Dutch Cats and Insurance Magnates
The deposition I took on Thursday in New York turned out to be in the AIG building on Pine Street. This building is very creepy. It is an early 20th century building ornamented with Ayn Rand-esque bas reliefs and art deco friezes an embellishments everywhere. One sees cement images of titans of industry, captains of commerce, wheels of fortune, etc.... Much of the lobby is covered in gold filigree covering still more images of titans of industry, captains of commerce, wheels of fortune, etc. You feel as though you are stepping back in time -- you expect to see a Horn & Hardart lurking in the corner of a lobby, or Greta Garbo stepping out of a taxi, or Humphrey Bogart pushing an elevator button. If there were a coatroom in this building, it would be manned by Jimmy Stewart. The building is tall -- somewhere between 70 and 90 floors, I'm not exactly sure how many but it's a lot. This giant edifice of capitalism is crammed into the itty bitty streets of ancient lower Manhattan. The roads down here are remnants of the first Dutch settlement, and so the they are wide enough for a cow or a horse but not really for a 90 story building. Pine Street is exactly one lane wide -- the street on the other side of the building is also one lane wide. These village lanes are dark -- the buildings around them are so tall that no light ever shines on Pine Street itself -- and to make matters worse the City has erected a temporary plywood "roof" along the street to protect pedestrians from falling muck, which I suppose is due to either renovations or window washing operations, or something, way up above somewhere on the side of the giant building. Also, the day I was there it was pouring rain (Hurricane Isidore's remnants) and so the whole scene was swirling in fog and mist and water and black umbrellas which made it all seem even more like the 1940s.
Finding the AIG building is pretty difficult. Pine Street buildings are too cool to have numbers. Also, they are too gothic to have signs. A sign would be useless, really, because the street is so narrow that one would never be able to see any sign, unless one had a very long skinny neck, like a giraffe, perhaps, or a stretchy cartoon neck like Plastic Man. I have neither. My cabbie (a nice Russian man) performed superhero feats trying to find the building for me, at one point parking his cab near Pine Street and Water Street and leaping out into the rain, dodging puddles, to find a merchant who could tell us where No. 70 was.... I'm sure he found a knowledgeable merchant in a Horn & Hardart -- that would make sense. Of course, if I had KNOWN I was going to the AIG building I could've told the cabbie that and I'm sure he would've known exactly where to go. But I didn't know that. All I knew was that I was going to No. 70 Pine Street.
The reason I didn't know I was going to the AIG Building was because I had the impression that I was going to a law firm, D'Amato & Lynch. Someone had told me that D'Amato & Lynch was a captive firm to AIG (who is our opponent), but I did not realize that it was so captive to AIG that it actually lives inside the mothership. Silly me.
Once my Russian cabbie helped me find this bastion of insurance nirvana, I had to negotiate AIG security. AIG security is much tighter than any security I have encountered in any airport. You have to be on a secret list of "approved visitors" before you can get on an elevator. And you cannot learn what floor you are visiting (in case you wanted to, for example, inform your court reporter), until you get an AIG security sticker slapped on your baggage. You have to send your briefcase, laptop, deposition exhibits, etc., through a CAT scan machine. You have to turn on all of your electronics. You have to surrender your picture ID. Then, you are allowed on an elevator and the security man pushes the button for you so that you don't have the ability to go to any floor other than your "approved" floor. Then you are left alone in the elevator and the final piece of AIG building security becomes evident. The inside of the elevators is so shiny and gold-filigree-covered that any visitor stands there dazed, stunned, and blinded by the reflections. Then you start to get a little sleepy because you are tired from your trip through lobby security. I think this is all on purpose. It is hard to get into anti-AIG trouble when you are simultaneously blinded and sleepy and lost.
After I tumbled out of the AIG buliding at the end of my deposition, I wandered down Pine Street in the rain with my wheelie (which was a little lighter than when I had arrived because I'd shed a bunch of deposition exhibits) looking for a cross street that was wide enough to accomodate taxis. I got pretty wet. But fortunately I was wearing the smashing black nylon topcoat I had purchased in San Francisco a few months ago. I was slick and shiny with rain. One my wet walk down this itty bitty, gloomy, super-narrow street stuffed full of insurance executives, I saw at least two scrawny cats.
This reminded me that my friend Ann had told me a few days earlier that the street cats in lower Manhattan share the same mitochondria and DNA as the street cats in the inner city of Amsterdam. This is because in 1620 when the Dutch landed on Manhattan Island, they brought cats with them in their boats. Those cats multiplied and their descendants still hang around the tiny streets of lower Manhattan and the Battery, below Wall Street, which was the northern most "wall" of the original village of New Amsterdam was. Cats are territorial. We know about all this because someone noticed that the cats in lower Manhattan look like the cats in Amsterdam so they tested their DNA and Bingo! -- kitty relatives.
My forebears were among those original Dutch settlers 400 years ago, the same people who brought the zeal for commerce (and ale) to the puritan colonies to begin with.
I realized then that I couldn't really hate the AIG building since it is just a physical representation of what our Dutch folks came here to do in the first place. Instead, as I stood in the pouring rain in the shadow of this 100-year-old building on the 350-year-old winding streets trying to get a cab, I thought that maybe the cat staring at me from an alley might have had an ancestor that used to belong to one of my ancestors. And then it seemed like a very small and not very creepy building after all.
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