Nearby you can live like a star in Mizner Park, among Spanish-style stucco restaurants, pretty fountains, upscale galleries and the artistic amphitheater.
The solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs.
On the porch stood one lonely wooden rocker, and the afternoon breeze made the unpruned shoots of last year's poinsettias tap-tap against the cracked stucco wall.
Traders ferried in flint and obsidian from Guatemala and " artisans were able to model stucco in a very advanced stylistic manner, " says archaeologist Carlos Miguel Varela Sherrer, field chief of the site.
Here on the outskirts absurd stucco palaces reared themselves in the cool sunset, poised for an instant in cool unreality, glided off far away, succeeded by the mazed confusion of the Harlem River.
The smell of sage drifted up from a canyon and made me think of a dead man and a moonless sky. Straggly stucco houses were molded flat to the side of the hill, like bas-reliefs.