Despite everything, the courthouse stirred his soul. Its four great facades were absolute jubilations of sculpture and bas-relief. There were groups of classical figures at every corner. Agriculture, Commerce, Industry, Religion, and the Arts, Justice, Government, Law and Order, and the Rights of Man— noble Romans wearing togas in the Bronx! Such a golden dream of an Apollonian future!

Today, if one of those lovely classical lads ever came down from up there, he wouldn't survive long enough to make it to 162nd Street to get a Choc-o-pop or a blue Shark. They'd whack him out just to get his toga. It was no joke, this precinct, the 44th. On the 158th Street side the courthouse overlooked Franz Sigel Park, which from a sixth-floor window was a beautiful swath of English-style landscaping, a romance of trees, bushes, grass, and rock outcroppings that stretched down the south side of the hill. Practically nobody but him knew the name of Franz Sigel Park anymore, however, because nobody with half a brain in his head would ever go far enough into the park to reach the plaque that bore the name. Just last week some poor devil was stabbed to death at 10:00 a.m. on one of the concrete benches that had been placed in the park in 1971 in the campaign to "provide urban amenities to revitalize Franz Sigel Park and reclaim it for the community." The bench was ten feet inside the park. Somebody killed the man for his portable radio, one of the big ones known in the District Attorney's Office as Bronx attache cases. Nobody from the District Attorney's Office went out into the park on a sunny day in May to have lunch, not even somebody who could bench-press two hundred pounds, the way he could. Not even a court officer, who had a uniform and legally carried a .38, ever did such a thing. They stayed inside the building, this island fortress of the Power, of the white people, like himself, this Gibraltar in the poor sad Sargasso Sea of the Bronx.