"Do You Have Any Shoes?"

Yesterday. Wall Street.

Me and a friend and fellow guide gave a tour to 25 money managers from the mid west.

He and I met on Fulton Street at 7am and grabbed bagels and brought them over to the group's hotel, then we walked them down Broadway to the NYSE where they went inside and watched the bell ring while we waited for them on the street.

They didn't eat all the bagels so I crammed several in my pockets and gave the rest to a Black man sleeping under some blankets just around the corner from Pearl and Wall.

This guy's blanket encampment is under scaffolding, and it takes advantage of an obtuse angle to stake out a few square feet of unused concrete. It's a good spot, made incredible for its proximity to history. This isn't some camp in the willow grove down by the train tracks. This is sleeping rough in the beating heart of America.

• George Washington was inaugurated a few hundred feet away.
• Across the street is the famous Beaver Building, aka the New York Cocoa Exchange, aka The Continental Hotel from John Wick, a building where sugar and coffee and cocoa from around the world were bought and sold, playing fiddle with the livelihoods of millions across the globe.
• The land under the blankets used to belong to the pirate William Kidd, who was gibbeted from a post in England and left to die.
• Around the corner, 24 stockbrokers signed the Buttonwood Agreement in 1792, the event the New York Stock Exchange marks as its founding.
• 200 feet east is the ghost location of Tontine Coffeehouse which was the early home of the Stock Exchange, and for many years the first place incoming ships would stop to register their cargo.
• No wonder commodities markets first appeared around here. And no wonder too that the city's first official slave market opened across the street in 1711. Remember that cocoa and sugar frequently were and are produced with slave labor.

Anyway, we gave this dude these bagels, and he sat up abruptly and said, "Have you got any shoes?"

Uhm... obviously we don't have any shoes. It didn't even really occur to us to give him money. He didn't ask for that. He asked for shoes. It was fun.

But then twice during the time we were down there we saw this dude padding around the shit-smeared streets of FiDi in his bare feet.

Awkward side note: There is more feces on the streets of FiDi than anywhere else in the city. A lot of it is people, but as more office buildings convert to condos, increasingly it's from dogs. We spent a good long while standing at the corner of Wall and Broad, watching the local dogs freed from their condominium prisons, cavorting and sniffing and dropping turds in front of the New York Stock Exchange. It was great.

This morning I started writing about this tour, but this moment with the shoeless guy kept coming up. And every time I came to the part where we didn't help him, I really couldn't write a decent excuse. So I put on my pants and went downtown, hoping I could find him, ask him his shoe size and go get him a pair.

It didn't go as expected.

There was definitely someone under the blankets as I approached, but they were completely covered. I spoke gently, trying to get his attention, and finally a meth-pocked white woman flipped the cover off her head and started cussing at me, understandably vexed that I was bothering her.

I was shocked. I apologized and left, quickly, and then started laughing. Of all the outcomes I'd imagined, finding a different person asleep under these blankets was not one of them.

I found a BID guy who told me the woman is the regular there, and that he'd never seen the shoeless guy.

So at best this man we met was hot-swapping the sidewalk blankets, and at worst he was squatting them. Blankets on the sidewalk. Without shoes. Right around the corner from Wall Street. Across the street from the old Slave Market. In the shadow of the offices of some of the richest men on earth.

This is a pirate island from start to finish.

DF