It was Percy Wetmore who ushered Coffey onto the block, with the supposedly traditional cry of “Dead man walking! Dead man walking here!”

Only the chickens clacked at the Saturday quiet and fat mouse-minded cats licked whiskers on the empty steps.

The $60 million project, devised by landscape architect Kate Orff more than a decade ago and launched by the Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, uses an approach that Orff has dubbed “oyster-tecture”: partially submerged mounds of rubble mingle with shell structures implanted with living larvae.

He thought it indecorous to have a young and pretty girl packing with him in his room. He was thinking so Frenchly, that it even seemed to him Bess should not have proposed it.