Beauty Queen

but he replied simply that he preferred driving around the city alone.
    He passed the exit for Houston Street. And then there it was, looming ahead: the sign that said "Manhattan Bridge— South Street."
    He peeled off the East Side Highway, and in another moment he was on South Street, back into another age.
    The street, its old cobblestones peeking through the asphalt in places, ran right along the edge of Manhattan Island. It was almost empty of traffic. Old brick tenements and commercial buildings faced out over the water: many were empty, boarded up. A few blocks had been razed, as part of an ill-conceived urban-renewal project—his heart bled every time he looked at these tears in the rich old fabric of that street. Every cross-town street that ran into South Street had a name laden with history—Gouverneur's Slip, Peck's Slip, Catherine Slip, Fulton Slip, Coenties Slip—names of now-vanished piers where the tall ships had tied up.
    As he drove slowly down the long, long street, almost at horse-and-buggy pace, he could imagine how it had looked a hundred years ago. There was hardly anything left of all that.
    Now there were some freighters tied up at the newer piers. There were the buildings belonging to the Brazilian Flag Lines, and the Fulton Fish Market. And there was the South Street Seaport Museum, where one lonely great square-rigger, the Peking, was tied up permanently amid several smaller vessels, including the old Ambrose Light ship. The Peking was a sad sight, with her spars now bare of sails and her gangway charging $1.50 to tourists. Across the street from the museum, a few blocks of buildings had already been renovated by another real-estate concern, with boutiques, apartments and seafood restaurants. The last old building he came to, before he turned around at Battery Park at the foot of Manhattan Island, was the beautiful Governor's Island ferry building built of ornamental iron.
    But the times had left South Street behind. The shallower waters of the East River had proven to be treacherous as shipping abandoned sail and took on more tonnage and size. The mammoth freighters and liners now went over to the deeper North River, to the other side of Manhattan Island. South Street had been left in an economic backwater, quaint and decaying.
    He turned around and drove back up South Street and stopped at the street marked Catherine Slip. There he parked by the curb. The area was so empty that one never had to worry about parking.
    He got out and stood looking.
    There, on the comer of Catherine Slip, was his dream house—the old Peake & Sturgis ship-chandler and sail-loft building. It and the surrounding block were now his.
    After the close of the shipping era, the building had been used as a warehouse. For years, Bill had looked at the photograph, knowing the building was still intact, hoping for a crack at it. In 1971 the owner, who had known Bill's father, had died, and the property had been tied up in a contested will. Bill had waited out the quarrel, and finally made a deal with the sons and daughters for the entire block of property.
    The filthy water, iridescent with oil from bilge washings, lapped around the rotting pilings. Off to his left, the Gothic towers of the Brooklyn Bridge loomed over him in the haze. Before him spread the great harbor. Out there in the haze was the far-off Statue of Liberty, and beyond, the Verrazano Bridge.
    The impressive three-story brick building bore no sign now. Its broken windows and gutted interior were scorched from a recent fire, set by junkies, that the fire department had quickly put out. But the tall windows with their neoclassic pedimenta, and the tall arched doorway, had an earthy dignity that spoke of the many seamen and captains who had trafficked in and out.
    Ever since he was young, he had dreamed of owning a big house with a view over the harbor. After working all night helping his father with paperwork in Scout Realty, he would walk across the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn to his daytime job as a clerk in a Wall Street brokerage firm. He would always stop halfway across, and lean on the walkway's iron railing to gaze out across the harbor, vast and shining in the morning haze, and try to imagine how it must have looked when it was a "forest of masts." The cops who patrolled the bridge soon learned that he was not thinking of suicide, and they stopped to chat with him.
    Now he stood there, half in a dream. A big white Italian freighter on her way out