Within a few blocks of one another were the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange, and a headquarters of every major financial institution on earth. Lower Manhattan was also rife with skyscraper apartments, home to many of the financiers and attorneys who serviced those institutions. Residents didn’t need a car; they could walk to work. The beach and amusement park on Brooklyn’s Coney Island were an endurable subway ride away. The proximity to a great park, Battery Park, to a beautifully landscaped esplanade that ran up much of the west side of the island, to world-class restaurants, to the Statue of Liberty, to a major airport—Newark Liberty, just fifteen minutes across the Hudson River—and to the rising colossus of the new World Trade Center site also made this one of the most desirable places to live in the city. None of which was known to Yasmin Rassin, or mattered. After crossing an old iron bridge, the car moved through the thin nighttime traffic among the zigzagging canyons.
