Every couple of minutes, my phone chimed with yet another text from someone telling me about something good they’d experienced around the city. The next morning, the chiming became so insistent that a teen in front of me in the Starbucks line turned around, looking annoyed.
“Your phone got a bug or something?” he asked, adjusting his earbuds.
I turned the volume down. “I just get a lot of texts.”
He studied my face. “What are you, some kind of celebrity?”
“Nope. Just a reporter.”
That profession was apparently boring enough that he immediately turned away and started scrolling through his phone.
A few minutes later and armed with a soy latte, I glanced at my phone to see what I’d missed. I stepped toward the door and smack into Scott Jameson.
Literally.
My cup fell, and when it hit the ground, its lid popped off, spilling liquid everywhere.
I laughed. “I must look like the most accident-prone person in Manhattan—”
“You just haven’t mastered the New York jostle yet,” he said as a Starbucks employee jumped in to mop up the mess.
“There’s a New York jostle?”
“Okay, I made that up. But the key to survival here is to never look down. Always maneuver around tourists. And never, ever look at your phone when you’re leaving Starbucks.”
“You made that last one up too.”
He smiled. “I did. Where are you headed?”
“I was just reading a text from a man who says someone prepaid his rent for the next month. And not just his. All his neighbors’ in his apartment building too.”
“Everyone?”
I glanced at my phone. “He says: ‘We all got letters taped to our door asking us to meet the anonymous donor by the fountain in Bryant Park at noon.’ Which is where I’m heading.”
“Can I tag along?”
I tilted my head. A guy with Scott Jameson’s star power didn’t need to join a freshman reporter on a story. If he wanted it, he could just take it. Besides, his series was all about natural wonders. In one episode, he’d spent the night lashed to the side of Yosemite’s El Capitan. In another, he’d hiked the Alaskan tundra. He’d even scaled a volcano in the South Pacific and spent the night there before reaching the summit and filming his show at sunrise.
“Action. Adventure. Adrenaline. That’s what you usually cover, right? Why would you want to come along on this story, which has none of that?”
We stepped aside to let a woman leaving Starbucks pass. She stopped to stare at him, then elbowed her friend to do the same. Scott had the kind of striking good looks that made people notice him. Even world-weary Manhattanites weren’t immune.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. I keep wondering—is it a marketing gimmick? Or maybe performance art of some kind? Banksy did something with balloons here once. But then something new happens, and none of those theories make sense. What do you think is going on?”
“I don’t know yet. The sheer number of things that are happening is . . . mind boggling. But things are never as they first appear.”
By noon, seventeen people from a small apartment building on 134th in Harlem had gathered around the fountain in Bryant Park. Despite the hundreds of people sitting in the grass or in patio chairs in the park during the lunch hour, it wasn’t hard to spot the group because they stood in a cluster, talking rapidly like people do when they’re at a birthday party or other celebration.
I was nervous about allowing Scott to join me on the story. It wasn’t unusual for a couple of reporters to team up, but it mostly came about on much bigger stories like natural disasters, riots, or mass shootings. Would it look like I couldn’t handle this story on my own if he was tagging along?
Even though he seemed to be genuinely curious, I wasn’t so naive to believe that his motives were entirely pure. This story was already getting a surprising amount of attention. Was he planning to gain some insight from our trip to Bryant Park and use it to take over the story?
The one plus to him joining was that he convinced cameraman Chris Yamashita to work with us on his day off. Without him, I’d have been stuck shooting everything with my cell phone camera because the dispatch team couldn’t assign any cameramen to this story. Chris jumped right in, recording shots of the rapidly growing group and getting close-ups of their excited expressions.
Scott and I struck up a conversation with fifty-three-year-old resident Grant Hamilton, who had sent me the text. “It’s like winning the lottery,” Grant told us. “Plus, I didn’t know most of these people in my building before all this. And now I do.”
“The spirit behind the gift was even more important to me than the money,” Ann-Marie Louison said. “It carried a lot of love with it.” She had dressed in a brightly colored red-and-orange floral caftan and had brought a jar of homemade pickles for the anonymous donor. She told us she hoped for a photo with them so she could show her seven-year-old grandson “what a hero looks like.”
But when no one had shown up by 12:25, our excitement wilted. Chris set his camera in the grass and popped a stick of gum in his mouth. “Have you considered that this is some company’s campaign to get viral attention?” he asked me.
“Yeah, maybe the chamber of commerce is trying to lure more tourists to Manhattan,” I replied.
“As if we need more of that,” he grumbled.
“The problem with both of those theories is that if this is some kind of campaign, they’d be promoting a hashtag or account to follow. But we haven’t seen that.”
Ann-Marie stepped toward me. “What if this whole thing was supposed to get us out of our apartments so they could steal what we have?”
That idea struck a chord of fear, and within minutes, everyone in the group was on their phones calling nearby friends and relatives to check on their apartments. Everyone except a retired guy named Walter, who sat quietly on a café chair, slowly and deliberately peeling an orange.
“I got nothin’ to steal. I’m just happy I got a month where I don’t have to scrape together the rent.”
“What will you do with the savings?” Scott asked him.
“Everything.” He cracked a smile. “Half the fun is thinking about that.”
Then three men in their twenties lumbered through the grass carrying heavy picnic baskets. “Are you people from the 134th Street apartments?” the tallest one asked.
“Yeah,” Grant said.
Was this them? These guys in their baggy jeans and sweat-stained T-shirts. I scanned their faces, wondering. Did it show? Did generosity like this reveal itself on someone’s face? Could you spot their compassion by the way they spoke or the way they carried themselves?
“Are you the people who paid our rent?” Ann-Marie asked.
“Nope,” the taller one said, wiping sweat from his face with a red bandana. “We’re from Broadway Finest Deli. Someone hired us to bring you this lunch. Sorry we’re late.”
The three men unpacked red-checkered picnic blankets and spread them out on the lawn.
“Who hired you?” I asked them as they laid out platters of sandwiches, salads, and cold drinks.
The one with a buzz cut and trendy clear-frame glasses shrugged. “We don’t know. Someone left cash and instructions for our boss.”