This article can be found in the magazine n ° 1215 on newsstands this week “Municipal, regional … Tampering and abstention”, available online for only 1.99 euros.
At first glance, the 87th district police station in an island metropolis, Isola, is in New York. Maliciously, the Italian-American Salvatore Lombino renames the city with a Latin name, even though he signs this series of 53 novels under a Scottish-sounding pseudo, Ed McBain. Detective Steve Carella combines the two cultures, Anglo-Saxon first name on an Italian surname, when his colleague Meyer Meyer has twice an ambivalent name, which means light in Hebrew, while blending perfectly into the founding language of the United States. McBain distributes the masks.
A district where people from all immigrations mingle, represented as much by cops, men and women, as by delinquents, places determined by numbers, brick facades, rather bourgeois streets, warehouses, squats , cut-throats, everything that makes up the 87th can be found in New York City. But where ? If it is an island, it is of course Manhattan. Except that it is impossible to identify a neighborhood, that we are neither in the old Puerto Rican West Side, nor in Little Italy or in the Lower East Side. Even less in Harlem. Moreover, since the creation of the 87th district in 1956, Manhattan has changed.
Everything that makes up the 87th is in New York City.
But where ? If it is an island, it is of course Manhattan.
Except that it is impossible to identify a neighborhood.
The characteristic features of the island’s working-class neighborhoods have moved to Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the other side of the …
–
