I’m typing this at NR HQ, which I have long known to be a few blocks from the birthplace of baseball, and from the birthplace of the Chester A. Arthur presidency. What I did not know, but am delighted to learn from Roger Rosenblatt’s new memoir, The Boy Detective: A New York Childhood, is that we are also roughly half-way between the home of Ayn Rand (120 East 34th) and that of Dashiell Hammett while he was writing his novel The Glass Key (155 East 30th).
That’s NYC for you: Between the ferocious libertarian and the devoted Communist there is a place even for the band of conservatives founded by WFB . . . (To be quite fair, WFB did subtitle one of his later books “Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist,” and would probably have been unhappy with some of the conservative-vs.-libertarian acrimony of recent years).