Trevanian's Desk/Images/Pearl Street today

'I was last in Albany in the late '80s. Pearl Street hadn't changed much because Albany had been depressed and missed out on the gentrification which has since caught up with it. North Pearl was still a slum, though now black instead of Irish. I sat on the stoop of my old tenement with a black man and we talked about how everything was changing, mostly for the worse. Two old men sitting in the autumn sunshine, sharing the view that everything was going to hell in a hand basket. A nice afternoon.'