In her storage room-turned-office, Jennifer Baum works under an expanding leak that is causing the ceiling to turn brown and crumble. Mold grows in the buckets positioned to catch the water. She shrugs it off. Outside her office she has taped up a clear plastic suit, and a sign that reads, "All employees must don protective gear before coming in." Such is life in limbo. Nearly a year after Sept. 11, the Legal Aid Society-the lawyers for New York's poor and homeless-remains, well, homeless. The nonprofit has been barred from returning to its 90 Church St. headquarters, across from the World Trade Center site, because of environmental concerns. Legal Aid has uncomfortable company. More than 11,500 New Yorkers continue to work out of temporary space, according to analysis by Manhattan-based real estate brokerage TenantWise.com Inc. and Crain's New York Business. That's 8% of the 137,000 workers who lost their offices or access to them when the Twin Towers collapsed. Legal Aid's 450 displaced attorneys and staffers have spent the past 12 months spread among previously unused spaces-some unused for good reason-in the nonprofit's other offices. It could be another year and a half before they return to their old desks. They have contended with difficult working conditions as demand for Legal Aid's services is on the rise because of Sept. 11 and the deteriorating economy. The civil division is spread among a few boroughs. Their papers and documents, some 20,000 boxes worth, are stuck in a storage facility in Linden, N.J. "I am counting the days till we can have all the parts back in one place," says Steven Banks, Legal Aid's associate attorney in chief. In the memories of the exiled workers, the old office has achieved mythical proportions. They say the wood paneling and rugs had the ability to cool emotions and lift spirits. The Legal Aid office on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, where 65 displaced workers have cobbled together space amid the faded and scratched walls, looks more like a bargain basement. 

What happened to some of the displaced Legal aid staff?


Marsha loves playing with her noodle friend. She had it for a long time so it is now a dark brown color. When her mom first made it, it was white. The night she met her noodle friend was spaghetti night. Marsha's favorite dinner was spaghetti, which happened to be every Tuesday night. On one Tuesday, a piece of spaghetti fell on the kitchen floor. To Marsha, it looked like a stick man so she kept him. She named her new noodle friend Joey and took him everywhere she went. Sometimes Joey gets a little dried out so Marsha's mom told her to soak him in water every few days. There were a couple times that the family dog, Mika, has tried to take Joey from Marsha and eat him! So from now on, Marsha takes extra special care to make sure Joey is safe and sound at all times. During the day she keeps him in a plastic bag in her pocket. At night, she puts him under her pillow. She loves Joey and wants to always be friends with him. 

Who does she keep in a plastic bag in her pocket?


Miss Anderson dined out, and preferred to suppose that she had no time to think until she was on her way home along the empty road round Jakko at eleven o'clock that night. Then it pleased her to get out of her rickshaw and walk. There was an opulent moon, the vast hills curving down to the plains were all grey and silvery, and the deodars overhead fretted the road with dramatic shadows. About her hung the great stillness in a mighty loneliness in which little Simla is set, and it freed her from what had happened, so that she could look at it and cry out. She actually did speak, pausing in the little pavilion on the road where the nursemaids gather in the daytime, but very low, so that her words fell round her even in that silence, and hardly a deodar was aware. 'I will not go now,' she said. 'I will stay and realize that he is another woman's husband. That should cure me if anything will--to see him surrounded by the commonplaces of married life, that kind of married life. I will stay till she comes and a fortnight after. Besides, I want to see her--I want to see how far she comes short.' She was silent for a moment, and the moonlight played upon her smile of quiet triumph. 'He cares too,' she said; 'he cares too, but he doesn't know it, and I promise you one thing, Madeline Anderson, you won't help him to find out. And in five weeks I will go away and leave my love where I found it--on a mountaintop in the middle of Asia!' 


What type of moon was visible at eleven o'clock?