Plaza Suite Quotes

Protest Man stood in his usual spot in the northwest corner of the plaza, dressed in his business suit and domino mask and holding one of his usual obscure protest signs (today, it said “Stop the black cars!”).

During the ceremony celebrating the unveiling of Chicago’s huge outdoor Picasso sculpture in the plaza across from City Hall, I happened to be standing next to a personal-injury lawyer with whom I was acquainted. As the inaugural speech droned on, I noticed a look of intense concentration on his face, and that his lips were moving. Asked what he was thinking, he answered that he was trying to estimate the amount of money the city was going to have to pay to settle suits involving children who got hurt climbing the sculpture. Was this lawyer lucky, because he could transform everything he saw into a professional problem his skills could master, and thus live in constant flow? Or was he depriving himself of an opportunity to grow by paying attention only to what he was already familiar with, and ignoring the aesthetic, civic, and social dimensions of the event? Perhaps both interpretations are accurate. In the long run, however, looking at the world exclusively from the little window that one’s self affords is always limiting. Even the most highly respected physicist, artist, or politician becomes a hollow bore and ceases to enjoy life if all he can interest himself in is his limited role in the universe.

The band members were doing what they could to make ends meet: Hidalgo and Pérez took work as instructors at Plaza de la Raza, the East L.A. center for arts and education, while Lozano worked as a teaching assistant at Hollenbeck Junior High in Boyle Heights. At one point around this time, jobs became so scarce that, at the behest of Mike Gonzalez, a former member of Rosas’s band Fast Company, they worked as strolling musicians, in full mariachi garb, drumming up business for a new restaurant by performing Mexican tunes on the mall at the Music Center in downtown L.A. A picture of the group from this era shows them looking stiff and distinctly uncomfortable in their matching embroidered black suits.

This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly. Maybe you spend three years in Massachusetts, studying constitutional law and discussing the relative merits of exclusionary vertical agreements in antitrust cases. For some, this might be truly interesting, but for you it is not. Maybe during those three years you make friends you’ll love and respect forever, people who seem genuinely called to the bloodless intricacies of the law, but you yourself are not called. Your passion stays low, yet under no circumstance will you underperform. You live, as you always have, by the code of effort/result, and with it you keep achieving until you think you know the answers to all the questions—including the most important one. Am I good enough? Yes, in fact I am. What happens next is that the rewards get real. You reach for the next rung of the ladder, and this time it’s a job with a salary in the Chicago offices of a high-end law firm called Sidley & Austin. You’re back where you started, in the city where you were born, only now you go to work on the forty-seventh floor in a downtown building with a wide plaza and a sculpture out front. You used to pass by it as a South Side kid riding the bus to high school, peering mutely out the window at the people who strode like titans to their jobs. Now you’re one of them. You’ve worked yourself out of that bus and across the plaza and onto an upward-moving elevator so silent it seems to glide. You’ve joined the tribe. At the age of twenty-five, you have an assistant. You make more money than your parents ever have. Your co-workers are polite, educated, and mostly white. You wear an Armani suit and sign up for a subscription wine service. You make monthly payments on your law school loans and go to step aerobics after work. Because you can, you buy yourself a Saab. Is there anything to question? It doesn’t seem that way. You’re a lawyer now. You’ve taken everything ever given to you—the love of your parents, the faith of your teachers, the music from Southside and Robbie, the meals from Aunt Sis, the vocabulary words drilled into you by Dandy—and converted it to this. You’ve climbed the mountain. And part of your job, aside from parsing abstract intellectual property issues for big corporations, is to help cultivate the next set of young lawyers being courted by the firm. A senior partner asks if you’ll mentor an incoming summer associate, and the answer is easy: Of course you will. You have yet to understand the altering force of a simple yes. You don’t know that when a memo arrives to confirm the assignment, some deep and unseen fault line in your life has begun to tremble, that some hold is already starting to slip. Next to your name is another name, that of some hotshot law student who’s busy climbing his own ladder. Like you, he’s black and from Harvard. Other than that, you know nothing—just the name, and it’s an odd one. Barack.

Outside the man who strolls up and down the plaza selling yo-yos stops at a bench to tighten his shoes. He is your city's version of the dandy in the double-breasted suit who roots through the garbage scavenging for recyclables, or the old couple with sombreros and ukuleles who sit in the park singing songs about their sex life — recognized by everybody, the object of a thousand jokes, but so lasting a feature of the landscape that they inspire as much affection as anyone you could mention.

the chain-of-custody document to the back of the search warrant application and was ready to go. “I’m out of here,” she announced. “You ever want to get together after work, I’m here, Amy. At least until the late show starts.” “Thanks,” Dodd said, seeming to pick up on Ballard’s worry. “I might take you up on that.” Ballard took the elevator down and then crossed the front plaza toward her car. She checked the windshield and saw no ticket. She decided to double down on her luck and leave the car there. The courthouse was only a block away on Temple; if she was fast and Judge Thornton had not convened court, she could be back to the car in less than a half hour. She quickened her pace. Judge Billy Thornton was a well-regarded mainstay in the local criminal justice system. He had served both as a public defender and as a deputy district attorney in his early years, before being elected to the bench and holding the position in Department 107 of the Los Angeles Superior Court for more than a quarter century. He had a folksy manner in the courtroom that concealed a sharp legal mind—one reason the presiding judge assigned wiretap search warrants to him. His full name was Clarence William Thornton but he preferred Billy, and his bailiff called it out every time he entered the courtroom: “The Honorable Billy Thornton presiding.” Thanks to the inordinately long wait for an elevator in the fifty-year-old courthouse, Ballard did not get to Department 107 until ten minutes before ten a.m., and she saw that court was about to convene. A man in blue county jail scrubs was at the defense table with his suited attorney sitting next to him. A prosecutor Ballard recognized but could not remember by name was at the other table. They appeared ready to go and the only party missing was the judge on the bench. Ballard pulled back her jacket so the badge on her belt could be seen by the courtroom deputy and went through the gate. She moved around the attorney tables and went to the clerk’s station to the right of the judge’s bench. A man with a fraying shirt collar looked up at her. The nameplate on his desk said ADAM TRAINOR. “Hi,” Ballard whispered, feigning breathlessness so Trainor would think she had run up the nine flights of steps and take pity. “Is there any chance I can get in to see the judge about a wiretap warrant before he starts court?” “Oh, boy, we’re just waiting on the last juror to get here before starting,” Trainor said. “You might have to come back at the lunch break.” “Can you please just ask him? The warrant’s only seven pages and most of it’s boilerplate stuff he’s read a million times. It won’t take him long.” “Let me see. What’s your name and department?” “Renée Ballard, LAPD. I’m working a cold case homicide. And there is a time element on this.” Trainor picked up his phone, punched a button, and swiveled on his chair so his back was to Ballard and she would have difficulty hearing the phone call. It didn’t matter because it was over in twenty seconds and Ballard expected the answer was no as Trainor swiveled toward her. But she was wrong. “You can go back,” Trainor said. “He’s in his chambers. He’s got about ten minutes. The missing juror just called from the garage.” “Not with those elevators,” Ballard said. Trainor opened a half door in the cubicle that allowed Ballard access to the rear door of the courtroom. She walked through a file room and then into a hallway. She had been in judicial chambers on other cases before and knew that this hallway led to a line of offices assigned to the criminal-court judges. She didn’t know whether to go right or left until she heard a voice say, “Back here.” It was to the left. She found an open door and saw Judge Billy Thornton standing next to a desk, pulling on his black robe for court. “Come in,” he said. Ballard entered. His chambers were just like the others she had been

Mrs. Rita Graul, one of Mrs. Hicks’s principal lieutenants, had just introduced two figures in chicken masks—“the white chicken, Senator Kennedy,” and “the brown chicken, Senator Brooke.” All of a sudden, there was Kennedy himself—that distinctive mop of brown hair, his face tanned from the late-summer weekend on the Cape. There was a brief but heated discussion over whether to let the Senator speak. Ultimately, Kennedy advanced to the microphone, but when the crowd realized who he was they booed and jeered: “Impeach him. Get rid of the bum!” “You’re a disgrace to the Irish!” “Why don’t you put your one-legged son on a bus!” “Yeah, let your daughter get bused, so she can get raped!” “Why don’t you let them shoot you, like they shot your brother!” Kennedy’s face tightened and his fist grasped the microphone more closely, but each time he tried to speak the clamor grew. Some in the crowd chanted, “No, no, we won’t go.” Others sang “God Bless America.” Then, slowly at first, more quickly as the idea caught on, the crowd turned row by row to face the Federal Building named for his brother, the late President. Kennedy abruptly left the platform and started across the plaza toward his office, a few women pursuing him, shouting further insults. Then out of the crowd sailed a ripe tomato, smashing on the pavement, splattering his pin-striped suit. “Ahhh,” sighed the crowd. Another tomato and several eggs rained down on him. Kennedy quickened his pace, head down. With the object of their resentment in full flight now, the pursuers closed in.

In 1958, Kaufman accompanied her husband Lewis Rosenstiel to a “party” hosted by Cohn at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Kaufman recalled entering through a side entrance and taking an elevator to the 2nd or 3rd floor; her husband knew the way well enough that she “had the impression [he] had been there before.” The suite was one of the largest available at the hotel and it was “all done in light blue.” Inside the suite were Cohn and another figure closely associated with both Cohn and Rosenstiel: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. To Kaufman’s surprise, Hoover was wearing women’s clothes and wig, with Cohn introducing him as “Mary” in a bout of barely concealed laughter. “Mary” was also incidentally the nickname widely used among New York Catholic clergy for Cardinal Spellman, who was also alleged to attend other parties hosted by Cohn in the Plaza’s “blue suite.”47