I circled back through Montgomery Park, past the big wading pool they have for kids. Crowds of them were there, shouting and splashing each other. I passed a skinny guy in a straw hat. He was selling a bunch of framed photographs laid out on blankets. I don’t know why, but I stopped. It was all these black-and-white photographs of crumbling buildings. A couple of them I recognized as local landmarks. More than half of the buildings were churches, and in every one, the focus was on missing bricks and boarded-up windows, or the fact that they were taken through wire fences thrown up by demolition crews. On the closest corner of the blanket was a picture of the church connected to the rear of the Emerson Center. When I saw it, something clicked. If anybody knew where B-Man was, it was A-Man. I took the west exit from the park and headed in that direction. The Emerson Center was a rooming house, partially funded by the church, whose steeple towered behind it.
