Then and now, urban version

If you remember NYC in the 1980's, you really must read this. Excerpt number one:

Fear was a New Yorker’s constant companion in the 1970s and ’80s. We lived behind doors with triple locks, some like engines of medieval ironmongery. We barred our ground-floor and fire-escape windows with steel grates that made us feel imprisoned. I was thankful for mine, though, when a hatchet turned up on my fire escape, origin unknown.

Sound familiar? It does to me. No hatchet, but there was (were?) human feces in the vestibule twice. But if that glances off your carapace, here is excerpt number two:

Holding him against the wall with his forearm, speaking “no more than a puma would,” the robber calmly unbuttons his [own] camel’s-hair coat, opens his fly, and displays to Sammler his penis, “a large tan-and-purple uncircumcised thing” like a snake or an elephant’s trunk, along with his “great oval testicles.” “The thing was shown with mystifying certitude” as “a prominent and separate object intended to communicate authority.” Then the thief returns it to his trousers. “Quod erat demonstrandum.” He releases Sammler, “concluding the session, the lesson, the warning, the encounter, the transmission.” No reader of Sammler has ever forgotten this scene, and even the novel’s characters can’t stop talking about it. “Was it sixteen, eighteen inches?” a wide-eyed nephew asks Sammler. “Would you guess it weighed two pounds, three pounds, four?”

How many books discuss penis weight, huh?

*Giuliani did 99% of NYC's clean-up, in return for which he was attacked by the New York Times on an almost daily basis. The paper labeled him a fascist for trying to get rid of the squeegie men and put the homeless in shelters (these people wanted your money, btw, and they were not passive). If the NYT's editorial board ran NYC... shudder.