Here's a clipping from a 1931 issue of the Brooklyn Standard Union.
"[redacted] died yesterday at his home, [my address], New York City. He was born in Beirut, Syria 71 years ago and lived in New York for 38 years. He was the proprietor of a restaurant at [redacted] Washington street, Manhattan, for 10 years. He is survived by his son, Francis. Funeral Saturday..."
I found a picture of him on the internet, in fact.
Unfortunately, the picture is a bit too fuzzy for you to make it out, but around the corner from my place I found the warehouse where they store all the downtown street signs. That's them on the shelf in the background there, all those black-and-white printed rectangles.
I think this is the fate of a lot of air conditioners in the city. Actually, that's why mine is on the fire escape instead of the other window, since it would only be a matter of time before that shit just slid off the flaking century-old masonry and smashed onto the concrete below.
This man is obviously not dissuaded enough to walk wide of the building. This brave, brave foolish man.
Today I was calling contractors around the North Eastern seaboard about some very important filing business, and I came across 
this guy who turned out to be a big fan of the New School and chatted me up about it and then invited me to lunch the next time he is in the city. And I think this is just the sort of impetuous-but-casual thing people do here, and the idea of it beguiles more than intimidates me, but none of that changes the fact that this guy is probably just a big fat loser.
Woke up at 2:00 pm today, either hung over or still drunk, and raced to work. I managed to squeeze a few hours out of the business day, and then battle the greasy rails and the steaming sewer grates and the slow-moving, polyestered behinds and the brumes of cigarette smoke and make it back to my clean, quiet hovel where I crank up the AC and lie on clean sheets and make people deliver food to my door.
photo source
I found this by accident but it turns out it's a famous artist who went to the New School.
The New School is spread out among a bunch of mostly older buildings in the Village. The kind of buildings that have bricked-in windows where a new building has sprung up next door and remnants of curved mouldings inside what is now a storage closet and old stairwells with half doors that make you really curious as to what's behind them, but are always locked and painted shut many times over except.. wohoah! What is this? This is a little crazy janitor's closet -slash- interrogation room.
