the last book I ever read (Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis, excerpt two)

from Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kirsten Bakis:

I was walking along Maiden Lane toward the Louise Nevelson Plaza, admiring how the turrets on top of the Federal Reserve Bank looked against the high, ragged clouds and thinking about that building, which had recently become one of my favorites because I’d written a paper on it the month before for an architecture class I was taking. I felt glad that the fog had lifted and that winter had come, and that I lived in a city where someone would think to build something like that giant fortress, out of blocks of stone that must each have weighed several tons, and to give it a forty-foot-tall doorway, and flank the doorway with wrought-iron lamps the size of small cars, and then decorate those lamps with so many little flourishes and curls that they had just ended up looking sort of silly and hairy instead of elegant and imposing as they were supposed to. Right before the stock market crashed, too, I thought, as I cam up along the side of the plaza. All those huge, beautiful, ambitious banks down here that were built just before 1929.