This one begins, like a dime detective novel from the nineteen-thirties, in a dingy bar in lower Manhattan. And, like a lot of New York stories, though it may touch on history and backroom politics, sex and the supernatural, though it throws together billionaires and scrap-lumber salesmen, city councilmen and scholars of the occult, it’s mostly about real estate—and the stubborn allure of old buildings and their secrets.

One of the oddities at No. 211 was an arrangement of brick pyramids, ten feet high. Photograph by Robert Polidori.

Ten years ago, a bar owner named David McWater took out a lease on a building at 211 Pearl Street. It was a plain brick structure in the Greek Revival style, with granite pillars along its base and a thin classical cornice. Its windows, three to a floor, once had sweeping views of New York Harbor—out across church spires and wooden piers, steam ferries and sailing ships, to the orchards and farms of Brooklyn. Now they looked out on the canyoned streets of the financial district. A family from New Jersey had owned the building for decades and had allowed it to fall into disrepair. The floors were layered with plywood and carpet, the walls with wood panelling. (The first floor had been an Irish bar called Rosie O’Grady’s.) Next door, at 213, the building it leaned against was in even worse shape: a jagged crack ran down the length of one wall, it was later discovered, slowly separating the façade from the sides.

Still, it was a sweet deal. The building at 211 had five floors, the rent was only five thousand dollars a month, and the lease was for twenty years. It was strictly a commercial property, and McWater was required to fix it up, but he had planned to do so anyway. His two partners, Ray Deter and Dennis Zentek, owned a popular beer bar in the East Village. They wanted to re-create the bar on a more lavish scale, with exposed brick and antique fixtures. It would make an elegant speakeasy, they thought, for young bankers and lawyers—a ghost of the neighborhood’s past.

Dave and I have known each other since our high-school days, in Oklahoma, twenty-five years ago. He was a skinny basketball player then, with feathered brown hair and a loose, cocky walk. He’s bulkier now and more imposing, with ruddy cheeks and a raucous laugh and eyebrows that beetle up when he’s delivering a punch line—the kind of loudmouthed operator you can imagine in a tuxedo and a bowler hat, carving up beefsteaks near Tammany Hall. As an undergraduate at New York University, Dave paid his tuition by running a sports agency from his dorm room. (One of his clients was John Starks, who went on to become a star for the New York Knicks.) Later, he was a regular at the World Series of Poker. Along the way, he managed to become the majority owner of eleven bars in downtown Manhattan, even persuading me to invest in one on the Lower East Side. Compared with most real-estate deals, he told me, 211 Pearl seemed like easy money. “It was a beautiful thing,” he said.

His crew spent the next few months gutting the building. Beneath the linoleum, they found oak boards and terra-cotta pavers; above the acoustic tile, a pressed-tin ceiling. When they pulled down the wooden panelling, the bricks behind it, salvaged from earlier buildings, read like a miniature history of Manhattan: ragged courses near the bottom, from Dutch buildings of the sixteen-hundreds; larger bricks higher up, still flecked with paint, from British homes; the newest courses on top, cleanly laid in the eighteen-thirties, when the clay shores of the Hudson River were lined with kilns. Best of all was a piece of brickwork on the first floor: a cryptic arrangement of three pyramids, like the mark of some mystic order. “It was a strange thing,” Dave told me. “But it made a great conversation piece: ‘What the hell is that?’ ”

Then the money ran out. Dave had hoped that the renovation would cost about a quarter of a million dollars. But after two years he’d spent twice that much, his partners had pulled out, and the bar was only half finished. What’s more, the building’s easygoing owners had sold it to a shadowy corporation called Chicago 4. Dave had been hearing talk on the street of a developer snatching up property in the neighborhood. The plan, he’d heard, was to demolish the whole block and replace it with a high-rise condominium and office complex. The new owners couldn’t afford to wait twenty years for Dave’s lease to run out, it seemed. They needed 211 torn down.

New York demolishes more old buildings every month than most American cities have standing. In a single week last September, the list of scheduled demolitions ran to six pages; in an average year, about two thousand buildings are torn down. As you walk through neighborhoods like SoHo or Greenwich Village, it’s easy to imagine Manhattan as one vast historic district, camera-ready for any period from the Civil War on. In fact, fewer than three per cent of the city’s million or so buildings are protected as landmarks.

Lower Manhattan is both the city’s oldest neighborhood and its most rebuilt. “It seems like they knocked everything down there fifty years ago,” Simeon Bankoff, the executive director of the Historic Districts Council, told me recently. If this is where New York began, it’s also where it has most had to reinvent itself. “That’s the peculiar pattern of development in Manhattan,” Bankoff said. “It spreads north and then it doubles back—and then it does it again and again.”

A few months after 211 Pearl Street was sold to Chicago 4, Dave McWater received a legal notice from his new landlords—the first of several. By failing to make necessary repairs and by using the building as a residence, the company argued, Dave was violating his lease. The complaints grew more specific as time went on—one claimed that the elevator shaft wasn’t properly sealed and that some windows had not been replaced in a “first class” manner—but the essential message stayed the same: the building had become an eyesore.

“I said to the judge, ‘This is horseshit,’ ” Dave told me. “ ‘They’re going to make me pay forty thousand dollars to renovate a building they’re tearing down.’ ” The real reason for the lawsuits, he said, was the demolition clause in his lease. If the building was torn down before its term ran out, he was entitled to up to a million dollars in compensation. “They were taking a shot,” he said. “Maybe I’m a loser and they can just evict me. If not, maybe they can harass me so much that they can talk me down from the million dollars.”

Dave managed to fend off the lawsuits for a while. But by the spring of 2000 he had spent tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, and he still had some expensive repairs to make. He decided to fight back. No. 211 Pearl seemed to be one of the oldest buildings left in lower Manhattan. If he could dig up its history, he thought, the city might just declare it a landmark. In the meantime, the mere possibility might scare the owner into settling.

He thought he’d give Alan Solomon a call.

Al lives in the East Village, a few blocks from Dave’s office on Avenue A. He has been, at various times, a real-estate agent, footwear salesman, environmental activist, T-shirt designer, candy vender, and amateur historian. He now sells reclaimed lumber and spends his days visiting demolition sites, scouring the wreckage for things to salvage. Al is small and slight, with short black hair that he combs straight back. He has pale, finely molded features, a longish nose, and green eyes capable of sudden, unnerving directness. When he’s on the hunt for material—joists from a police-horse stable on Hester Street, say, or beams from an abandoned snuff warehouse in New Jersey—he walks with his shoulders squared, his baseball cap pulled down low, and weaves his way through scaffolding and plywood barriers, construction pits and chain-link fences, as content amid the city’s detritus as any raccoon.

Al has spent his life among junk. He grew up north of Boston, where his father owns one of the largest scrap-metal yards in New England, Solomon Metals. As a boy, Al used to go there on weekends and rummage through piles of radiators and barrels of broken pipes. He’d fish out a few treasures—copper pots, pewter doorstops, Art Deco ashtrays, and brass molds from toymakers—and sell them at the flea market next to the local drive-in. “All this stuff you see in SoHo or Tribeca nowadays, in artifact stores,” he told me. “A lot of it, thirty years ago, was just flowing into scrap.”

Al’s father had inherited the business from his father, and for a while Al seemed likely to do the same. He got a degree in finance from Boston University, worked for a bank in Ireland for a few months, then came home. He worked at the scrap yard for eight years, mostly processing metals and dealing with customers. Then, in 1996, he moved to New York. “I’d just turned thirty,” he told me. “I wasn’t married, and I was sort of thinking, If I’m ever going to try and do something, this is the time.” What, exactly, that something was he didn’t know: “It was into the unknown.” Al arrived in January and took a job in Macy’s shoe department to get him through the winter. He found a rentstabilized apartment, twelve feet square, and built a sleeping loft with old safety barricades, striped orange and white. Then he did what he’d always done: walked around the city and found pieces of it to save.

I’d known Al a little when I lived in Boston, and after I moved to New York I periodically got word of his newest ventures. Our friend Todd Wiener remembers having a beer with Al in the Village one night and talking at length about tires. They were clogging up landfills, Al said, and ought to be put to better use. Todd asked him what he meant. “You could use them to make yarmulkes, for instance,” Al said. Then he reached into his backpack and pulled out a small rubber cap. It was made from scraps of old inner tubes, stitched together with heavy nylon thread. Todd turned it around in his hands for a minute, not sure what to say. It looked like something that Frankenstein’s monster might wear if he were Jewish. “Of course, if it goes into production the stitching will have to be a lot nicer,” Al said.

Not long afterward, Al developed an interest in manhole covers. The oldest ones in New York dated to the mid-eighteen-hundreds, he found, and were often beautifully embossed. Yet they were regularly sold for scrap. By looking up the city’s scrap-metal sales through the Freedom of Information Act, Al located sixty of the covers at a yard in East New York. He bought the lot for three thousand dollars, and brought them to an ironworker in Williamsburg. Then he had them turned into coffee tables. They never sold very well, though: each table weighed more than two hundred pounds.

Al’s projects always had the same quirky yet earnest quality back then—part business venture, part recycling effort, part idealistic prank. After 9/11, he spent days walking around the city collecting newspapers in foreign languages. He copied some letters, Arabic script, or ideograms from each one and silk-screened them onto T-shirts in the form of an eye chart. Along the bottom, in small print, he wrote “Peace on Earth.”

Dave met him during his gumball period, when Al was installing candy machines in the East Village. (The machines were perched on recycled signposts, and part of the profits went to Amnesty International.) The guy was a little odd, Dave thought, but he seemed to have a talent for research. When Dave hired him to do some genealogical work, Al tracked down Dave’s great-great-grandfather in the 1850 Illinois census. “Al was always finding out little things,” Dave told me. “He’d just be hanging around the block, and people would tell him these juicy tidbits. He had that whole working-man thing going on.” Digging up the history of 211 Pearl Street seemed just the job for him.

Al first tried to verify some of the rumors that Dave had been hearing. He went to the Surrogate’s Court building, at 31 Chambers Street, where the city’s property records were kept, and spent a few days in a musty room on the third floor, spooling through microfilm. As Dave had suspected, most of the block had changed hands recently. The names on the deeds sometimes had a similar ring—Chicago 4, Atlanta 5—but the buildings all seemed to have different owners. It was only later, when Al showed Dave photocopies he’d made of some lawsuits related to the properties, that the two began to notice a pattern: the same attorneys and staff appeared again and again. Chicago 4 and the others were just fronts. Almost the entire block belonged to a single owner: the Rockrose Development Corp.

Rockrose had made its name, ironically, by resuscitating old buildings like 211 Pearl Street. The company was founded, in 1970, by three brothers from Iran: Kamran, Henry, and Frederick Elghanayan—the first a Harvard Business School graduate, the second a lawyer, the third an engineer. They’d started out in Greenwich Village, converting warehouses and welfare hotels into condominiums, then moved on to larger projects, including an office tower on West Fifty-seventh Street by Cesar Pelli. Pearl Street was their most ambitious project yet: Rockrose hoped to build towers of up to a million square feet on the block, including a new trading floor for the New York Stock Exchange.

“I can’t think of any reason that we would need or want to let people know what’s going on,” Jon McMillan, Rockrose’s director of planning, told me recently. “Imagine that you own 213 Pearl and you read in the paper that Rockrose is assembling all of the block to build a new home for the Stock Exchange. The later you hold out, the more money you get.” In 1997, he said, when the development was first conceived, Rockrose consulted a survey of lower Manhattan by Andrew Dolkart, a professor of historic preservation at Columbia. None of the Pearl Street buildings were mentioned. “We just looked at them and saw tenement,” McMillan said.

Landmarks in New York have to be presented for public review, approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission, and affirmed by the City Council. The criteria are fairly vague—everything from the Woolworth Building to the Wonder Wheel has made the grade. But most landmarks have at least one of three unusual qualities: great beauty, unique architecture, or enough neighbors in a similar style to form a historic district. No. 211 had none of these. “It didn’t have the romance of South Street Seaport or the sex appeal of Wall Street,” Al told me. “It was just a place where everyday merchants bought and sold and moved goods.” The story of Pearl Street was mostly the story of people like Al.