Read Heart of the City for Free Online Page B

to those in easier circumstances.” Olmsted’s partner, Calvert Vaux, was more succinct: he wanted to “translate democratic ideas into trees and dirt.”
    The chill fingers of fall touched down in the city, and Joey Filip, eighteen, pulled her jacket tight as a gust of wind rattled the awnings over the store windows on Fifth Avenue. Shivering, she paid a street vendor a nickel for a box of cigarettes. She had never smoked before, but on this cold September day in 1941, with clouds unfurling across the sky, she liked the thought of drawing hot smoke into her lungs. Of burning inside.
    “You’re going to hell,” her mother had shouted a few weeks before, as Joey ran down her driveway in Passaic, New Jersey, with a sack of clothes. Her father, the only person she felt had ever understood her, had died in July. Her mother, an observant Catholic, had demanded she follow her older sisters into a convent. Joey ran away from home instead.
    Her first night in the city, she slept on the subways. She needed a job, but would anyone in this big city hire a mill hand with little education and no one to vouch for her?
    On her left, the stores with glittering things in the windows gave way to the arching trees of Central Park. Joey, her feet throbbing, turned onto a path that dipped through greens planted with tall elms.
    There must be benches here, she thought. Maybe even a hiding place, where I can lie down for the night. She studied the spaces between the trees, some so close together they shrouded the understory in shadow.
    A cackle from somewhere behind her right shoulder made her jump. She turned to see a pair of women in fur coats, with jewels at their throats and gentlemen on their arms.
    “Charlie, you in the mood for a highball?” one of the women said.
    “When is Charlie not in the mood?” said the other, as the group exploded in a howl of laughter.
    Joey ducked away to let the group pass. They showed not the slightest awareness of her.

    EVERYWHERE Quartermaster Third Class Willis Langford looked in Central Park, there were girls. And the variety! Rounded and thin. Some with the rouged cheeks of angels, others with the darkened eyes of devils. There were broads and dames. Sweet patooties and shebas.
    “Swell to be back on land,” Willis said, shimmying his chest so his uniform straightened over his tall, lean frame.
    “And how,” said his shipmate, Joe.
    It was hard to tell from the proud, ruler-straight way Willis carried himself, but he’d grown up poor on the outskirts of Victoria, Texas, the son of subsistence farmers. With no other prospects—his grades, at an unaccredited high school, would impress no college—he answered a postcard from the Navy that arrived a few days before graduation. The Navy promised adventure and, more important, a living. Enough money to send home to his nine younger siblings—all girls—who spent summers barefoot because there was no money for shoes.
    Serving on a coastal gunboat off South China for the past two years, Willis had sent his family fifteen dollars a month, out of his salary of twenty-one dollars. Liberty was cramped enough in Asia, with its different customs and language. But it could be downright frustrating if all you had in your billfold was six dollars. While shipmates were drinking themselves into a stupor in bars in Hong Kong or the Philippines, Willis often found himself on solo walking tours through town. And so yes, back in America for a few weeks, awaiting new orders, Willis, twenty-two years old, with dark hair, thick eyebrows, and a leading man’s smile, was ready to have a little fun.
    Liberty came early on September 11, 1941, and sailors at the Naval receiving station on Manhattan’s Pier 51 didn’t have to be back until eight the next morning. “This could be a long night,” Joe said, jutting his chin at a pair of smartly dressed
young women who were just then passing. “Ready to start the hunt?”
    “How about the lake over there,” said