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Authors: Jonathan Lethem
Tags: Fiction
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political machine. The story has the beauty of a Greek myth: a short length of pneumatic subway built in 1869
in secret
beneath Broadway by a gentleman engineer determined to alleviate the choking daylight nightmare of New York’s foot, pig, horse, stagecoach, and surface railway traffic, against the status quo wishes of Tammany’s Boss Tweed, who rolled in troughs of money extorted from trolley and omnibus companies. The tube’s builder, Alfred Ely Beach, ought to be the hero of one of those elegiac novels of Time Travelers in Olde New York—editor of
Scientific American
, architect of American patent law, he was also a health nut and an opera buff, and the man in whose office Edison first demonstrated the phonograph (“Good morning, Sir . . . How do you like the talking box?”). In fifty-eight nights of covert digging Beach’s crew created a 312-foot tunnel, then assembled an elegant wooden, horseshoe-shaped subway car, powered by a giant electric fan. When he unveiled his miracle to the press—in an underground waiting room fitted with curtains, stuffed chairs, painted frescoes, a goldfish fountain and waterfall, grandfather clock, and zircon lamps—his demonstration subway caused a sensation. Tweed, aghast at what had hatched beneath his feet, roused an entrepreneurial assault on Beach’s tunnel, investing his capital—and New York’s immediate future—in elevated lines rather than subways. The life was squeezed from Beach’s dream. His tunnel was rented for wine storage, then forgotten. When in 1912 diggers excavating for the BMT line stumbled unwittingly into Beach’s intact waiting room, his drained fountain and extinguished lamps, his stilled wooden car, they must have felt like intruders on Tut’s tomb.
When you’re a child, everything local is famous. On that principle, Hoyt-Schermerhorn was the most famous subway station in the world. It was the first I knew, and it took years for me to disentangle my primal fascination with its status as a functional ruin, an indifferent home to clockwork chaos, from the fact that it was, in objective measure, an anomalous place. Personal impressions—family stories, and my own—and neighborhood lore swirled in my exaggerated regard. In fact the place was cool and weird beyond my obsession’s parameters, cooler and weirder than most subway stations anyway.
My neighborhood, as I knew it in the 1970s, was an awkwardly gentrifying residential zone. The Hoyt-Schermerhorn station stood at the border of the vibrant mercantile chaos of Fulton Street—once the borough’s poshest shopping and theater boulevard, it had suffered a steep decline, through the fifties and sixties, from Manhattanesque grandeur to ghetto pedestrian mall. Now no less vital in its way, the place was full of chain outlets and sidewalk vendors, many selling African liquorice-root chews and “Muslim” incense and oils alongside discount socks and hats and mittens. The station itself gave testimony to the lost commercial greatness of the area. Like some Manhattan subway stops, though fewer and fewer every year, it housed businesses on its mezzanine level: a magazine shop, a shoeshine stand, a bakery. Most telling and shrouded at once were the series of ruined shop-display windows that lined the long corridor from the Bond Street entrance. Elegant blue-and-yellow tile work labeled them with an enormous “L”—standing for what, exactly? The ruined dressmakers’ dummies and empty display stands behind the cracked glass weren’t saying.
The station was synonymous with crime. A neighborhood legend held that Hoyt-Schermerhorn consistently ranked highest in arrests in the whole transit system. Hoyt and Bond streets made vents from the Fulton Mall area, where purse snatchers and street dealers were likely to flee and be cornered. The station also houses one of the borough’s three transit police substations, a headquarters for subway cops which legislates over a third of Brooklyn’s subway
in secret
beneath Broadway by a gentleman engineer determined to alleviate the choking daylight nightmare of New York’s foot, pig, horse, stagecoach, and surface railway traffic, against the status quo wishes of Tammany’s Boss Tweed, who rolled in troughs of money extorted from trolley and omnibus companies. The tube’s builder, Alfred Ely Beach, ought to be the hero of one of those elegiac novels of Time Travelers in Olde New York—editor of
Scientific American
, architect of American patent law, he was also a health nut and an opera buff, and the man in whose office Edison first demonstrated the phonograph (“Good morning, Sir . . . How do you like the talking box?”). In fifty-eight nights of covert digging Beach’s crew created a 312-foot tunnel, then assembled an elegant wooden, horseshoe-shaped subway car, powered by a giant electric fan. When he unveiled his miracle to the press—in an underground waiting room fitted with curtains, stuffed chairs, painted frescoes, a goldfish fountain and waterfall, grandfather clock, and zircon lamps—his demonstration subway caused a sensation. Tweed, aghast at what had hatched beneath his feet, roused an entrepreneurial assault on Beach’s tunnel, investing his capital—and New York’s immediate future—in elevated lines rather than subways. The life was squeezed from Beach’s dream. His tunnel was rented for wine storage, then forgotten. When in 1912 diggers excavating for the BMT line stumbled unwittingly into Beach’s intact waiting room, his drained fountain and extinguished lamps, his stilled wooden car, they must have felt like intruders on Tut’s tomb.
When you’re a child, everything local is famous. On that principle, Hoyt-Schermerhorn was the most famous subway station in the world. It was the first I knew, and it took years for me to disentangle my primal fascination with its status as a functional ruin, an indifferent home to clockwork chaos, from the fact that it was, in objective measure, an anomalous place. Personal impressions—family stories, and my own—and neighborhood lore swirled in my exaggerated regard. In fact the place was cool and weird beyond my obsession’s parameters, cooler and weirder than most subway stations anyway.
My neighborhood, as I knew it in the 1970s, was an awkwardly gentrifying residential zone. The Hoyt-Schermerhorn station stood at the border of the vibrant mercantile chaos of Fulton Street—once the borough’s poshest shopping and theater boulevard, it had suffered a steep decline, through the fifties and sixties, from Manhattanesque grandeur to ghetto pedestrian mall. Now no less vital in its way, the place was full of chain outlets and sidewalk vendors, many selling African liquorice-root chews and “Muslim” incense and oils alongside discount socks and hats and mittens. The station itself gave testimony to the lost commercial greatness of the area. Like some Manhattan subway stops, though fewer and fewer every year, it housed businesses on its mezzanine level: a magazine shop, a shoeshine stand, a bakery. Most telling and shrouded at once were the series of ruined shop-display windows that lined the long corridor from the Bond Street entrance. Elegant blue-and-yellow tile work labeled them with an enormous “L”—standing for what, exactly? The ruined dressmakers’ dummies and empty display stands behind the cracked glass weren’t saying.
The station was synonymous with crime. A neighborhood legend held that Hoyt-Schermerhorn consistently ranked highest in arrests in the whole transit system. Hoyt and Bond streets made vents from the Fulton Mall area, where purse snatchers and street dealers were likely to flee and be cornered. The station also houses one of the borough’s three transit police substations, a headquarters for subway cops which legislates over a third of Brooklyn’s subway
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