The 'marshal' of his neighborhood

John Maloney, age 70, holds the keys to more than a dozen homes on his block in the Windsor Terrace neighborhood in Brooklyn.

"Just about every block in this city has two or three just like Mr. Maloney — elderly men and women who have known only one neighborhood most of their lives," says The New York Times. "They grew up on the same streets and stoops where they grew old. They are the antithesis of white flight, the exception to gentrification."

"New York is big enough to hold more than eight million people in hundreds of neighborhoods, yet small enough to sustain one obscure, marvelous life in the space of a few city blocks."

The Times profiles "Moe" Maloney, a retired Teamster who, with the exception of an unfortunate period in Lakewood, New Jersey, has spent his entire life in a neighborhood roughly nine blocks long. Like one of the neighborhood merchants portrayed in Jane Jacobs's Death and Life of Great American Cities, who kept keys for people living near his Greenwich Village shop, Moe is the man to turn to when a neighbor is locked out.