Over the course of the summer some of the ticks had put on so much weight that they’d metamorphosed into a nest of mindless, roaming esophagi, searching with rheumy eyes for boxes of jelly doughnuts and generous slices of meat pie. Others, from a steady diet of pills and liquor, had shed so many ...
as it is sometimes called—old because the Gilded Age mansions and Depression Era brownstones are in advanced stages of decay; the rooftops leaking, the foundations sinking imperceptibly into sandy soil, the copper pipes waiting to be harvested from the plaster walls and sold for scrap; old becaus...