On my way out of work the other day I spied a peculiar object resting on the gleaming off-white marble floor of the elevator foyer: a brand-new, shiny little nail.

OK?

In the vast lobby of the Art Deco building where I work there’s a giant globe on the left, seated in a backlit, hemispheric cavity in the floor that’s ringed with steps whose purpose seems to be to allow the janitor, at eight o’clock each night, to sweep them with a dust mop, one after the other, as the benighted half of the world looms over his crouching form.

On the right, two security clerks sit about fifteen feet apart behind an enormous, U-shaped marble desk. One morning I walked in to hear one speaking to the other.

“James Coburn,” he said. “James Coburn was a student of Bruce Lee. OK?”

This building stands farther from the street than it should, farther than the others, as though preliminary blueprints had called for a moat. It’s distinctive but dated. Someone must have thought it beautiful, once.

You walk in the lobby and there’s towering art on every wall, semi-sculptural art, huge frames erupting with geometric shapes and colors. Art that comes out at you. Shiny marble floor, pearly white and maroon. Workers crisscrossing to their respective elevator banks in the morning. At night, when you leave, the floor is dotted with delivery guys standing immobile in their caps and white jackets, white plastic bags at their feet, waiting for their overworked customers to scurry toward them with a fistful of bills.

There's renovation going on at the building where I work, up on the seventeenth floor. The hallway's covered with a patchwork of thick cardboard jointed by duct tape; the walls papered halfway up with what looks like butcher paper.

It's unclear what's being done.

On the way out last night I passed two workers near an open door to nothing: some shadowy and dusty space, indistinct, its purpose utterly obscure. The threshold was strewn with mechanical junk - casings, coils, joints - forming a vague trail to a bewildering machine, mounted on stilts, steel-forged, inert.

Friday night I fell asleep on the uptown bus after Christina's roof party, drunk and sated from salty sweet McDonald's hamburgers, and I awoke at 120th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. The walk back down was strangely delightful. Adam Clayton Boulevard, a tree-lined corridor bisecting the top of Central Park, was a dream of old New York, of New York in 1925 or something. The beautiful old buildings seemed more intact than I'd expected, preserved somehow, not by renovation but by some invisible benign envelope. The walls were bathed in yellow glow. There was street life here and there, people on stoops or gathered in groups on the sidewalk. Looking down, the street disappeared into the blackness of the park aglitter with lamplight. I took a left onto 110th Street. I passed a blue awning that said DENTIST'S OFFICE and a plaque beside the door that said DENTIST'S OFFICE too.

The interior architecture of Paris fascinates me. Not the façades of the classic buildings, the 19th century apartments with the wrought iron and the funny round windows in the roof. No. I am much more interested in the spaces inside, particularly where those spaces disintegrate into a weird, cramped collision of old and new: corridors, stairwells, bathrooms. Paris is a modern, explosive city inside an ancient, walled city; its first-world progress and growing population strain the tiny streets and low-rise blocks. The French obsession with preservation makes every building fragile, priceless. I feel a deep incongruity when I climb the steps of a McDonald's which is inside a bourgeois home that was built in 1860. The touch of the handle on the bathroom door thrills me further; inside, the plumbing and the mirrors and the tiles on the floor are shiny-new but the odd, slanted ceiling and rounded walls betray history.