Mystery on Pearl Street.(Short story)

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.

Ten years ago, a bar owner named David McWater took out a lease on a building at 211 Pearl Street. It was a plain brick structure in the Greek Revival style, with granite pillars along its base and a thin classical cornice. Its windows, three to a floor, once had sweeping views of New York Harbor--out across church spires and wooden piers, steam ferries and sailing ships, to the orchards and farms of Brooklyn. Now they looked out on the canyoned streets of the financial district. A family from New Jersey had owned the building for decades and had allowed it to fall into disrepair. The floors were layered with plywood and carpet, the walls with wood panelling. (The first floor had been an Irish bar called Rosie O'Grady's.) Next door, at 213, the building it leaned against was in even worse shape: a jagged crack ran down the length of one wall, it was later discovered, slowly separating the facade from the sides.

Still, it was a sweet deal. The building at 211 had five floors, the rent was only five thousand dollars a month, and the lease was for twenty years. It was strictly a commercial property, and McWater was required to fix it up, but he had planned to do so anyway. His two partners, Ray Deter and Dennis Zentek, owned a popular beer bar in the East Village. They wanted to re-create the bar on a more lavish scale, with exposed brick and antique fixtures. It would make an elegant speakeasy, they thought, for young bankers and lawyers--a ghost of the neighborhood's past.

Dave and I have known each other since our high-school days, in Oklahoma, twenty-five years ago. He was a skinny basketball player then, with feathered brown hair and a loose, cocky walk. He's bulkier now and more imposing, with ruddy cheeks and a raucous laugh and eyebrows that beetle up when he's delivering a punch line--the kind of loudmouthed operator you can imagine in a tuxedo and a bowler hat, carving up beefsteaks near Tammany Hall. As an undergraduate at New York University, Dave paid his tuition by running a sports agency from his dorm room. (One of his clients was John Starks, who went on to become a star for the New York Knicks.) Later, he was a regular at the World Series of Poker. Along the way, he managed to become the majority owner of eleven bars in downtown Manhattan, even persuading me to invest in one on the Lower East Side. Compared with most real-estate deals, he told me, 211 Pearl seemed like easy money. "It was a beautiful thing," he said.

His crew spent the next few months gutting the building. Beneath the linoleum, they found oak boards and terra-cotta pavers; above the acoustic tile, a pressed-tin ceiling. When they pulled down the wooden panelling, the bricks behind it, salvaged from earlier buildings, read like a miniature history of Manhattan: ragged courses near the bottom, from Dutch buildings of the sixteen-hundreds; larger bricks higher up, still flecked with paint, from British homes; the newest courses on top, cleanly laid in the eighteen-thirties, when the clay shores of the Hudson River were lined with kilns. Best of all was a piece of brickwork on the first floor: a cryptic arrangement of three pyramids, like the mark of some mystic order. "It was a strange thing," Dave told me. "But it made a great conversation piece: 'What the hell is that?' "

Then the money ran out. Dave had hoped that the renovation would cost about a quarter of a million dollars. But after two years he'd spent twice that much, his partners had pulled out, and the bar was only half finished. What's more, the building's easygoing owners had sold it to a shadowy corporation called Chicago 4. Dave had been hearing talk on the street of a developer snatching up property in the neighborhood. The plan, he'd heard, was to demolish the whole block and replace it with a high-rise condominium and office complex. The new owners couldn't afford to wait twenty years for Dave's lease to run out, it seemed. They needed 211 torn down.

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.