The world, they say, is divided into two groups of people. (Ed. Note: ‘They’, in that sentence, can be translated as ‘I’, as so often. Last week I invented friends to illustrate a point I wanted to make. Today, I’ve invented an entire swathe of society. Next week, the world!)

The world, they say, is divided into two groups of people: those who have one or more dirty little secrets that they don’t care to share with others, and – depending on which particular group of ‘they’ I am favouring today – either those who don’t, or those who pretend to themselves that they don’t.

I thought today I would remove another of Salome’s seven veils and share one of my dirty little secrets with you. When I read articles in The Times online, I am addicted to reading the comments from readers. Most people are shocked and horrified when I admit this, but let me attempt to justify my habit.

 A couple of different factors feed this addiction. First, it is always interesting to see how many comments it takes until two or more readers descend to personal abuse. Despite The Times’ algorithm for filtering and blocking comments based on the language used, creative readers are still quite able to be very unpleasantly abusive. Clearly, some of these readers come with a prior agenda. However, in other cases, it is simply part of the social media phenomenon that allows otherwise civilised individuals to feel no restraint in engaging in the kind of insulting exchanges that they would be horrified to witness, let alone to instigate, in a face-to-face encounter.

A second factor that draws me to these comments is that sometimes readers are able to contribute a personal anecdote that confirms, contradicts, or otherwise sheds more light on, the news story, op-ed article or obituary they are commenting on. These personal insights often add another dimension to my appreciation of the original story.

And then there are the serendipitous moments, one of which arose last week. A casual comment from a reader led me on a Google trail that uncovered a story that I found fascinating, and that I hope will tickle your fancy as well. It is a tale of tragic loss, hubris, irony, urban development and popular culture, and it begins on the Obituary pages of The Times.

On June 1, less than two weeks ago, Cynthia Weil died. I readily confess to wondering who she was when I first saw the obituary. However, experience has taught me that the Obituary pages are often the most interesting, and sometimes the most enlightening, in the paper, and certainly consistently contain the most uplifting stories in the paper – not that the bar is set very high in that regard.

I soon learnt that Cynthia Weil was the lyricist, and her husband Barry Mann the tunesmith, of an astonishing and wide-ranging collection of popular songs from the early 60s. Together, they wrote, inter tin-pan-alia, You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ for the Righteous Brothers, On Broadway for the Drifters and We Gotta Get out of This Place, recorded by the Animals. I felt less embarrassed by my ignorance when I learnt that when Mann and Weil, staged, in 2004, a musical revue based on their songs, they named the show, ironically, They Wrote That?

The obituary made reference to the couple sharing a cubbyhole in New York’s Brill Building in the 1960s, a building that boasted many such upright-piano-equipped cubbyholes.

One of the commenters on the obit asked: ‘Who was Brill?’ For some reason, I found the question intriguing, and so I did some research. This is the story I uncovered.

A property on the corner of Broadway and 49^th Street was leased early in the last century to a men’s clothing store, Brill Brothers. In 1929, the Brills sublet to property developer Abraham Lefcourt, with the requirement that he build a structure to be completed no later than November 1931. Lefcourt, whose ambition exceeded his practicality, announced plans for the tallest building in the world at 1050 feet, with a $30 million price tag. This was a deliberate attempt to upstage both the Chrysler building, on which work had started, and the Empire State building, on which work was about to start.

Two factors made Lefcourt’s plans unrealistically grandiose. The first, for which he must take responsibility, was that the site he had sublet was a third of the area of the Chrysler lot, and a seventh of the size of the Empire State lot. Such a small area could not reasonably be expected to support so tall a building.

The second unfortunate fact, which Lefcourt, like many others, failed to foresee, was that, 25 days after he announced his plans on October 3, 1929, the New York Stock Market crash would begin. Ever an enterprising businessman, Lefcourt calculated that investors who survived the crash would prefer to put their money in bricks and mortar, and he started rethinking.

Then, just four months after his initial announcement, Lefcourt’s 17-year-old son Alan, who was the apple of his father’s eye, died of anaemia. Within a month, Lefcourt had filed plans with the authorities for a 10-storey office structure on the site, to be named the Alan E. Lefcourt Building, in his son’s memory.

Within a year of the building being completed, Abraham Lefcourt defaulted on his sublease, and the building reverted to the Brill Brothers, who reopened their store there. As early as 1932, the building became known as the Brill Building, and the only reference to Alan’s memory was the busts, which bear no plaque.

When Lefcourt Sr died, in December 1932, his net worth, which had stood at over $100 million in 1928, was declared as being $2,500, none of it in real estate.

Originally, the office floors above the store were leased by the Brills to a variety of ordinary businesses. However, by the 1940s, the building was already full of musicians. The composer Johnny Marks, who wrote Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer in 1949, had space in the Brill no later than 1950, and his firm, St. Nicholas Music, (don’t you love the name!) still has offices there. Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole were among others who rented office space in the building.

By 1962, the Brill Building contained 165 music businesses. A musician could find a publisher and printer, cut a demo, promote the record and cut a deal with radio promoters, all within this one building. The creative culture of the independent music companies in the Brill Building and the nearby 1650 Broadway came to define the influential “Brill Building Sound” and the style of popular song writing and recording created by its writers and producers.

Composers and lyricists who worked in the Brill Building in its heyday included (deep breath): Burt Bacharach, Jeff Barry, Bert Berns, Bobby Darin, Hal David, Neil Diamond, Luther Dixon, Sherman Edwards, Buddy Feyne, Gerry Goffin, Howard Greenfield, Ellie Greenwich, Jack Keller, Carole King, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Barry Mann, Johnny Mercer, Rose Marie McCoy, Van McCoy, Irving Mills, Fred Neil, Laura Nyro, Tony Orlando, Doc Pomus, Jerry Ragovoy, Ben Raleigh, Teddy Randazzo, Billy Rose, Neil Sedaka, Mort Shuman, Paul Simon, Cynthia Weil.

Here’s Carole King describing the atmosphere in the building:

Every day we squeezed into our respective cubby holes with just enough room for a piano, a bench, and maybe a chair for the lyricist if you were lucky. You’d sit there and write and you could hear someone in the next cubby hole composing a song exactly like yours. The pressure in the Brill Building was really terrific—because Donny (Kirshner) would play one songwriter against another. He’d say: “We need a new smash hit”—and we’d all go back and write a song and the next day we’d each audition for Bobby Vee’s producer.

These days, the building houses more offices related to the film-making than to the music-making industry, but in 2017 (the latest reference I could find) Paul Simon still had offices there.

In 2010, in recognition of its art deco design, its impressive facade and its contribution to the cultural history of the city, the Brill Building was officially designated a New York City landmark.

And yet who now remembers Abraham Lefcourt or (which would probably have grieved him more) his son, Alan?

Now, can you blame me for reading the comments following the articles in The Times? You really never know what you are going to turn up next.

Unlike readers of my blog, who always know what (or, rather, who) is going to turn up next. And here they are, right on cue: the lyricist, the performer and the tunesmith. Take your pick.