Somehow, I doubt the new people worry about dying that sort of death. They know they won’t be trapped here. They have other places they can go. But if they don’t worry like New Yorkers worry, can they dream like New Yorkers dream? While they sleep, do the walls of their apartments miraculously open into extra rooms for them the way they do for us, or do the new people have all the space they need and so they are free to dream of other wishful things? Hashtag abundance. Hashtag gratitude.

After she died and her furniture was removed, my neighbor’s apartment was quickly gutted and renovated, the rent jacked from hundreds to thousands, decontrolled. The man next to her died a year later. He was born on the block and never lived anywhere else. A hoarder who once infested us with bedbugs, he was also a kind person and a talented whistler. He would walk up the stairs, slowly, while whistling classic songs. Rodgers and Hart. Irving Berlin. The Gershwins. Tunes that would stay in my head all day. “We’ll have Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island too.” When he went, I watched the paramedics pump his heart and lift him onto a stretcher, his eyes open but empty, not seeing the hallway he’d whistled through for decades. When the police officer asked me his name, I could only come up with his first. It bothered me that I could not remember the last name of this man who’d greeted me nearly every day for twenty-five years, talked to me about the weather, told me to “be careful” each time I went out. How could his last name be gone from my mind? Later, I understood it was because of the mailboxes. Our last names used to be printed on the slots for each mailbox, handwritten and enduring, never changing because no one ever left. I saw them every day, a reminder of the people I lived among. My people. But the new owners covered them over, replacing names with numbers, wiping us from each other’s memory.