This is the memory palace. I'm Nate Demayow.

You could go to Dreamland. You just caught the ferry at 23rd Street or the battery.

Or slog your way through the slow crawl of horse carts and motorcars, heading south on

Shell Road in the golden light of a late-tune afternoon. Down to the edge of the Atlantic,

where a white city rose up above the brick in Asher, Brooklyn.

And you could walk through the fake marble gates as the sun went down, and the sea flashed

amber and then gray. And Staten Island disappeared into the shadows, and the light grew dim enough

for you to fool yourself that the marble wasn't fake at all.

And then the bulbs blinked on, a million of them, lighting up the night in the largest

amusement park in the world, which was a hell of a thing to see, just a few years after

you'd seen your first electric light at all. And after you'd spent a 12-hour day in

some basement room, or some windowless factory floor, stitching sleeves or packing boxes,

fitting fingers to gloves by gaslight. And it'd be a hell of a thing even now, to see

dozens of white buildings made to look like French pavilions, Roman fora, Florentine

towers, a glow at the edge of the ocean.

Where you could dance in history's largest ballroom, where you could drink tea in a Japanese

garden, where you could sit in an auditorium in bleachers surrounding a vast pool of salt

water, and watch submarines fight a fake battle, beneath a scale model of San Francisco.

You could buy your ticket to Dreamland and take a gondola ride through the canals of

Venice, past St. Mark Square, and the Doge's Palace, steal a kiss beneath the bridge

size. You could ride your first escalator. This one to the top of a giant slide, which

would send you down, caroming off obstacles like the Plinko board on the prices ride. If

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