Free Heart of the City by Ariel Sabar Page A

STREET
    By the nineteenth century, Manhattan was well on its way to becoming a world center of high finance and culture. But at least one part of the city was designed for ordinary citizens: its streets. The grid plan of 1811 was adopted on the basis of a “plain and simple” reflection: that “straight-sided and right-angled houses are the most cheap to build and the most convenient to live in.” The streets and avenues wouldn’t be named for city burghers but would bear ascending numbers or letters. Moreover, they would march across the island at fixed intervals, regardless of natural topography.

    Sofia Feldman couldn’t remember the last time she’d ventured this far north of Twenty-third Street. A Gramercy girl who now lived in the East Village, she’d packed her viola and taken the uptown train to a dress rehearsal at Jazz at Lincoln Center. The performing arts center, at Sixtieth and Broadway, had asked the Greenwich Village Orchestra, an all-volunteer group Sofia was in, to play at the building’s grand opening later that week.
    It was early October 2004, and it was late—after 10 p.m.—when rehearsal ended. Sofia, twenty-six, had to be at her day job, at a lab, early the next morning.
    She waved goodbye to the other musicians and made for the Columbus Circle subway station, just steps from the music hall. But when she stepped outside, she was overcome by a sense of dislocation. This part of Midtown had always conjured a single, unpleasant image for her: a zoo. During the day, it crawled with suits from the office towers and with fanny pack-wearing tourists window-shopping the luxury stores on Fifth Avenue. It was one of the reasons Sofia kept her distance.
    But on this crisp fall night, she looked across Columbus Circle at row after row of nearly deserted streets. She could hear wind hissing through leaves in Central Park. The traffic lights ticked green, then red, then green again, with no one passing save a few lonely cabs and an old man on a ten-speed. When the breeze picked up again, she could hear the sound of a plastic bottle skittering along the pavement somewhere in the darkness.
    She was born and raised in New York. But she felt at that moment like a stranger.

    MATT FITZGERALD, twenty-nine, left his therapist’s office after another session of fruitless soul-searching. His love life had grown so complicated of late that if it weren’t happening to him
it would have almost been funny. He had been months from marrying Amanda, a colleague he’d dated for four years, despite obvious problems. The wedding invitations had already gone out when he discovered that she was cheating on him. He had to call each of the guests to explain that the wedding was off.
    A week later, their wedding planner called. “I knew you two weren’t right for each other,” she’d said. “I could just tell.”
    Then she asked him out for drinks. The wedding planner . He was vulnerable and confused, and he accepted.
    Earlier tonight was supposed to be his second date with the wedding planner. But she showed up with a man she described as a former boyfriend. “I told Ayden I was meeting you,” she said. “And he insisted on coming. Ayden does this.”
    Matt finished his drink quickly. “I actually have to go,” he said, forcing a smile.
    “You just got here.”
    “I have a doctor’s appointment.”
    “What kind of doctor is open at 9 p.m.?” the wedding planner asked.
    Walking home along West Fifty-seventh Street after the shrink’s appointment, he continued to brood. Why did he feel compelled to stay with Amanda all those years, even in the face of all those warning signs? Why didn’t he stick up for himself more, be more open about his feelings? Did he really have a “nice guy complex,” as his shrink suggested? He grew up in Rochester, in upstate New York, and still had some small-town values, but that didn’t make him some hayseed. Nor could it explain why he kept winding up with the wrong women.
    When