Having just finished my fourth article about tenants in the Hotel Breslin, I told my editor Wednesday night: “Here’s hoping they don’t make news next week!”

Not that it’s not an absorbing tale, one that I was both thrilled and stupefied no one else had discovered; it combines elements of the better-known and quite different sagas of the Hotel Chelsea , with its community of artists, and 47 East 3rd Street, the tenement whose new owners want to turn into a private house. I was both thrilled and a touch wary to see it on this site, and positively paranoid when I heard the Times had finally sent a reporter sniffing around. And I certainly want to be the one covering the next stage, whatever that is.

But I think my brain and heart are kind of tapped from it all. I need to take a rest, and make room for other stories. First and foremost, this weekend, the story that I think will begin my book, which takes place in Princeton, New Jersey in 1781.