Apartment saga, continued

My rent complaint is finally getting settled. More on that later. But in the meantime, I found out all kinds of fascinating things about the woman who used to live here, the one who paid $95 rent when the apartment was still set up tenement-style. The landlord doesn't know for how long she lived here - their records only go back to 1965 - but she was living here then. Which means that she lived here when this neighbourhood was still populated by families and little local businesses, and possibly when the El still ran down Greenwich Street, and before several square blocks were rased for the World Trade Center. She would have witnessed the building of the twin towers, and the evolution of her quaint neighbourhood street into Sodom South. And when September 11 happened, she was evacuated, as was all of Lower Manhattan, and according to the superintendents and the landlord she was "very elderly" at the time, and "never returned." In fact, the city didn't give my landlord the go-ahead to allow tenants to return until the spring of 2003. At some point that year, the woman's family asked the landlord permission to enter her apartment and remove her belongings, and at some point that same year (before or after, no one recalls), she passed away. I think about her utter confusion the day the towers fell, the diremption of her universe, the final chapter of her tenancy here written by that horrific act around which the entire world's politics then pivoted, let alone New York's history. Her name is still on my mailbox; I've never changed it.