“Our house was on the west side of the town, on Lambert Street behind the old Trinity Church—in the very shadow of Trinity, so it felt to me, for as a boy I liked to wander alone among the tilting gravestones which in places encroached upon the back garden where my mama grew vegetables and kept her chickens. I loved that house. My papa built it with his own hands and though I know it was a modest house, to the small boy I was then it seemed a mansion. To the north lay swampland and open fields with low bluffs hanging over the river and oyster boats pulled up on the banks below. Cattle grazed in the pastures above Warren Street, and in summer the grass grew as high as a man’s waist.

“Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now by Patrick McGrath