A lovely, utterly New York story by Corey Kilgannon from the Metropolitan Section of the Sunday Times.
If you’ve never been in New York City’s Surrogates Court building, you certainly have seen it many times on Law and Order episodes. It is unquestionably the most beautiful civic building in the city and, I might argue, possibly in the world.
The building at 31 Chambers Street also houses the Division of Old Records, i.e., the archives of the city, and Bruce Abrams, the gentleman featured in the NYT article, is an archivist of the records which, according to the article, date back to 1674. (He was an archivist, that is, until last Friday when he officially retired but he remains an archivist because “his work…was far from finished…and there was no one in the pipeline to replace him.”)
Mr. Abrams sounds like an endearing old curmudgeon. His work sounds like a dream job and his place of work is a sort of urban eden.