Suddenly the group slowed. Just ahead walked a group of four young male Asian Americans—Vietnamese, he guessed—all speaking English with heavy Latino accents. They wore team jerseys and flat-brimmed ball caps and took up all of the sidewalk and then some. Despite the fact that they were moving in a slow, exaggerated saunter, none of the other homeward-bound fans made any move to get around them. Ted hung back. The four guys didn’t act threatening—they seemed to be in quite good spirits—but this was not his neighborhood, and he had no wish to break some cultural taboo or do something that could be interpreted as disrespect.

It wasn’t fear—it was good judgment.

The young men sauntered into the bar on the corner, and the group’s pace returned to normal.

The first block after 114th Street held a mix of commercial and residential buildings. The streetlights and the store signs made the sidewalk almost as bright as in day. There were car repair shops, a church, two hotels, and a group of three-story multifamilies. Ted stopped in the middle of the block, letting the straggling crowd pass by, and stood with his back up against the front of the church.

Queens was his home. He had abandoned it for the celestial promises of Manhattan, but it had taken him back when his flame had sputtered out and he had fallen to earth. That was practically the definition of home. The place that had to take you in. He had no living family, no particular childhood friends who would welcome him, and yet, it was home. But as he stood there contemplating the view across the way, Ted realized that he had never seen this neighborhood before. He’d walked through it on his way to somewhere else, but he had never taken the time to really look. Queens, more than any other borough, is a collection of disparate communities. Though it is a stew of cultures, each maintains an individual identity. Geographic lines are fluid, but Hollis and Howard Beach could be separated by light-years for all the contact between them.

The proposed development project would be to the south. Ted tried to gauge how high one hundred stories would look. Impossible to tell. And didn’t all developers lie about the number of stories? Trump Tower on Fifth skipped a dozen floors. He’d read of a fifty-six-story building in Hong Kong where the penthouse was listed as the eighty-eighth floor because the number eight was considered lucky. Yet that seemed no more unusual than omitting the thirteenth floor in American high-rises. Number of floors was a poor measure of height. The new residential high-rise on Park was 150 feet taller than the Empire State Building but was listed as having fourteen fewer stories.