"You should've been there for The Uprising of 20,000. Can you imagine, Irving? Strikers like an ocean filling the streets..."

We unroll them, twenty-five feet down, twenty-five feet back, until we have a foot deep river of fabric. Thick cables dangle from the ceiling, giving power to electric knives that can glide the length of the long table. I stand in a corner as the air goes thick with dust and the ocean of fabric becomes a string of islands floating on a dark wood sea.

I hum a tune Mendel taught us over beer at Cepulski’s. “It’s a strike, yes a strike, a big cloak maker’s strike. The Manufacturer’s Association had to go on vacation because of the cloak maker’s strike.”

“Dear Editor, I am in agony. My husband was quarantined at Ellis Island because of a cough. When we went to get him, he’d already left. My cousin had to take us in. He has written this for me. How can I get my husband back?” (Editor: The National Desertion Bureau, 356 2nd Avenue, locates missing men. We refer you to them for help.)

So began my monumental correspondence with Superintendent Dr. Charles S. Little of Letchworth Village Asylum for the Feeble Minded and Epileptic. Back and forth the letters flew, explanations, rebuttals, entreaties, and legalities until I am at last granted a visit to their hallowed institution in Thiells, New York.

She deposits her portfolio on the table, unpins her hat, and hands us her calling card. “Just to be official.”

Florence Archer

Field Representative

Eugenics Records Office

“Fancy.” Miriam holds it like it smells. “But it doesn’t say what you’re after.”

 The horde overflows the fences, blocking traffic from Fourteenth Street to Seventeenth Street, both east and west of the square.

The speaker points at a poster-sized photo—a dark-haired woman surrounded by grey rubble, clutching the corpse of her dead baby. I’m in the front row with Leo who’s the lead organizer for the Trade Union Relief for Spain Committee. The audience listens, rapt.

“My mother and I watched them go up, floor after floor out of thin air like one of those time-lapse things in the movies. Twenty stories. Housing for fifteen hundred middle-income people. People with disposable income who want good schools and a safe neighborhood. Wanna go look?”

42 Hester Street, Then and Now