SPEAK, HOYT-SCHE~Lerhorn Doom and Romance on a Subway Platform by Jonathan Lethem

M E M 0 R

SPEAK, HOYT-SCHE~lERHORN Doom and romance on a subway platform By Jonathan Lethem

'~n you're a child, everything vard. Fultonhad suffered a steep de- telling and shrouded at once were the local is famous. On that principle, cline, from Manhattanesque grandeur ruined shop-displaywindowsthat lined Hovt-Schermerhorn was the most fa- to ghetto pedestrian mall, through the the long corridor from the Bond Street mous subway station in the world. It Fiftiesand Sixties. Now, no lessvital in entrance. Elegant blue-and-yellow tile- was the first subway work labeled them station I knew, and it with an enormous took years for me to L-standing for what disentangle my primal exactly? The ruined fascination with its dressmakers' dum- status as a functional mies and empty dis- ruin, an indifferent play stands behind home to clockwork the cracked glass chaos, from the fact weren't saying. that it was, in objec- The station was tive measure, an synonymous with anomalous place. Per- crime. A neighbor- sonal impressionsand hood legend held that neighborhood lore Hoyt-Schermerhorn swirled in my exag- consistentlv ranked gerated regard. In fact highest 'in ~rrests in the place was cool the whole transit sys- and weird beyond my tem. Its two border obsession's parame- streets, Hoyt and ters, cooler and weird- Bond, were vents er than most subway from the Fulton mall stations anyway. area, where purse My Brooklyn neighborhood, as I its way, the place wasfull of chain out- snatchers and street dealers were like- knew it in the 1970s,wasan awkwardly lets and sidewalkvendors, many selling ly to flee and be cornered. The station gentrifying residential zone. The Hoyt- African licorice-root chews and "Mus- also housed one of the borough's four Schermerhorn station stood at the bor- lim" incense alongside discount socks Transit Police substations, a head- der of the vibrant mercantile disarray and hats and mittens. The station itself quarters for subway cops that legislat- of Fulton Street-once the borough's gave testimony to the lost commercial ed over a quarter of Brooklyn's subway poshest shopping and theater boule- greatness of the area. Like some Man- system, so perhaps it was merely that hattan subwaystops, though fewer and suspectsnabbed elsewherein the system Jonathan Lethem is the author of six novels, fewer every year, it licensed businesses were brought there to register their ac- including Motherless Brooklynand, most on its mezzaninelevel:a magazineshop, tual arrest? I've never been able to cor- recently, The FortressofSolitude. a shoeshine stand, a bakery; Most roborate the legend. The presence of

Illustration by Andrea Ventura MEMOIR 73 cops and robbers in the same place has teenager, on night trains, looping as ly the younger cousin to a more suc- a kind of chicken-and-egg quality. Or prey would, to skirt trouble. I relate cessfulfreak train, also run out of Hoyt- should it be considered as a Heisen- this form of looping to other subter- Schermerhorn: the Aqueduct Race- bergian "observer" problem---do we ar- ranean habits I learned as a terrified track special, which ran horse-racing rest you because we see you? Would child. For instance, a tic of boarding: bettors out to the track on gambling af- we arrest you as much elsewhere if we I'll stand at one spot until a train ternoons. Begun in 1959, it flourished, were there? stops, then abruptly veer left- or as wagering's infrastructure tends to, However ridiculous it may seem, it rightward, to enter a car other than until in 1981 it became a casualty of is true that within sight of that police the one for which I might have ap- the even more efficient Off-Track Bet- substation my father, his arms laden peared to be waiting. This to shake ting, known as OTB, the walk-in store- with luggage for a flight out of ]FK, pursuers, of course. Similarly, a front gambling establishments that had his pocket picked while waiting nighttime trick of exiting at lonely soon dotted the city. Both the Train to on line for a token. And the pay subway stations: at arrival I'll stay in the Plane and the Aqueduct Race- phone in the station was widely un- my seat until the doors have lain track special made use of Hoyt- derstood to have drug-dealers-only open for a few seconds, then dash Schermerhorn's most fundamentally status. Maybe it does still. I myself from the train. In these tricks my strange feature: its two quiescent tracks was detained, not arrested, trying to teenager self learned to cash in a and dark spare platform, that parallel breeze the wrong way through an ex- small portion of the invisibility that ghost haunting the live platforms. As it gate, flashing an imaginary bus pass is not only each subway rider's pre- a kid, I took that dark platform for at the token agent, on my way to high sumed right but his duty to other granted. Later, I'd learn how rare it school. A cop gave me a ticket and passengers, whose irritation and pan- was-though there are whole ghost turned me around to go home and get icrises at each sign of oddness, in stations, dead to trains, and famously money for a token. I tried to engage exchange for tiny like li- host to homeless populations and vast my cop in sophistry-how could I be hoods of increased safety. graffiti masterpieces, only a handful of ticketed for a crime that had been active stations in the entire system prevented? Shouldn't he let me Ather peculiarities helped Hoyt- have a ghost platform. through to ride the train if I were Schermerhorn colonize my dreams. Even if I'd known it, I wasn't then paying the price for my The station featured not only the live- curious enough to consider how those misdeed? No cigar. ly express A train, and its pokey but two unused tracks and that whole serviceable local equivalent, the CC, spare platform spoke, as did the ru- Undercover transit policemen are but also the erratic and desultory GG, ined display windows, of the zone's rrained to watch for "loopers"-that is, a train running a lonely trail through dwindled splendor, its former place as riders who switch from one train car to Bedford-Stuyvesant and into Queens. a hub, a center. Where I lived was the next at each stop. Loopers are un- The GG-shortened today to the G- self-evidently marginal to Manhat- derstood to be likely pickpockets, wor- had the sorry distinction of being the tan-who cared that it was once some- thy of suspicion. Even before that, only subway line in the entire system thing grander? What got me excited though, loopers are guilty of using the never to penetrate Manhattan. All about Hovt-Scherrnerhorn's eerie subway 'Uffong. In truth, every subway roads lead to Rome, but not the GG. fourth platform was this: one summer rider is an undercover officer in a Hoyt-Scherrnerhorn also hosted a day in 1979, I found a film crew work- precinct house of the mind, noticing quickly abandoned Eighties transit ex- ing there, swirling in and out of the and cataloguing outre and dissident periment, the Train to the Plane-ba- station from rows of trucks parked behavior in his fellow passengers even sically an A train that, for an addi- along vacant Schermerhorn Street. while cultivating the apparent indif- tional fare, made a quick expressrun to Actors costumed as both gang mem- ference for which New Yorkers are fa- the airport. For my friends and me, the bers and as high school students mous, above and below ground. It may Train to the Plane was richly comical dressed for prom night worked in a only be safe to play at not noticing on several grounds-first of all, be- stilled train. The movie, I learned from others because our noticing senses are cause it didn't actually go to the air- an assistant director standing bored sharpened to trigger-readiness. jittery port: you had to take a bus from the with a walkie-talkie at one of the sub- subway-shooter Bernhard Goetz once end of the line. Second, for its twee way entrances, was called The W'ar- ran for mayor. He may not have been and hectoring local-television ad- riors. My invisible, squalid home turf electable, but he had a constituency. "Take the train to the plane, take the train had been redeemed as picturesque. As it happens, I'm also an inveter- to the plane," etc. And last because the New Yorkers mostly take film crewsfor ate looper, though I do it less these sight of it, rumbling nearly empty granted as an irritant part of the self- days. I'll still sometimes loop to into Hoyr-Scherrnerhorn with the em- congratulatory burden of living in the place myself at the right exit stair- blem of an airplane in place of its iden- World Capital. But I was more like a well, to save steps if I'm running tifying number or letter, suggested an small-town hick in my delight at late. I've looped on the 7 out to inglorious subway train that was fan- Hoyt-Schermerhorn's being deemed Shea Stadium, searching for a friend tasizing itself some other, less earth- lensworthy. I was only afraid that headed for the same ball game. More bound conveyance. like a vampire or a ghost, the station than anything, though, I looped as a The Train to the Plane was actual- wouldn't actually be able to be cap-

74 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / DECEMBER 2004 tured in depiction: what were the odds would become the BMT line stumbled financial district. Two stops later, this crappy-looking movie with no stars unwittingly into Beach's intact waiting his girlfriend boarded the train. would ever be released? By picking my room, his drained fountain and extin- They'd kiss and moon between turf, the crew had likely guished lamps, his stilled wooden car, stops until she reached her destina- rJ"" sealed their doom. they must have felt like in- tion, Lynn and I took special plea- truders on Tut's tomb. sure in witnessing this openly, star- ~he origins of the New York un- ing like evil Walter Keane kids so derground rapid transit, like those of the Ibecame a regularcustomer in 1978. the conductor felt the knife edge of city itself,reflect a bastard convergence That year I began commuting from our complicity .. of utopian longing and squalid practi- Brooklyn to Harlem, an hour away in This was the year another student, cality-land grabs, sweetheart deals, the upper reaches of Manhattan, to a talented violinist, had been pushed lined pockets. The city's first, thwart- attend Music and Art, a venerated from a train platform, her arm sev- ed subway was no different: a Jules public high school created by Fiorello ered and reattached. The incident un- Verne dream, one instantly snuffed by La Guardia. (Music and Art, with its nerved us to the extent that we were Tammany Hall, that paradigmatic po- sister campus, Performing Arts, was able to afford to maintain it as con- litical machine. The storyhas the beau- immortalized in the movie Fame dur- scious knowledge: we couldn't, and so ty of a Greek myth: a short length of ing my years there, but since I was didn't. There were paltry but some- pneumatic subway built in 1870 in se- studying painting and no painters were how effective brackets of irony around cret beneath Broadway by a gentleman portrayed in the film, I didn't take it our sense of the city's dangers. Lynn engineer determined to alleviate the personally.) The A train out of Hoyt- and I were soon joined by Jeremy and choking daylight nightmare of New Schermerhorn was now my twice- Adam, other kids from my street, and York'sfoot, pig, horse, stagecoach, and daily passage, to and from. My com- we all four persistently found crime surface railway traffic, against the sta- panion was Lynn Nottage, a kid from and chaos amusing. The same inci- tus quo wishes of Tammany's Boss the block I grew up on, a street friend. dents that drew hand-wringing from Tweed, who as commissioner of public Lynn was from a black middle-class our parents and righteous indignation works rolled in troughs of money ex- family; I was from a white bohemian from the tabloids struck us as merry ev- torted from trolley.and omnibus com- one. We had never gone to school to- idence of the fatuousness of grown- panies. The tube's builder, Alfred Ely gether in Brooklyn-Lynn had been at ups. Naturally the world sucked, nat- Beach, ought to be the hero of one of private school-but now were high urally the authorities blinked. those elegiac novels of Time Travelers school freshmen together, in distant Anything was possible. Graffiti was in Olde New York-one of the first Harlem. Lynn had the challenge of maybe an art form, certainly a defin- editors of ScientificAmerican, architect getting to school on time with me as itive statement as to who had actual- of American patent law, he was also a her albatross. Some mornings the ly grasped the nature of reality as well health nut and an opera buff, and the sound of her ringing the doorbell was as the workings of the reeling system man in whose officeEdisonfirstdemon- my alarm clock. around you: not adults but the kids strated the phonograph ("Good morn- Lynn and I had habits. We stood just a year or three older than you, ing.... How do you like the talking in a certain spot on the platform, who were scary but legendary. The box?"). In fifty-eight nights of covert boarding the same train every entire city was like the school in the digging, Beach's crew created a 312- morning (despite an appearance of Ramones' movie Rock 'n' Roll High foot tunnel, then assembled an elegant chaos, the system is regular). Most School, or the college in Animal wooden, horseshoe-shaped subwaycar, mornings we rode the same subway House-the dean corrupt and blind, pushed by an enormous electric fan. car, the conductor's car. Had we the campus an unpatrolled playground. When he unveiled his miracle to the been advised to do this by protec- Our own fear, paradoxically, was more press-in an underground waiting room tive parents? I don't know. Any- evidence, like the graffiti and the con- fitted with curtains, frescoed walls, how, we became spies, on the adults, ductor's affair, of the reckless, wide- stuffed chairs, a grandfather clock, a the office workers, tourists, beggars, open nature of this world. It may have fountain, and bright zircon lamps-his and policemen who'd share segments appeared from the outside that Lynn demonstration subway made a sensa- of our endless trip. We took a special and Jeremy and Adam and I were cow- tion, drawing four hundred thousand delight in watching the bewilder- ering in this lawless place, visitors in 1870. BossTweed, aghast at ment of riders trapped after Fifty- rJ"" but in our minds we romped. what had been hatched beneath his ninth Street, thinking they'd board- feet, roused a legal and entrepreneurial ed a local, faces sagging in defeat as ~he names of the three limbs of assault against Beach's tunnel, invest- the train skipped every station up the subway-the IRT (Interborough ing his influence-and New YorkCity's to 125th, the longest express hop in Rapid Transit), the BMT (Brooklyn immediate future-in elevated lines the system. Also, we spied on our Manhattan Transit, changed from rather than subways.The life wasgrad- own conductor. The conductor's the original BR T, for Brooklyn ually squeezed out of Beach's dream. wife rode in with him to work- Rapid Transit), and the INO (Inde- His tunnel was rented for wine stor- she'd been aboard since somewhere pendent l-s-are slowly falling from age, then sealed, then forgotten. When before Hoyt-Schermerhorn-then New Yorkers' common tongue, and in 1912 diggers excavating for what kissed him goodbye at a stop in the the last enamel signs citing the old

MEMOIR 75 names will soon be pried off. Slip- destiny was no longer horizontal but casion only for an admiring photo- ping into shadow with the disuse of vertical, perhaps fractal, a break with graph of a crane picking a car from those names is the tripartite origin of the American frontier motif in favor the pit, labeled with a brief caption. the subways, the fact that each of of something more dense Alfred Kazin, in A Walker in the the three sets of trains was once a and strange. City, wrote: "All those first stations completely separate and rival corpo- in Brooklyn-Clark, Borough Hall, ration. The lines tried to squeeze one Construction of new subway sta- Hoyt, Nevins, the junction of the another out of business, even as they tions and tunnels in a city already East and West side express lines- vied with now-extinct rival forms: webbed with infrastructure was a rou- told me only that I was on the last streetcars and elevated trains. On tine marvel. According to Stan leg home, though there was always a this subject, the language of the Fischler's Uptown, Downtown, tunnel- stirring of my heart at Hoyt, where now-unified citywide system, the of- ing for the IND required, among oth- the grimy subway platform was sud- ficial maps and names, has grown er astonishing statistics (22 million cu- denly enlivened by Abraham and mute. But the grammar of the train bic yards of rock and earth displaced, 7 Straus's windows of ladies' wear ... " lines and stations themselves, with million man-days of labor) the reloca- When a friend directed me to this their overlaps and redundancies, tion of 26 miles of water and gas pipes, passage, thinking he'd solved the their strange omissions and impro- 350 miles of electrical wire, and 18 mystery of those deserted shopwin- vised passageways, still pronounces milesof sewagepipes. What's striking, dows in the Hoyt-Schermerhorn sta- this history everywhere. though, in photographs documenting tion, I at least had a clue. I searched The early subways pioneered in that work, isthe blithe disinterest in the the corporate history of Abraham & crafty partnership with realtors and faces of passersby, even at such pre- Straus-Brooklyn's dominant de- developers. Groping for new rider- posterous scenes as workers tunneling partment store and a polestar in my ship, the early owners threw track beneath a street where both a surface childhood constellation of the bor- deep into farmland, anticipating trolley and an elevated train are being ough's tarnished majesty, with its (and creating) neighborhoods like kept in continuous operation above. brass fixtures and uniformed elevator Bensonhurst and Jackson Heights. Construction of the Sixth Avenue tun- operators, and the eighth floor's mys- The latecomer, the IND{ependent), nel at Thirty-fourth Street was an en- terious stamp- and coin-collector's contrary to its name, was a political gineering marvel of its day, the tunnel counters. In the A&S annals I found instrument, conceived from within a having to be threaded under the Broad- the .name of a Fulton Street rival: mayor's feud with transit's maverick way BMT subway and over the Penn- Frederick Loeser's, one of the na- owners. James Hylan, elected mayor sylvania Railroad (now Amtrak) tubes, tion's largest department Stores for in 1917, was widely understood to be as well as an even more deeply buried almost a century, eventually gobbled a puppet of the Hearst newspapers- water main. This, according to Groff by A&S in a merger. The 1950s a man who, according to Robert Conklin, author ofAll About Subways, were to such stores as the Mesozoic Moses, "swelled instead of growing" "the most difficultpiece of subwaycon- was to the dinosaurs-between '52 in office. His credo-"the preserva- struction which has ever been at- and '57 New York lost Loeser's, tion of democracy and the retention tempted," is almost impossible to keep Namm's, Wanamaker's, McCreery's, of the 5-cent fare"-is only a glimpse in mind on an F train as it slidesbland- and Hearn's; the names alone are into the scope of his obsession with ly through Herald Square today. concrete poetry. transit interests, whom he accused of A scattering of photos of the Hoyt- I'd nailed my tile-work L: Loeser's wishing to rape New York "like the Schermerhorn dig are available in the created display windows in the new conquered cities of old." archives in the basement of the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station to vie The legacy of Hylan's bullying was MTA's building on Livingston Street, with A&S's famous (at least to Al- the eventual merging of this chaotic just a couple of blocks from the station. fred Kazin) windows at Hoyt. Kazin's system into a confederated public trust. The excavation method was typical: it windows are visible as bricked-in tile When subway unification came, in was a "cut-and-cover" job, where an window frames today, but like the 1940 under Fiorello La Guardia, it was elaborate temporary roadway is con- smashed and dusty Loeser's windows the largestrailwaymerger in the history structed of wood and girders. The ma- of my childhood, they go ignored. of the country-of, I suppose, the jority of the pictures document a not- Meanwhile, aboveground on Fulton world. Under Hvlan's own watch, quite-catastrophe: the collapse after Street, the name Loeser's has recent- though, the IND was a city-sponsored a rainstorm of a portion of the wood- ly reemerged like an Etch A Sketch rival to the private interests, one en roadway into the tunnel, swallow- filigree on some second-story brick- nonetheless forced to run in the black ing several cars and streetlamps but work, as lost urban names and therefore to cling to established no lives. In several photos the land- rr' sometimes do. . population centers, unlike its more ad- mark Quaker Meetinghouse is seen venturous precursors. The IND's cir- hovering on the crumbled brink of !he abandoned platform wasa mys- cumscription within the city's previ- the hole. Another few feet and it tery shallower to penetrate than ouslyestablishedtransit routes alienated would be undermined. The only news- Loeser's L-in fact, it is the station's the realtor lobby, previously the sub- paper account I could locate treated bragging point. The extra track con- way's great secret weapon. The city's the collapse so glancingly it was oc- nects the abandoned platform to an

76 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2004 abandoned station, three blocks away Find Out About arper's Magazine is accept- on Court Street. This spur of misguided the Other You ing applications from col- development was put out of its misery H lege students and gradu- in 1946, and sat unused until some- ates for its editorial and art internship time in the early Sixties, when the programs. MT A realized it at last had an ideal fa- • Editorial interns serve full-time for cility for renting to film and television three to five months and gain practi- crews. The empty Court Street station cal experience in critical reading and and the curve of track between it analysis, research, fact-checking, and and the ghost platform at Hoyt- the general workings of a national Schermerhorn allowed filmmakers to magazine. Each intern works with an run trains in and out of two picturesque editor on one section ofthe magazine stations along a nice curved wall, with- and takes part in the creation of the out disturbing regular operations. For Harper's Index. this distinction Hoyt-Schermerhorn • Art interns serve part-time for three sporadically stars in human-interest to five months and view current ex- stories in the New York Times Metro hibits at museums and galleries, take Section: who doesn't enjoy reading part in the selection of art for the Read- about film stars slumming in urban lo- "An important contribution ings section, and gain skills in elec- cations? The nonpareil among thirty- to the privacy debate, and tronic page layout, color separation, art six movies made utilizing subway prop- Solove's discussion of the harms and photo research, and working with erty just between 1970 and 1975 is the of what he calls' digital dossiers' freelancers. subway-hijacking-hostage thriller Allinterns are encouraged to gen- The is invaluable." Taking of Pelham One Two Three. It erate ideas, read widely, and approach JEFFREY ROSEN I author of was in Hoyt-Schermerhorn's approach problems creatively. Both positions The Unwanted Gaze and The Naked Crowd tunnels that Robert Shaw and his co- are unpaid. $29.95 cloth hort stripped off fake mustaches and For further information and an appli- trench coats and, clutching bags of cation, call (212) 420-5720. Please spec- ransom money, made their hopeless ify which program you are applyingfor. dash for daylight, and it was in Hoyt- Schermerhorn's approach tunnels that Shaw, cornered by crusading MT A in- spector Walter Matthau, stepped on the third rail and met his doom. SOLUTION TO THE P H A L L U S E A S E a And then there is The \Varriors.The NOVEMBER PUZZLE film is based on a novel by Sol Yurick, E E R E I N V E N T E D itself in tum based on Xenophon's An- A F F A B L E S A U C E abasis, an account of a band of Greek S T A T I a N I N F a s mercenaries fighting their way home, against impossible odds, through ene- B a R E D a u G H F M E my turf. Yurick translated Xenophon a H M E a s A H L L I L into New York street gangs. His book I A I K L I C K is a late and lofty entry, steeped in the a N S C tone of Camus's The Stranger, in the T a s s A N T I C E a H "teen panic" novels of the Fifties and NOTES FOR E I S I N G S C a u z a Sixties. Walter Hill, a director whose "SENSITIVITY TRAINING- A POEM": paradigm is the western, turned Yurick's A L I E N S E K U D Z U crisp, relentless book into the definitive Puzzle editing by Dan Asimov. K I S S S H A M P A I N Anagrams are indicated with an image of a New York ruled by territo- M A T T R E S S E Y E D rial gangs, each decorated absurdly and asterisk (*). ruling their outposts absolutely. The movie inspired reports of SENSITIVE CLUES: A. c-Y-CLI-c.; B. psy*-chic; C. bo(rdeua*)x; D. K-am(I-K)aze; theater-lobby riots during its theatri- E. boutique (hidden); F. champ-(ag)ne; G. matricide*; H. fall-ac(l)es; I. p(harm)ac[inist. cal run. It's a cult object now, fetishized on websites, celebrated in hip-hop by Puff Daddy and the Wu- ACROSS: 10. *; 11. a-F-fable; 13. *; 15. no-titat )s (rcv.]; 17. so-fufn) (rev.); 21. oh Tang Clan, and cherished by New me*; 22. Sah*-l; 24. lil(y); 26. to-S.S.; 27. ant-icte ); 30. sin(g)s; 32. hidden; 33. Yorkers my age, we who preen in our atlielns: 35. homophone; 37. K(is)s. old fears, for mythologizing the crime- ruled New York of the Seventies more DOWN: 1. homophone; 2 (r lhefr; 3. a-E>l (rev.): 4.1i(bid)os (rev.): 5. *; 6. S(e)ven; 7. an-a; 8. two mngs.: 9. *; 16. teens-lest; 19. O-hi-O; 20. *; 23. (t)act; 24. lieulten- ant); 28. coup-E.; 29. ail-l (rev.): 31. selnorjas: 34. Sheta); 36. da-ay(overlapped).

MEMOIR 77 sweetly and absurdly than Kojak or As my newspaper clippings accu- terday in a brick-throwing, window- The French Connection. For, in the mulated, I began to imagine my equiv- breaking riot .... The disturbances film, it is the gang members them- alent: Hoyt-Schermerhorn Death Trip. spread over a two-mile area and onto selves who become the ultimate vic- "TWO ARE KILLED BY POLICE IN subway trains and stations .... A group tims of the city's chaos. Even the War- GUN BATTLE, 1/23/73: Neither of of 60 youths attacked a group of riors wish they'd stayed home. the slain men was immediatelv iden- six white high school students on For me, a fifteen-year-old dogging tified. But the police said that'one of the Clinton-IND's GG line.... They the steps of the crew as they filmed, it them had been wanted for severalbank were apprehended at the Hoyt- was only perfect that a fake gang had robberies and for allegedly shooting at Schermerhorn Station by 15 transit occupied Hoyt-Schermerhorn's fake policemen last Wednesday night in policemen ... " "300 IN SUBWAY platform. The film was etching my the Hoyt-Schermerhorn Street sub- HELP TILT CAR AND RELEASE own image of the city into legend, way station ... " "WOMAN HURT BOY'S WEDGED FOOT, 9/2/70: A and for me it had begun its work IN SUBWAY FALL, 6/19/58: A 55- rescue team of subway passengers, even before its public life. (In fact, I year-old woman was critically injured hastily organized by three transit pa- couldn't imagine that anyone would yesterday when she fell or jumped in trolmen, tipped back a 54-ton subway want to see it.) Yurick's book has just front of a southbound IND express car last night to free an l l-vear-old been reissued again, with a movie train at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn Street boy whose foot was wedged between still on the jacket and a long new in- station in Brooklyn. ,.. Service on the the car and the platform at a down- troduction, detailing the classical and southbound tracks of the A line wasin- town Brooklyn station. The boy ... existentialist roots of the project, and terrupted for fifty-three minutes." "37 was running for an IND A train fascinating for its rueful and erudite HURT I CRASH OF TWO IND when his leg was caught between perplexity that this least ambitious of TRAINS, One Rams Rear of Anoth- the platform and train at the Hoyt- his books should be the one to sur- er in Downtown Brooklyn During Schermerhorn station." vive: "There hasn't been one film Evening Rush, 7/18/70: ... there was a Contemplation of the density of made in the United States that I rending of metal at the crash, she said, meanings at a given site becomes, in would consider seeing five times, as and then the car tilted. All the lights the end, like Lesy's scrapbook, a tidal many who loved the film version of went out. She said there were sparks experience. The lapping of succes- The Warriors did." Years later, by and the car filled with smoke. The girl sive human moments forms a pulse chance, I met the wizened Yurick.on said she' was thrown to the floor and, or current, like the lapping of trains a train platform, though not the sub- terrified, began screaming ... " through the underground tunnels, or way. We disembarked together in "YOUTH ARRESTED WITH GUN, like the Doppler-effect fading of cer- Providence, Rhode Island, each a 5/26/89: A 13-year-oldBrooklyn youth tain memories from the planet, as guest at the same literary conference, was arrested yesterday morning with a they're recalled for the penultimate and, unknowingly, companion riders fully loaded, 9-millimeter handgun, time, and then the last: when will on an Amtrak from New York. Our and he showed up later in the day to the last person to have purchased hosts had failed to meet our train, ask the New York City transit police panty hose or a razor at Loeser's pass and as the locals all scattered to their when he would get his gun back." from the earth? When will the last of cars, the family members or lovers to "STRANGER PUSHES WOMAN those 300 who rocked the train car their reunions, we were left to dis- TO DEATH UNDER A TRAIN, off the boy's pinned leg, or the last of cover each other and our dilemma. 2/2/75: A 25-year-old woman was those 400 Negro boy- Yurick shrugged fatalistically- thrown to her death in front of an on- cotters, be gone? should we have expected better? He rushing subway train in Brooklyn yes- summed his perspective in a sale terday evening by a man who appar- A kid raised inside the liberal sen- world-weary suggestion: ently was a total stranger to her, the timents of a middle-class familyyet liv- • /1 "Wanna nosh?" police said.... The incident took place ing in an area fringed with crime and at about 6:15 P.M. in the Hoyt- poverty met a choice. It was possible to 1"_ ichael Lesy's 1973 book Wis- Schermerhorn Street IND station, identify with and assimilate to the consin Death Trip is a mosaic of vintage which was crowded with shoppers at harsher truths of the street, and so photographs and newspaper accounts the time. According to witnesses, toughen, somewhat, to fear. Alter- of eccentric behavior and spastic vio- including the train motorman ... [the] nately, a kid could carry his parents' lence in turn-of-the-century rural Wis- man suddenly stepped up to the victim, sensitivities, and standards, with him, consin. It makes a case, not polemically who had her back to him, and pushed out of doors. The price was obvious. but by a flood of miniature evidence, her forward in front of the train with- Most of us, whether we ended in one that stirring just under the skin of this· out saying a word ... " "400 BOY- camp or another, wavered. I was a historical site is mayhem, sexuality, COTTING STUDENTS RIOT, "good" kid, and a bullied one, yet I re- the possibility of despair. The book is HURL BRICKS, BEAT OTHER call dozens of moments when I slid a corrective to homilies of a pastoral YOUTHS, 2/18/65: Four hundred boy- brieflyacross the separation line. It was American countryside, a catalogue of cotting Negro students broke through on a basketball court directly across unaccountable indigenous lust, grief, police barricades outside Board of Ed- from Hoyt-Schermerhorn's entrance revenge, and sudden joy. ucation headquarters in Brooklyn yes- where I allowed myself to meld com-

78 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2004 plicitly into a crowd of Puerto Rican each accelerating footstep, until I at greater perversity, since a subway sta- kids, with whom I'd been playing, as last overtook her just outside the door. tion is a sinkhole of destroyed and they briefly halted our game to harass While I tried to explain, she trem- thwarted time. Bystanding here trying and threaten a single Asian man, a gay bled, in fear that had converted im- to remember Hoyt-Schermerhorn I've man, off a neighboring court. I wasn't mediately, and rightly, to rage. De- only triggered its profoundest resis- violent; the incident hardly was. But nial has covered any recollection of my tance: I'm using it wrong. the man was the boyfriend of a pal of words by now, but I know they were Yet I'm stubborn. This was my my mother's, and I'd been a guest in hopelessly inadequate to repair what first subway memory, the tunnel, their elegant town house. When my I'd told myself was a harmless joke- those ruined Loeser's windows. I've mom's friend, a gay man considerably though I was walking behind her I'd returned to reclaim the seed of a huskier than his young lover, returned still been protecting her, hadn't I?- lifelong romance, a New Yorker's to the court with a baseball bat and, and was actually such a cruel joke it typical romance with our limitless bellowing at us, broke up the game, wasn't a joke at all. Although I'd hard- secret neighborhood, the one run- sent us scurrying, his eyes met mine ly claim to be Patty Hearst, there was ning beneath all the others. Noth- and I wasdisgraced,wrenched between a touch of the Stockholm syndrome ing subsequent, not hundreds of concurrent selves. in my behavior. I was bestowing on high school days, not The Warriors, The moment was precursor to a another a trace, or more than a or my own feeble crimes, can dis- worse one. This was the summer be- trace, of fears I'd absorbed place this memory's primacy or fade tween high school and college, which for years. its color. I held my mother's hand. I is to say the verge of my escape from was being taken to her office, in Brooklyn for most of fifteen years. I've Here's where I am: in the sub- Manhattan. Perhaps it was a day off come to understand how fraught that way, but not on a train. I'm standing on from school, I don't know. I rode moment was for me, as I considered or one platform, gazingat another. Moan- the subway for the first time I can refused to consider what I was invol- ing trains roll in, obscuring my view; I recall, but I don't remember the untarily carrying with me out of the wait for them to pass.The far platform, train. I remember the station. _ particulars of my childhood environ- the one I'm inspecting, isn't lit. The ment. My girlfriend was from upstate tiles along the abandoned platform's December Index Sources New York but living in my city, my wall are stained-I mean, more than in neighborhood, for that summer before some ordinary way-and the stairwells 1-3 U.S. Department of Justice; 4 we both embarked to college. She are caged and locked, top and bottom. Colum Lynch, Washington Post worked nights as a waitress in Man- Nothing's happening there, and it's (N.Y.C.); 5 Halliburton (Houston, hattan and rode, yes, the A train, into happening round the clock. Tex.): 6-7 Office of the Comptroller (N.Y.C.); 8 U.S. Department of Hoyt-Schermerhorn. She was fright- I've been haunting this place lately, Homeland Security; 9-10 Program ened, as she perhaps should have been, though the more time I spend, the fur- Executive Office for Ammunition to walk the several blocks home from ther it reels from my grasp. And, in- (Picatinny Arsenal, N.J.); 11 Harp- that station after eleven, and so I'd creasingly, I'm drawing looks from other's Research; 12-13 U.S. Depart- promised always to meet her. I often er passengers on the platforms, and ment of Defense; 14 Politicallvloney- lightly mo~kedher fear-but that bit of upstairs, at the station's mezzanine lev- Line (Washington); 15-16 Ballot overcompensation, lousy as it sounds, el. Subway stations-the platforms and Access News (San Francisco); 17 wasn't my crime. stairwells and tunnels, the passages Green Party (Washington); 18-19 My crime was that one night, going themselves-are sites of deep and Juliet B. Schor, Boston College to the station to pick her up, I impul- willed invisibility. Even the geekiest (Boston); 20 Delta Air Lines (At- sively waited in shadow by the en- transit buffs adore the trains, not the lanta); 21 American Sociological trance instead of making myselfvisible. stations. By lingering here, I've set off Association (Washington); 22-23 I had no plan. I was fooling around. miniature alarms in nearby minds, The Brookings Institution (Washing- She looked for me, evidently afraid to including my own. I've allied myself ton); 24-25 Harper's Research; 26 stand there waiting alone, as she ab- with the malingerers not on their way National Oceanic and Atmospheric solutely should have been: it was a dif- to somewhere else. My investigation of Administration (Silver Spring, Md.); ferent thing to walk swiftlyhome than this place reeks of a futility so deep it 27 Times- Pica)'une (Jefferson Parish, it was to linger. I could have stepped shades toward horror. La.), 28 Department of Health (Lon- don); 29 International Atomic Ener- forward easily, but instead my stupid By the same law of meticulously ob- gy Agency (Vienna); 30 Harper's jape distended, and I just watched her. served abnormalities that causes loop- Research; 31 Embassy of the Repub- And then, as she began walking home ers to stand out, my spying at Hoyt- lic of Sudan (London); 32 British without me, I followed her. Schermerhorn triggers a rustle of High Commission (Wellington, New I think I was certain she'd tum and disquiet. I'm not here for a train. What Zealand); 33 Harper's Research; 34- see me, and that it would be oddly I'm trying to do maybe can't be done: 35 State Police Headquarters (Por- funny, but she never did. She was inhabit and understand the Hoyt- denone, Italy); 36 Richard Beeston afraid to tum to see whose footsteps Schermerhorn station as a place. (Baghdad); 37 Select (N.Y.C.); 38 followed her, of course. I trailed her Worse, I'm trying to remember it, to re- Virgin Group (London); 39 Waseda home, compounding my mistake with I store it to its home in time. There's no University (Tokyo).

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