So what are we left of those stories? Are we going to have to construct an imaginary city to house our memories? Because when you love something, every time a bit goes, you lose a piece of yourself. Stories of a city that is disappearing before our eyes, its people swept over the Williamsburg of those stories. Edgar Allan Poe, freeing live monkeys from the crates of a crumbling schooner on the oily slips of South Street. Sid Vicious spewing beer from his teeth in the Chelsea Hotel. Remember Kay Thompson's Eloise? Eloise who lived in the Plaza Hotel with her dog Weenie, and her parents were always away, and her English nanny who had eight hair pins made out of bones. And today I walked by the acres of scaffolding outside what used to be the Plaza Hotel. Last week took me to the gray depths of the East River where Dmitri Panchenko swims his morning laps, like he has every morning since the 1960s. I walk and watch and listen, a witness to all the beauty and ugliness that is disappearing from our beloved city.

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