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