[By the way, this, for some reason, is an mystifyingly long post, which I can’t really explain, and for which I apologise. It’s an experiment.]

Take this evening, for example. I am still looking for an apartment, and had made an appointment via Craigslist to see one at around 7pm in the neighbourhood I am staying in. (A neighbourhood, a fellow resident informed me earlier today, that is sitting on a lake of industrial waste larger than the Exxon Valdez spill.) The apartment was matter-of-factly described, and gave away few extraneous details beyond the building’s age.

The house, on a quiet street of terraced houses in historic Greenpoint, looked well-kept, solid, and typical of the two-family brick house of the area. I rang, and the landlady, and her tenant of ten years, came to greet me and ushered me inside – where I was met with a sumptuous hallway, with original fittings, sliding wood-panelled doors, carved banisters, and a reassuring sensation of solidity, craftsmanship, serenity, like being in a vintage Rolls-Royce, the Oak Room at the Algonquin, or a falconer’s glove.

I followed the tenant upstairs, into a simply decorated living-room around thirty feet long, with a wooden carved archway in the middle, panelled wardrobes down one side, and three windows giving onto the street. This led into a small-ish (in comparison) bedroom, maybe fifteen feet across, but still comfortably large enough for a double bed.

The tenant parted the stained-glass doors, and walked me into a room overlooking the garden, which he was using as an office, but which, at more than double the size of the bedroom, might on its own accommodate a small restaurant. “You could, if you wanted, use this as a spare bedroom,” he offered, tentatively.

Again this room had perfectly preserved original fittings, including a lockable cabinet, with a practically medieval key. Then a sparse modern kitchen, and a small clean bathroom, followed by another room, currently used for storage, with a massive and weighty wooden bookcase, and more large cupboards. Everything looked like it had been polished with decades of care and love, and the whole place exuded a tranquility in contrast to the increasing bustle on the streets nearby.

Spellbound, I walked through again, filming the entire place on my phone – which took around three minutes. Another prospective tenant arrived, let’s call her “Cesaria”, so I went downstairs to discuss with the landlady what the next steps might be. We began talking, but before I could ask about the practicalities, she said, “It’s not just about me being happy, it’s about the person who takes the apartment being happy. My tenant has been here over ten years, and sometimes it’s been four or five months that we don’t see each other or bother each other.” I nodded, and she continued.

“Life here’s not so great. I came here over 50 years ago as a displaced person from Germany, and had to work two jobs to pay the rent. I worked, then I retired when I was 65, and I tend the garden. My tenant moved in when he was just a boy, 22, and he’s leaving now to get married at 32 – I think of him as my baby! But people round here, you know they’re prejudiced against his kind, and it’s not like that in the UK, or even in Poland, is it? But I don’t want to go back to Poland, or Germany. Too many bad memories.”

“Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung”, I half-mumble, but she’s has already picked up another thread: “But you know the neighbourhood is changing. When I moved here, people were nice to each other, they’d do things for each other, but now, you’re afraid to get bullied in the street, and it’s no defence being old any more. My tenant wasn’t born here, and he was properly brought up, like you, and you can see the difference between that and the people who are born here. My friends tell me you can feel the difference in atmosphere when you get off the plane in London.”

At this point, Cesaria comes downstairs, followed by the tenant, and says she would take the apartment “in a heartbeat”, which concerns me. We vie weakly to be ever more charming, modest, polite, educated, knowledgeable, rooted in the area, struck by the beauty of the apartment (Cesaria comments winningly on the beautiful “moldings and wainscoting”, I resolve to bone up on architectural features before going to see any more apartments) and respectful. Cesaria mentions the historic district, and meets an unexpected reply:

“You know I don’t believe they should just preserve stuff because it’s old. Lots of houses in this neighbourhood are crumbling, but they have to be kept intact because you can’t do anything to the houses in the historic district without permission. You can change parts of the back, but you can’t change the front at all – everything has to be replaced in the original style. I mean, it’s not like we’re talking about the Houses of Parliament here… I think they should tear those houses down. And the apartment blocks by the water! Instead of putting up huge apartment blocks, they should create landscaped gardens and parks for the people, and a nice waterfront.”

I break the spell by remembering that I will definitely need wifi and cable TV, and ask the tenant whether they are installed (they are). It’s the perfect cue to leave. The landlady touchingly leaves us with: “If I had enough room, I’d house all the people who came via the internet to see this place, including you two, you’re so polite and educated. Not like the people brokers bring – they’ll bring anyone that’ll pay them.”

“Oh my God! That place was incredible, so beautiful! I’d pay a million to live there, and it’s nothing like the other shit you see from brokers or Craigslist that costs twice as much!” says Cesaria, as she and I walk away from the front gate. We turn down the main street together, and she asks me what I do. I tell her, and she rolls her eyes: “So you win on morality points…” I don’t draw her attention, for what it’s worth, to the fact that I am also an immigrant, with roots in the tenant’s country of origin. And I speak German. And that someone once called me, in a teasingly double-edged way, the “Cary Grant of suburbia.”

Cesaria is, it turns out, working on an encyclopedia of contemporary art, and is training to be a librarian/archivist. As we weave round slower walkers, I ask her what the biggest challenge for the profession is, and she says: “We’re thinking about how to deal with categorisation. The whole thing about folksonomies, people being able to tag and categorise things how they want to, is a real threat. How they do this shifts, and evolves, and that means it’s not static.” I tell her about the project I am working on, and how it was proposed that we allow users to tag freely when it comes to geography. What happens when lots of people miscategorise? Do the administrators go in to correct and standardise? No, she says, “the idea is that the community will eventually do that for you.” “Do you believe that?” She purses her lips. “I don’t know.”

Cesaria, with the noble sentiment that “one of us two should get the apartment”, heads into the subway, and I turn in my tracks, heading towards a well-established local restaurant. I walk in past three women, one of whom says, “Whoa, I feel like there’s a lead weight in my stomach.” Ordering the house speciality lead weight, something I have eaten with stunned pleasure before, I await my food by poring over my own work, an overspill from the day. I come up for air, sink my beer rapidly, sip my iced water, and look around.

The waitresses, since the last time I was there, have been coordinated into revealing, but curiously unsexy uniforms. They treat me with perfect neutrality, neither hostile, nor warm. The clientele is part Polish-American, young and old, part Jewish, Puerto Rican, African-American, Chinese, Thai, Indian, part neo-hipster, part construction worker. Many takeaways are issued to well-spoken thirty-something creatives. The walls are covered with photographs of a middle-aged and rather glamourous blonde woman, and a series of local celebrities, with room for plenty more. The woman in the photographs is sitting at a table behind me with two men, drinking a bottle of Merlot. A bilingual menu that looks like it was produced on a late eighties DTP program lies printed on Cartland-pink paper. Every time I glance towards the waitresses, they look at me suspiciously, as if I am trying to see up, or down, their dresses (I am not). Apart from the clientele, those dresses, and the accretion of new photographs, this place has clearly not changed in a very, very long time.

My food arrives, does not last long, and as I push back the plate, I deliberately meet one waitress’ eye for the first time. “That was absolutely delicious…” She smiles appreciatively, then broadly, also for the first time. I order and receive an impossibly weak coffee.

As I leave, both waitresses bid me goodbye, their smiles broadened, not solely by the 25% tip, I hope, but also by their pride in unsolicited appreciation. I wander back to the place I am staying, past the days-old vegetarian diner/deli, staffed by scatty hipster undergrads, decorated with a bathtub full of jelly beans, to streets whose decades-long view of Manhattan will within two years be a view broken by towers, whose residents will have exclusive access to the beauty beyond. I am momentarily overwhelmed.

So there it is: a perfectly preserved Victorian apartment (coveted by a woman who is concerned about the fall in the quality of data if media archival practices are influenced or overtaken by folksonomies) in a house owned by a formerly displaced person, who isn’t overly sentimental about the historic status of her district, but is dismayed at the change in the gentility of the culture around her (what Tony Blair would call the “respect agenda”), and by the prejudice shown by her countrymen towards non-whites, around the corner from a Polish restaurant that could be in 1960’s Katowice, walls covered with pictures of the owner with local celebrities, and with genuine waitresses serving coma-inducing food to a slowly shifting clientele, all living in peaceable post-prandial torpor, in NYC’s “latest hot neighbourhood“.

Until the OOZE finally bubbles up and engulfs us all, at least.

I was walking back from seeing an apartment this morning, waiting to cross at the lights by the Atlantic Yards, wondering whether I would just have to compromise and start wearing protective headgear, when I heard a voice.

“Do you run?”

I turn around. An extremely overweight African-American man, dressed in loose blue sports clothes, and gulping down water, is sitting down against the Atlantic Yards fence. He looks bothered by the gathering heat.

“Do you run?” he asks again, indicating my trainers.

“Not really, I don’t do nearly enough exercise.” Or indeed, any.

“I’m walking today, because I’ve gotta do something about my weight. I got chest pains, I thought I should go to the gym. But I’m too lazy to go to the gym, I don’t last half-an-hour.” He is genuinely very large – William “The Fridge” Perry large – so this does not come as a total surprise.

I sympathise, telling him that the most I have ever been psychologically prepared to do in a gym is swim.

He continues: “I’m cutting down on my red meat, eating more vegetables, drinking water, drinking water, but I do eat junk food, a lot of junk food. So I figure if I’m walking twenty blocks a day, that should help.”

My mind wanders briefly, as I feel the strain of my belly against my waistband, back to my breakfast of Dominican eggs, bacon and homefries, and two Cuban coffees.

“I’m walking to Nostrand, that’s twenty blocks, then I’m gonna take a cab. I’m just taking a break now, because I figure I can do it ten blocks at a time.”

I ask him how long he has been following this regime.

“It’s my first day,” he beams. We shake hands, I wish him luck, and turn to cross the road. I’ve missed the lights, but I don’t turn back, and nor does he.

I have a couple of hours till my flight back to New York, to reflect on an emotionally draining weekend. Which I will do, while softening my patty with “Yellow Mustard”.

It’s Memorial Day, I’ve just got off a plane, and I am rather tired. But he knows he has a captive audience.

“You can see it in the documentaries, and in the books. The media too. Don’t believe anything they tell you – they’re just working to protect the government. You need to know the truth. I’ll tell you, how can a building collapse when it’s hit halfway up?”

I attempt to offer a plausible explanation, but he’s only just hitting his stride.

“And when that plane hit the Pentagon, how come the hole was so much bigger than the pieces of aircraft they found nearby? They would have found something, right? But not a screw, not a nail, nothing…”

DON’T feed the fire.

“Why do they try to blame the Muslims for everything like that? It’s getting to be like the bad times in Germany. You know, when the Jews were being persecuted in Europe, no one wanted them, they were shunted around from here to there, and eventually they got a homeland where everyone could say to them, Go Here. The English didn’t want them, the Americans didn’t want them, so they went to Israel. Right?”

“They nearly ended up in Uganda,” I footnote.

“The Indians went there instead.” He rolls his eyes significantly in the rear-view mirror. “Look, when I arrived in this country, in 1975, at that time there were almost no Jews in New York. They basically all arrived since then.”

Not so much fairy-tale, more like Lear.  I begin to wish that I had not stood aside in the queue at JFK and allowed two young women to take the cab before this one. There’s no arguing with that kind of empirical evidence, so I change the subject to prosperity.

I remember a recent NYT article that compared (on the strength of a handful of interviews) the relative prosperity and patriotism of the Pakistani-American community with the educational underachievement and economic marginalisation of many British Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. He swats this away for six over midwicket.

“You’re wrong. My friends tell me that actually Bangladeshis in London have huge amounts of money, and are great property speculators – that’s the way you get ahead here, equity. They bought houses nobody else would buy in Brick Lane, and then sold them for big money, half a million pounds!”

“You don’t think that some of them just couldn’t afford to buy anywhere else all those years ago, and in a way they just got lucky because the area became cool?”

He doesn’t even pause to think. Pow! Cover drive…

“No.”

Change of subject again. “So, where are we?”

“Is this where your friend lives?”

“I think so…”

“Your friend lives in a really shitty neighbourhood.”

Now that I look at it, yes, we are indeed in a shitty (does he mean black?) neighbourhood, but not the one where my friend lives.

I call my friend, and the cab driver receives instructions. “He says to come to Greenpoint. Now that’s somewhere where people work hard. Full of Polish. Nice area. Text your friend to put the kettle on. Tell him it’s tea for two.”

We turn around, and head towards Manhattan Avenue, and he points out all the stages of the route where I sent him in the wrong direction, and made poor decisions.

Arriving on my friend’s street, he lets out a sigh of approval. I realise he turned off the meter some time ago, and is not going to charge me for the lengthy detour. I wonder whether he wants to be invited in to continue the conversation, but press thirty-five dollars through the hatch, grab my bags out of the boot, and pat the roof of the cab.

Inside the apartment, my friend is watching a film by Nicholas Roeg called Bad Timing. It’s almost like he knew I was coming.