Every now and then, I have these moments when I realize that New York is not like other cities. These are two of those stories.

    Last weekend, I had to go to a work thing at Tweed. It’s a building that houses a lot of Board of Ed offices, and I’ve never heard it called anything other than “Tweed.” When I arrived at 52 Chambers Street, I realized it was Tweed Courthouse, named for none other than Boss Tweed. Dust of the covers of your 11th grade US history textbook (or Wikipedia) and you’ll recall that Boss Tweed was linked with the Tamany Hall political scandal in the 1800s and was convicted of stealing somewhere between $75-200 million dollars from taxpayers. Including about $10 million that he siphoned for himself when building Tweed Courthouse. (Think of Boss Hog from the Dukes of Hazzard, place him up with the Yankees about 70 years earlier, and you’ve got it.)

    Tweed is one of those spectacular secular cathedrals of the 1800s. A massive rotunda, interior marble columns and more domes and archways than, well, something with a lot of domes and archways. There are even secret passageways that lead out of the building, which Tweed and his cronies used to escape the angry mobs of Irish immigrants -- and New York City cops. As I zoned out during the meetings, I kept looking at the intricacies of the stone carvings on the walls. My coworker Anthony summed it up nicely when he said, “Pretty things from ugly money.”

    Growing up elsewhere, I have these moments sometimes when I realize that this is where the history happened. I’d read about the tenements, and Tamany Hall, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory where the big fire happened, but walking past it with my groceries is another experience entirely.

    This all happened during the UF-Ole Miss game. Marc was texting me with score updates, and as the meeting drew to a close, UF was in the disastrous fourth quarter. My colleague Frances used to work in the area, and she rushed me to a nearby bar with televisions so I could watch them lose by one point to an unranked team. Not that I’m bitter or anything ...

    To get to the bar, we passed Ground Zero -- former site of the World Trade Towers. I asked Frances if she worked here on September 11th, and she nodded. “I was up against the wall of a building with debris and ash slamming past me,” she said calmly, and took a sip of bourbon.

    After a few more sips, she told me more about that day. While she was against the wall, the only thought she remembers was, “I can’t deal with this right now. I have to get married next month.” Strange, the ways our brain attaches to what feels rational to help us get out of danger. She ran out of her shoes while she was running. She made it into a building, and “after the second tower dropped, we knew it was over, and they told us all to leave,” she went back to find her shoes. I was stunned at that, but she looked at me blankly. “I knew where I’d lost them,” she said. She had to dig them out from mountains of ashes, but she found them.

    What to say to a story that is so much bigger than anything I’ve ever experienced? I responded with the best response I could muster -- a deep breath and another pull on my Southern Comfort. She did the same with her bourbon. Then she pointed with her chin, out the window to the graffiti on the building across the street. “That’s from when they searched the buildings.”

    I looked. The graffiti looked like a mess of black spray paint over some orange spray paint. “The orange,” she said, “is what the cops put after they searched the buildings to show there weren’t any bodies inside.”

    As a nonnative to New York, I admit that I chafe against this place sometimes. I hate the crowds, the lack of nature, the dirtiness, and the foul language that is inescapable. But this place ... it does get under your skin. And last Saturday, while I sat in a building I read about in Ms. Ramsey’s US History class, and while I drank a glass of Southern Comfort in a building that had been searched and cleared for bodies just a few years ago, I realized (or re-realized) that the past isn’t really past at all.