minneapolis, where he lived, his friends knew little about him other than that he was a handyman who spoke broken English and ate past-date cakes. A gregarious neighborhood fixture with a mouth full of gold teeth, he was fond of scavenging in garbage cans for broken toys, fixing them up, and giving them to children.

A few days after the World Trade Center towers fell, in 2001, Temeczko, who was eighty-six, called his lawyer, William K. Wangensteen, and said that he wanted to leave all his money to New York City: "So much suffering. Maybe my money can help." Wangensteen says that Temeczko was overjoyed when he changed his will: "He said, 'Shouldn't we call Mayor Giuliani?' I said, 'That seems a little premature, Joe.' " Two weeks later, while dragging a length of garden hose, Temeczko collapsed and died.

When Wangensteen went through Temeczko's effects, he learned that his client had been born in Poland in 1915. Photographs of Temeczko in his twenties showed an affluent-looking young man with a fondness for ascots. After fighting with the Polish Army in the Second World War, Temeczko spent time in both German and Russian prison camps, which is where his teeth deteriorated, because he had gnawed on bones. Around 1950, Temeczko arrived at Ellis Island. He worked for a time helping to clean the Statue of Liberty; later, in Minneapolis, he taped a poster of the statue to his living-room wall. And, over the years, he somehow amassed more than a million four hundred thousand dollars.

The story of how Joe Temeczko's life savings were received in a city with a budget of some forty-seven billion dollars is a bureaucratic opera bouffe. For months, the Mayor's office failed to acknowledge the gift. Finally, in February of last year, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Gifford Miller announced that the bequest would help fund two projects. Most of the money would go to Columbus Park, in Chinatown, where it would pay for replacing a decrepit asphalt sports field with synthetic turf. The remaining three hundred thousand dollars would go to the Daffodil Project, which is responsible for getting two and a half million daffodil bulbs planted around the city to honor the victims of September 11th.

Nineteen months after the announcement, the money remains unspent. Chinatown community groups, led by ...