When Dallas Hayes was 11 he moved with his mother to an apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side: a plain, square, redbrick place with narrow corridors, a small creaking lift and a fearsome woman from Alabama who lived in a little flat on the ground floor.
Hayes remembers being at a party on New Year’s Eve, in the flat next to hers, when this lady appeared in the doorway. “She said if we didn’t keep it down she would buy the building and have us all kicked out,” he recalled, standing in the building’s porch one recent evening.
