Peggy considered the suggestion for a moment. It would be a relief to take an afternoon off and just loaf about the house. But then she shook her head. “No. If we don’t have any luck, we can take tomorrow off, but I’d like to go out again today. There’s a meeting of the players tonight at Connie’s, you know, and I’d love to be able to report that we found something today. Let’s give it a try.”
“All right, Peggy,” Amy agreed, “if you’re game, so am I. And it would be nice to have some good news for the gang tonight. I’m just afraid that we’ll put a damper on the evening when we show up all tired out with some more of our usual bad news.”
Peggy half agreed, but knew that if she gave in and let down her pace, she might never again get up the kind of drive she had been working on for the last week. With a deep breath and a determined expression, she swept Amy off with her.
“The section we’re looking in today,” she explained as they walked to the subway, “is a little west and south of Greenwich Village. It’s mostly warehouses now, but there were once several theaters there, and since there’s been almost no new construction in the area in the last fifty years, there’s a chance that some of the theaters have been left alone. I’m particularly interested in two of them that I think have a better chance of being there than the others we’ve looked for.”
“Why should these two have a better chance?” Amy asked.
“The licenses show that there were several theaters built in the city at one time in a way that got around the fire laws. The law said that you couldn’t build a theater with any other kind of space over it, and with land so expensive, it kept a lot of people from building theaters. So a few smart builders put theaters on the top floors of office buildings, and got more rentable space on their ground that way. I’ve found permits for over a dozen of these top-floor theaters.”
“But why should they still be there,” Amy asked, “any more than any of the other old theaters?”
“Two reasons,” Peggy answered. “In the first place, nobody would want to convert a top-floor theater to a restaurant or a garage or anything like that. And in the second place, the district we’re going to has practically no apartment buildings in it, and that means that there aren’t residents in the neighborhood to want to use a theater for a social club or a church or a funeral parlor. I have a feeling that we’re going to find our theater here, if we find it anywhere.”
Amy agreed with Peggy’s logic and further noted that, if they did find a theater in this district, it would be a good location. There were two subway lines that had stops on either side of the area, and several bus lines as well.
These observations gave them a somewhat more cheerful outlook, and it was with a renewed sense of anticipation that they came up from the subway and started their search in this promising new district.