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Authors: Jonathan Lethem
Tags: Fiction
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system—so perhaps it was merely that suspects nabbed elsewhere in the system are brought there to register their actual arrest? I’ve never been able to corroborate the legend. The presence of cops and robbers in the same place has a kind of chicken-and-egg quality. Or should it be considered as a Heisenbergian “observer” problem: Do we arrest you because we see you? Would we arrest you as much elsewhere if we were there?
However ridiculous it may seem, it is true that within sight of that police substation my father, his arms laden with luggage for a flight out of JFK, had his pocket picked while waiting on line for a token. And the pay phone in the station was widely understood to have drug-dealers-only status. Maybe it does still. For my own part I was once detained, not arrested, trying to breeze the wrong way through an exit gate, flashing an imaginary bus pass at the token agent, on my way to high school. A cop gave me a ticket and turned me around to go home and get money for a token. I tried to engage my cop in sophistry: How could I be ticketed for a crime that had been prevented? Shouldn’t he let me through to ride the train if I were paying the price for my misdeed? No cigar.
Other peculiarities helped Hoyt-Schermerhorn colonize my dreams. The station featured not only the lively express A train, and its pokey local equivalent, the CC, but also the erratic and desultory GG, a train running a lonely trail through Bedford-Stuyvesant into Queens. The GG—now shortened to the G—was the only subway line in the entire system never to penetrate Manhattan. All roads lead to Rome, but not the GG. Hoyt-Schermerhorn also hosted a quickly abandoned early-eighties transit experiment, “The Train to the Plane”—basically an A train which, for an additional fare, ran an express shot to the airport. For my friends and me, the Train to the Plane was richly comic on several grounds—first of all, because it didn’t actually go to the airport: you took a bus from the end of the line. Second, for its twee and hectoring local-television ad— “Take the train to the plane, take the train to the plane,” etc. And last because the sight of it, rumbling nearly empty into Hoyt-Schermerhorn with the emblem of an airplane in place of its identifying number or letter, suggested a subway train that was fantasizing itself some other, less inglorious and earthbound conveyance.
The Train to the Plane was younger cousin to a more successful freak train, also run through Hoyt-Schermerhorn: the Aqueduct Special, which took horse-racing bettors out to the track on gambling afternoons. It flourished from 1959 to 1981, when it became a casualty of Off-Track Betting, the walk-in storefront gambling establishments that soon dotted the city. The Aqueduct Special made use of Hoyt-Schermerhorn’s strangest feature: its two quiescent tracks and dark spare platform, that parallel ghost—the platform I’d come to gaze at so many years later. As a kid, I took that dark platform for granted. Later, I’d learn how rare it was—though the system contains whole ghost stations, dead to trains, and famously host to homeless populations and vast graffiti masterpieces, no other active station has a ghost platform.
Even if I’d known it, I wasn’t then curious enough to consider how those two unused tracks and that eerie platform spoke, as did the ruined display windows, of the zone’s dwindled splendor, its former place as a hub. Where I lived was self-evidently marginal to Manhattan—who cared that it was once something grander? What got me excited about Hoyt-Schermerhorn’s fourth platform was this: one summer day in 1979 I found a film crew working there, swirling in and out of the station from rows of trucks parked along Schermerhorn Street. Actors costumed as both gang members and as high-school students dressed for prom night worked in a stilled train. The movie, I learned from a bored assistant director standing with a
However ridiculous it may seem, it is true that within sight of that police substation my father, his arms laden with luggage for a flight out of JFK, had his pocket picked while waiting on line for a token. And the pay phone in the station was widely understood to have drug-dealers-only status. Maybe it does still. For my own part I was once detained, not arrested, trying to breeze the wrong way through an exit gate, flashing an imaginary bus pass at the token agent, on my way to high school. A cop gave me a ticket and turned me around to go home and get money for a token. I tried to engage my cop in sophistry: How could I be ticketed for a crime that had been prevented? Shouldn’t he let me through to ride the train if I were paying the price for my misdeed? No cigar.
Other peculiarities helped Hoyt-Schermerhorn colonize my dreams. The station featured not only the lively express A train, and its pokey local equivalent, the CC, but also the erratic and desultory GG, a train running a lonely trail through Bedford-Stuyvesant into Queens. The GG—now shortened to the G—was the only subway line in the entire system never to penetrate Manhattan. All roads lead to Rome, but not the GG. Hoyt-Schermerhorn also hosted a quickly abandoned early-eighties transit experiment, “The Train to the Plane”—basically an A train which, for an additional fare, ran an express shot to the airport. For my friends and me, the Train to the Plane was richly comic on several grounds—first of all, because it didn’t actually go to the airport: you took a bus from the end of the line. Second, for its twee and hectoring local-television ad— “Take the train to the plane, take the train to the plane,” etc. And last because the sight of it, rumbling nearly empty into Hoyt-Schermerhorn with the emblem of an airplane in place of its identifying number or letter, suggested a subway train that was fantasizing itself some other, less inglorious and earthbound conveyance.
The Train to the Plane was younger cousin to a more successful freak train, also run through Hoyt-Schermerhorn: the Aqueduct Special, which took horse-racing bettors out to the track on gambling afternoons. It flourished from 1959 to 1981, when it became a casualty of Off-Track Betting, the walk-in storefront gambling establishments that soon dotted the city. The Aqueduct Special made use of Hoyt-Schermerhorn’s strangest feature: its two quiescent tracks and dark spare platform, that parallel ghost—the platform I’d come to gaze at so many years later. As a kid, I took that dark platform for granted. Later, I’d learn how rare it was—though the system contains whole ghost stations, dead to trains, and famously host to homeless populations and vast graffiti masterpieces, no other active station has a ghost platform.
Even if I’d known it, I wasn’t then curious enough to consider how those two unused tracks and that eerie platform spoke, as did the ruined display windows, of the zone’s dwindled splendor, its former place as a hub. Where I lived was self-evidently marginal to Manhattan—who cared that it was once something grander? What got me excited about Hoyt-Schermerhorn’s fourth platform was this: one summer day in 1979 I found a film crew working there, swirling in and out of the station from rows of trucks parked along Schermerhorn Street. Actors costumed as both gang members and as high-school students dressed for prom night worked in a stilled train. The movie, I learned from a bored assistant director standing with a
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