I soaked my handkerchief in the clean, unlikely water, and squeezed it onto my neck with a happy shiver. I sat on the sidewalk, feet resting on the quiet half of Broadway, and inspected the stolen glove. It was precisely what I had been looking for, but something was wrong.

From deep in my bag, past notepads and soiled napkins and the remains of more than one sandwich, I pulled a second glove. Cream, with the same irises and the same rubber stamp, but made of weightless leather and held together by imperceptible stitches. Beside it, the stolen glove was hackwork. The leather was coarse, the stitching ragged, the brand a vague blob. It looked as ugly as if I’d made it myself. I flipped the gloves over. Both were for the left hand. They were not mates. They were twins, one made by an artist, the other by a clod, and the one I’d taken from Thieves’ Market had not belonged to my client after all.

Another wasted day.

Life on the Westside has always been peculiar. When the first Dutch settlers came to the island, the Lenape warned them against crossing the old deer trail that would become Broadway. The island’s western half was strange, they said. Dangerous. As white men are wont to do, the Dutch ignored them, and found the district fought every attempt at civilization. A 1628 letter from colony director Peter Minuit boasts of crops that grew taller and faster than could be dreamed, but complains of tools rusting and muskets refusing to fire.

“Our homes shift on their foundations,” he wrote. “Our wood comes loose from its joints, and my dreams are plagued by visions of pestilence, stigmata, and the armies of hell.”

The smart settlers returned to the east. The feckless, greedy, criminal, and mad stayed on, and through sheer Protestant stubbornness beat the Westside into submission. Their houses steadied, their tools stayed pristine, and their crops returned to human scale.

For two centuries and more, the Westside was hardly distinguishable from the east. Perhaps it produced more than its share of suicides, murderers, and artists. Yes, its saloons were death traps. And certainly its brothels were hell on earth. But to the genteel city across the stem, this was no more than charming eccentricity—a badge of honor for refined New York, that the city could thrive in spite of the long, strange scar that marred the west side of its face. So it went for decades. Around century’s end, however, the Westside began to change.