THE PART OF DOWNTOWN MANHATTAN WHERE I LIVE WAS once the quietest, least traveled, and most sparsely occupied area in town. Its stately old brick buildings, many of them dating from the middle of the nineteenth century, were from an era when buildings were built to last. The stonework of window arches and the loading platforms of warehouses, the narrow cobblestone streets and small shops evoked the atmosphere of a bygone New York. It was a place of lovely days and enticing hushed nights. The balmy summer breezes and brisk winter winds that wound through it from the Hudson were like familiar spirits that caused leaves, panes, and shadows to tremble in the lush silence. It was easy to imagine the elderly Thomas Paine idling here amid others to witness the hanging of a murderer, on the corner of Leonard Street and Broadway, as he did one day in the spring of 1804. Easy to imagine butter and egg traders still bustling within the old red-brick Mercantile Exchange, as they did a century ago and more, near to a Bayer heroin warehouse on Harrison Street. The bar I haunted occupied the ground floor of a three-story building that had been put up in 1852.

It was a wonderful neighborhood, a neighborhood of seclusion and friendly encounters and whispers, welcoming byways and odd purchases, peace and quiet, cosseting charm, and open skies above gables, chimneys, and trees.

Then, some years ago, in the closing decade of the last millennium, everything began to change. At first the change was slow and subtle, barely noticeable. By the time it was perceived, it was too late. What had lingered on, so rare and so precious and so different for so long, was gone forever. New, ugly buildings of glass, metal, and cheap fabrication belittled the old structures and obscured the sky. I lived now in a valley of eternal scaffolding. Years before I had slept on my fire escape, rising with the soft light and stirrings of early morning. Now the night was a glare of artificial lighting and a blare of industrial clamor. Through the window that opened to the fire escape where I had slept so soundly, I now saw scaffolding that advertised Warburg Realty, where “Tribeca’s cobblestone streets meet the information highway.” The old and real cobblestone street beneath my window had been torn up and repaved with a new, quainter-looking surface: a stupid project that had brought with it a year of deafening noise. Forget about the sweet open-air sleep on the fire escape outside my bedroom window, back when an old florist had occupied the corner where Warburg now kept its windows brightly lighted all night. I now needed a blackout shade on the window just to sleep in my bed.

The whispering peace of the place vanished amid the obliterating noises of traffic, construction, demolition, street renovation, and above all and most abhorrent, the crowds that infested the place, blocking the narrow sidewalks with their twin baby carriages and strollers, whining shrilly into mobile telephones, professing a love for what had been as they ran amok and destroyed it.

Why had they come here? Because they read that it was the place to live. The school was good. Property values were rising. It was safe. It was a good investment. It was the perfect place to raise a family. So they came, and so they overcrowded the school, created a real estate bubble, attracted crime, caused inflation, shoved aside those who had been here before them, and remade the neighborhood in their own image, trumpeting their obstreperous entitlement over the vanishing remains of what had been and was no more.

Who were they? Emigrants from the Upper East Side. The rich white trash of Europe and Asia. Wall Street thieves. Speculators. Yuppies. The scum of New York and of the earth. I was becoming a racist. I was coming to hate white people. These white people.

I had seen their spawn grow into adolescent blobs of medicated hyperactive protoplasm. I had seen those blobs of adolescent protoplasm grow into the manic dusk of their teenage years, scorched, undone, and broken apart by privilege, free money, alienation, disorders of the mind, and congenital enfeeblement.

The doomed soul whom Thomas Paine had watched hang had comported himself tranquilly, attaching the gallows rope around his own neck to the crosspiece above. Not so these uneasy children of the damned, these blood blisters of entitlement and dejection.

I was surrounded by susceptible, impressionable lost young girls. Surely the magic in my hand and my mouth would not fail to bring longed-for grace to these trembling lambs. Even if they did not know it, they wanted me as I wanted them, needed me as I needed them.

It was better, however, to hunt elsewhere, was it not? The Lower East Side and other old pockets of character had also fallen, or were falling, to nothingness. Yes, better to hunt elsewhere, away from the eyes and tongues of these girls’ parents and guardians. Such girls, after all, were everywhere in this fallen city, in these fallen days.

I thought of the girl-child, maybe sixteen, whom I had seen masturbating one morning, her eyes tightly shut, rubbing herself into a frenzy on the narrow arm of a bench in the little park nearby. (I had stopped watching her when two sanitation men, on their way to the bar, paused to watch.) I thought of the girl who offered me money to take her half-finished container of coffee into the bar and have it filled with liquor for her. I thought of the girl, thin and pale and hithering, who wore sheer black hosiery under the hiked-up plaid of her school skirt. I thought of the girl, a wisp older (the bars served her), who sang for me on a sultry late summer night but had never heard of Billie Holiday or the Jaynetts. I thought of the girl who asked me for a cigarette and smelled like freesia and dew when she drew close to the flame of my lighter. I thought of all the errant daughters, in their distress and in their dangerous desire. I thought of the blood like rainy lace on Sandrine’s thigh, transposed to their thighs. I thought of many things.