That Lighthouse in the Bronx

I used to work in that building with the lighthouse (above the Harlem River, not far from Yankee Stadium in the Bronx). It used to be the headquarters of the HW Wilson Company, where I worked as a legal librarian - until the whole department was outsourced to the Philippines. They produced and published scholarly indexes. The claim to fame of the Index of Legal Periodicals was that (unlike indexes such as LexisNexis and Westlaw) it rejected automation and had real lawyers working on it. That all came to an end in 2009 following the economic reckoning of 20 years of post Cold War neoliberalism. The company’s logo, the lighthouse, they used to tell us, symbolized the light of the index illuminating humanity’s storehouse of knowledge. Now it just represents a storage company above the Major Deegan Expressway, where you can store your junk. We drove past it yesterday, just after that rainstorm, and almost crashed into an open manhole in the first lane. The manhole cover had somehow been knocked out and was lying there a few feet ahead of it, another living symbol of decay.