But there were other reasons pushing him to leave, too. Not just his own tension-filled family dynamics, but larger, cultural ones. New York in the late thirties, when his parents arrived from Europe, was the most powerful, influential city on Earth. Then, over the next forty years, hundreds of neighborhoods were gutted by expressways and gargantuan building projects. The autocratic Robert Moses and his urban renewal cronies sacrificed a city of people to a future devoted to the automobile, disturbing the intricacy of a living human tapestry and encapsulating huge numbers of displaced poor inside towering clusters of bland, geographically marginalized housing units that served as thinly disguised penitentiaries. The postwar economic expansion challenged the concept of centralized urban powerhouses like New York, and with startling speed the city went broke, garbage piled up in the streets, and the fuse began to burn. It became a city to abandon, and Willy took the hint.

He was in the East Village section by now, going strong, no longer mindful of the night air, watching how both the architecture and the mood had changed from that of just a few blocks earlier. This was the fringe of old New York, where numbered streets became names, and the strict grid pattern slowly yielded to the quirky remnants of an agrarian past, where waterways and farm-tomarket paths marked the way people traveled hundreds of years ago. The city of neighborhoods began opening before him, the buildings becoming lower, older, more eccentric in design, their ground floors occupied by a bazaar of mom-and-pop outlets selling everything and anything. This was where the opposition to Moses and his road builders had finally succeeded, and made of New York one of the few big cities in the U.S. without a freeway splitting the downtown in two.