Volume 38, Number 1 & 2 · January 17, 1991
New York: Sentimental Journeys
By Joan Didion
We know her story, and some of us, although not all of us, which was to become one of the story's several equivocal aspects, know her name. She was a twenty-nine-year-old unmarried white woman who worked as an investment banker in the corporate finance department at Salomon Brothers in downtown Manhattan, the energy and natural resources group. She was said by one of the principals in a Texas oil stock offering on which she had collaborated as a member of the Salomon team to have done 'top-notch' work. She lived alone in an apartment on East 83rd Street, between York and East End, a sublet cooperative she was thinking about buying. She often worked late and when she got home she would change into jogging clothes and at eight-thirty or nine-thirty in the evening would go running, six or seven miles through Central Park, north on the East Drive, west on the less traveled road connecting the East and West Drives at approximately 102nd Street, and south on the West Drive. The wisdom of this was later questioned by some, by those who were accustomed to thinking of the Park as a place to avoid after dark, and defended by others, the more adroit of whom spoke of the citizen's absolute right to public access ('That park belongs to us and this time nobody is going to take it from us,' Ronnie Eldridge, at the time a Democratic candidate for the City Council of New York, declared on the op-ed page of The New York Times), others of whom spoke of 'running' as a preemptive right. 'Runners have Type A controlled personalities and they don't like their schedules interrupted,' one runner, a securities trader, told the Times to this point. 'When people run is a function of their life style,' another runner said. 'I am personally very angry,' a third said, 'Because women should have the right to run any time.'
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