The narrative devolves into a succession of meandering profiles of well-known real estate brokers -LRB- including Linda Stein , Alice Mason , Edward Lee Cave , Dolly Lenz , Dottie Herman and Michael Shvo -RRB- and a series of long historical digressions about individual buildings like the Ansonia , digressions that are heavily indebted to earlier books like Elizabeth Hawes 's charming '' New York , New York : How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City '' ( 1993 ) .