When I was trying to decide which car to buy, I test-drove a number of competing models: Lexus, BMW, Mercedes and a couple of others. My office was, at that point, located in the nearly glamourous Brooklyn Army Terminal (in a building only its mother could love: https://brooklynarmyterminal.com/ - my barbeque pit was on one of the top floor balconies shown in the atrium photo). The site had a guarded gate and the interior roads had potholes, railroad tracks, speed bumps and ended in a gravel pit - and on weekends nearly zero traffic.

So I would (despite some who protested) insist the dealer put on their seat belt and then floor the car for the nearly 1,200 foot straight run over the obstructions. One dealer swore I was working for Consumer Reports, another swore that if I broke the car, I bought it and a third just swore (in a virtuosity of three languages).

The BMW rep said that his was a car where you could "feel" the road. When I drove the Lexus, I didn't - and considering that I drove over potholes all the time, that was what sold me.

My top-floor office had 24 inches of reenforced concrete for a roof, windows with chicken wire hexagons embedded in the glass, 12 inch concrete interior petitions, and a bank of freight elevators large enough to carry moderate sized cars. My space of about 18,000 square feet was the smallest in the facility (but still large enough that I had an archery range to shoot down on weekends when the place was empty.

My "veranda", which extended through a pair of sliding patio doors from my office, was originally a loading bay where the huge horizontal crane (which ran the length of the atrium) could lift ordinance from the trains which ran on the tracks along the bottom of the atrium into the ware housed from which my office was carved. Until the Pentagon was built, the building had the largest footprint of any in the US.

Jeff