Tasia, twenty-six years old, is spending the summer in New York with her boyfriend Andreo. She is from a well-off Madrid family. She is attractive, with dark eyes and dark (preferably short) hair, olive skin; she is half Spanish and half Moroccan. Her father is a Madrid tax lawyer (more on him below). Tasia is closer to her mother, who has lead quite an extraordinary career: she was born in Nador in Northern Morocco and holds an American PhD in sociology and a Spanish law degree, and she worked in Spain under the Aznar government, in the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Sociologicas (the national sociological research board). Tasia is spending the summer working at an art gallery in Soho, owned by a friend of her family. [Costume: She wears simple black clothing, probably a long skirt instead of pants (it is very important to reduce the risk of sartorial anachronisms).]

 

Andreo, twenty-eight years old, is a law student from Madrid, clean-cut, with dark hair, soft-spoken, fair to olive skin. At the time of our story he is at the end of his twelve week stay at a New York corporate law firm as a summer associate; he is about to start his final of three years of law school at Columbia. He expects an offer from the firm. Andreo studied literature at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, where he met his girlfriend Tasia. Tasia's father is a partner in tax law at the Madrid office of a large American law firm, and he encouraged Andreo to work at his firm during the summer after his junior year of college. Andreo applied to law school during his junior year, and was accepted at Columbia. Andreo's abandoned thesis is called Spanish Time and attempted to depict an experience of time peculiar to Spanish artists and culture, influenced perhaps by Arabic culture, and demonstrates this sense of time in the plays of Lorca. He has noticed that living in America has changed his handwriting. He and Tasia have been carrying on a primarily long distance relationship for two years, and they are living together for the summer in an apartment owned by friends of her family, house sitting for a friend of her mother's; Andreo has sublet his apartment near Columbia to live with her.

 

William is a bearded, 53-year-old structural engineer, and he devised the innovative design of the Citicorp Center. He imagined the structure of a building that would resemble a human skeleton, based on four columns that extend to the top of the tower. These four columns support six sections of eight stories each, which make up the bulk of the tower. The eight stories of each section are bundled together by diagonal braces that run from the top corners of the eighth floor to the center of the lowest floor, and it is here that the diagonal braces are bonded to the four columns. These joints between the diagonal braces and the columns are obviously crucial.  When he accidentally discovers that the steel corporation that erected the building had used cheaper and weaker joints, he realizes he has a problem on his hands unique in scale and danger in the history of architecture:  an 8% chance of the world's seventh tallest building collapsing in any given year.  He is a great fan of classical music.

 

Hugh is a quite successful 66-year-old architect who, at the time of our story, had just designed the Citicorp Center, a building on Lexington Avenue between 53rd and 54th Street in New York that houses both the law firm that Andreo works for and the bank that John works for.  Hugh was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1912, and he studied at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design; several of his fellow students there also went on to celebrated careers, including Pei. Hugh has developed an architecture firm that consistently produces beautiful buildings, which typically bear the influences of Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Alvar Aalto.  His distinctive, oblique top to the 9l4-foot Citicorp tower was, in part, a response to the Pennzoil Place in Houston:  a building designed by the architect Hugh considers his personal rival, Philip Johnson. 

 

John is a conservative-looking banker with an engineering background. At the time of our story he is an executive vice president at Citibank, in charge of the retail bank division. He's around 37 years old. His efforts to develop this division have put a financial strain on the organization, particularly at the expense of the wholesale corporate bankers, some of whom are calling for his (forced) retirement. Luckily, John has the support of the CEO, his friend Walter. Unbeknownst to our characters at the time of our story, John's idea (a consumer banking divison) will prove immensely lucrative, and he will eventually become CEO, leading his company through a merger with a insurance/finance/brokerage company Travellers Group:  a $70 billion deal that will create the largest financial company in the world, forever altering the scale (and the boundaries) of global capitalism. Indeed, in 1992, John quipped, "I am a revolutionary, as you may know," a reference to the American journalist and author of Ten Days that Shook the World whose name he shares.

Helena, a young woman in her late twenties, is of German/Lithuanian heritage.  She grew up in suburban Chicago and studied literature at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.  After college she moved to Minneapolis with her boyfriend and worked at Simpson Housing Services, Inc., a nonprofit serving homeless adults and families with children.  After she and her boyfriend went their separate ways after much discussion (and some heartbreak), she decided that she needed more time to write, so she moved to New York, where she ended up working as an assistant to an editor at Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux.  She still doesn't have much time to write and is currently planning her next move while enjoying the city. 

Daniel is a promising young artist living in New York.  Part Greek, he studied plastic arts at the Rhode Island School of Design.  A dark and romantic spirit; a Byronesque sensibility; a fairly good bartender.

Aparna is an Indian woman in her late thirties; she has lived in New York for thirteen years.  She works in the healthcare industry and is a devoted mother of two.  A terrific cook, she lives with her family in an apartment on the upper east side with a kitchen, in her words, "far, far too small."

A Japanese couple in their early thirties, they are visiting New York for the first time.  Their story is at least as interesting as that of Tasia and Andreo -- but unfortunately, they're only supporting characters here.