New York City is kind to photographers
Mar 23, 2009 Americana, Heart and spirit, Lex scripta, Metropolis
Also to bloggers with BlackBerry cameras but not much to say on a given day.
This is the view of New York City’s City Hall, by the way, that greets you a few paces after you emerge from the “Brooklyn Bridge” stop of the 4 / 5 / 6 train, which is where lawyers get off to go the state and federal courthouses at Foley Square.
Being greeted by such a sight of a chill spring morning en route to rendezvous with an adversary at the Ex Parte Clerk’s Office at 60 Centre Street is almost enough to save the humanity of the practice of law from certain kinds of clients… and certain kinds of judges… and certain kinds of adversaries.
And certain kinds of clerks. Not at that office, by the way, where they are perfectly courteous, as they ply their trade in their antiquated diggings. There this morning I sat next to a matronly middle-aged black woman, unable to afford her own lawyer, waiting for the return of that clerk who had given her some hopeful words earlier and volunteering to me her need for someone to help her with $19,000 in back child support. After I expressed my sympathy but declined to take the hint, she turned to gently muttering messages of hope and desperation to herself in an oddly optimistic singsong. It was a melody and a lyric that surely were meant not only for God but for His double-breasted servant right beside her to hear.
What can I tell you? Some things I can’t help with. I don’t even know how to work those parts of the machine. And besides, what is the chance that the man who fathered her asthmatic daughter has $19,000 sitting in the cookie jar for a judge to order turned over to them under any scenario? She may succeed in securing his further punishment and further assurance that his ability ever to earn it will recede even further as he cools his heels in Rikers Island. That’s what the law can do for her.
I can’t help her, and no one there can, really. She runs still into these profound, photogenic buildings that promise municipal salvation, and she prays for the magistrate to, by the stroke of a pen, bring forth loaves and fishes, and healing too.
These muscular edifices promise so much, but in the long run they keep their word, mainly, to the eye.
