In the night, with the front bathed in the glare of lights from the fire truck, I watched the last remaining firefighters finish their scrutiny of the wrecked interior. The building has now been evacuated, and will probably have to come down. If it does, it will be the first of all the buildings in which I’ve ever lived — in three of the boroughs of New York, on Martha’s Vineyard, in San Francisco, and in Golfe-Juan, France — to vanish. […]