Harriet Welsch is an 11-year-old girl who lives in a brownstone on East 87th Street in Manhattan in the early 1960s. Her best friend is a boy named Sport who aspires to be a ballplayer. Harriet explains her hobby of spying on people to Sport. She has a regular route around the neighborhood to watch various occupants and records her observations in a journal. She began keeping notebooks when she was eight years old.

While Sport and Harriet are outside playing a game called Town that Harriet invented, they are interrupted by her nanny, Ole Golly. The woman announces that she is taking the children on a day trip because it’s important to see as much of the world as one can. The trio takes public transportation to Far Rockaway. Ole Golly leads them to a tiny house inhabited by a woman who “stood like a mountain, her hands on her hips, in a flowered cotton print dress and enormous hanging coat sweater. Probably the biggest sweater in the world, thought Harriet” (14).

This is Ole Golly’s mother. Mrs. Golly is delighted to see her daughter and the two children.