The Breviary. She’d sleep here if she could. But security had gotten tight over the last few months after a couple of laid-off employees broke in and trashed the lobby. After midnight, rent-a-cops patrolled all the cubes, and even the bathrooms.
She decided to delay the inevitable and check her e-mail. Amidst the spam, there wasn’t a single note from Saraub. So she composed one:
Dear jerk,
Thanks for leaving me in a motel room. You probably should have kicked in a few bucks for the bill.
She deleted this, and wrote:
Saraub,
I was very surprised by your departure, but trust you know what you’re doing. Good luck with your film, and all future endeavors.
That one got deleted.
Next, she wrote: I’m slowly becoming possessed by my apartment. So…can I stay at your place while you’re gone? I don’t have keys anymore. She erased that, too. Finally she wrote: I miss you. A lot. She pressed SEND fast, before she reconsidered and deleted it.
After that, her curiosity got the better of her, and she searched “Breviary apartment building.”
The first link led to an archived New York High Society article from 1932: “The Secret History of New York through Its Venerable Grande Dames, IV: Chapter four of a six-part series.” She scanned the whole thing, and found the sections devoted to The Breviary:
In 1857, fifteen coal tycoons had an idea. Instead of traveling to faraway summer homes on Long Island and the Adirondacks, they’d build their own, self-contained community in the hills of Harlem. A grand apartment building sequestered far away from the sewaged streets of Washington Square, and close enough to the bucolic Hudson River for daily swims. They’d have no need to send for kith and kin: they would bring the party with them.
They commissioned the popular architect Edgar Schermerhorn to design the building, and he rendered it with his trademark Chaotic Naturalist details, though the building itself was not affiliated with that religion. The Breviary took five years to erect, and its two-degree slant from perpendicular remains a feat of engineering to this day.
In the absence of an Episcopalian place of worship, the fifteen requested that a church be built in The Breviary’s lobby, and a rectory constructed out of its basement. The Irish immigrants who laid the stones, resentful of a Protestant God, named their creation “The Dark Church.” The name stuck, but its true origin has been forgotten, which is why locals misguidedly claim that the building is haunted.
The Breviary was born in turmoil. The “Great Panic of 1857” had led to a decade-long economic depression. The dollar’s value dropped. Collapsed land speculation, grain prices, and the manipulation of gold’s value drove banks into failure. New York shouldered the brunt of the crisis. Riots, most notably between Bayard Street’s Bowery Boys and Five Points’ Dead Rabbits, plunged the city into chaos. For weeks, the dead were buried along dirt roads in unmarked graves. Violence spread as far north as the Astor Slums of the Upper West Side. Local and state police could not rout the violent tide. Finally, our dear President Lincoln recalled the nearest Civil War regiment from Bull Run to occupy the city and restore order.
Like all storms, the crisis passed, and the city recovered, much like we will recover from our own black Tuesday. When Manhattan yawned, stretched, and awoke from its nightmare, it cast its gaze on the dazzling Breviary.
By far the most regal edifice of its era, if you walk by it, you’ll see that it does not face forward but turns slightly to the west, as if posing coyly for passersby. Its limestone is now gray with soot, but its unevenly distributed gargoyles are still sharp as cut glass. Like the city which it inhabits, its strength is a miracle.
Perhaps the most defining aspect of The Breviary is its occupants. Those same fifteen original investors who commissioned the property raised their families on each of its fifteen floors, and it is now their children and grandchildren who reside there. They are members of a genteel and endangered class who still leave calling cards and equip their doormen with top hats. They throw parties each Monday evening, hopping from floor to floor in the small town that is their building. Many of them attended Yale, Harvard, Radcliffe, or Bowdoin before returning home and wedding each other. Each year at their annual New Year’s Eve Ball, they raise money for the neighbourhood homeless, and on winter Sundays, they set out a pot of spiced rum, which they serve