Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn
"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 subway station 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 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 Brooklyn 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 disarray of Fulton Street--once the borough's poshest shopping and theater boulevard. Fulton had suffered a steep decline, from Manhattanesque grandeur to ghetto pedestrian mall, through the Fifties and Sixties. Now, no less vital in its way, the place was full of chain outlets and sidewalk vendors, many selling African licorice-root chews and "Muslim" incense 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 licensed businesses on its mezzanine level: a magazine shop, a shoeshine stand, a bakery. Most telling and shrouded at once were the 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. Its two border streets, Hoyt and Bond, were vents from the Fulton mall area, where purse snatchers and street dealers were likely to flee and be cornered. The station also housed one of the borough's four Transit Police substations, a headquarters for subway cops that legislated over a quarter of Brooklyn's subway system, so perhaps it was merely that suspects nabbed elsewhere in the system were 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. I myself was 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.
Undercover transit policemen are trained to watch for "loopers"--that is, riders who switch from one train car to the next at each stop. Loopers are understood to be likely pickpockets, worthy of suspicion. Even before that, though, loopers are guilty of using the subway wrong. In truth, every subway rider is an undercover officer in a precinct house of the mind, noticing and cataloguing outre and dissident behavior in his fellow passengers even while cultivating the apparent indifference for which New Yorkers are famous, above and below ground. It may only be safe to play at not noticing others because our noticing senses are sharpened to trigger-readiness. Jittery subway-shooter Bernhard Goetz once ran for mayor. He may not have been electable, but he had a constituency.
As it happens, I'm also an inveterate looper, though I do it less these days. I'll still sometimes loop to place myself at the right exit stairwell, to save steps if I'm running late. I've looped on the 7 out to Shea Stadium, searching for a friend headed for the same ball game. More than anything, though, I looped as a teenager, on night trains, looping as prey would, to skirt trouble. I relate this form of looping to other subterranean habits I learned as a terrified child. For instance, a tic of boarding: I'll stand at one spot until a train stops, then abruptly veer left- or rightward, to enter a car other than the one for which I might have appeared to be waiting. This to shake pursuers, of course. Similarly, a nighttime trick of exiting at lonely subway stations: at arrival I'll stay in my seat until the doors have lain open for a few seconds, then dash from the train. In these tricks my teenager self learned to cash in a small portion of the invisibility that is not only each subway rider's presumed right but his duty to other passengers, whose irritation and panic rises at each sign of oddness, in exchange for tiny likelihoods of increased safety.
Other peculiarities helped Hoyt-Schermerhorn colonize my dreams."
goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-3491594/Speak-Hoyt-Scher...
Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn
"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 subway station 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 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 Brooklyn 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 disarray of Fulton Street--once the borough's poshest shopping and theater boulevard. Fulton had suffered a steep decline, from Manhattanesque grandeur to ghetto pedestrian mall, through the Fifties and Sixties. Now, no less vital in its way, the place was full of chain outlets and sidewalk vendors, many selling African licorice-root chews and "Muslim" incense 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 licensed businesses on its mezzanine level: a magazine shop, a shoeshine stand, a bakery. Most telling and shrouded at once were the 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. Its two border streets, Hoyt and Bond, were vents from the Fulton mall area, where purse snatchers and street dealers were likely to flee and be cornered. The station also housed one of the borough's four Transit Police substations, a headquarters for subway cops that legislated over a quarter of Brooklyn's subway system, so perhaps it was merely that suspects nabbed elsewhere in the system were 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. I myself was 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.
Undercover transit policemen are trained to watch for "loopers"--that is, riders who switch from one train car to the next at each stop. Loopers are understood to be likely pickpockets, worthy of suspicion. Even before that, though, loopers are guilty of using the subway wrong. In truth, every subway rider is an undercover officer in a precinct house of the mind, noticing and cataloguing outre and dissident behavior in his fellow passengers even while cultivating the apparent indifference for which New Yorkers are famous, above and below ground. It may only be safe to play at not noticing others because our noticing senses are sharpened to trigger-readiness. Jittery subway-shooter Bernhard Goetz once ran for mayor. He may not have been electable, but he had a constituency.
As it happens, I'm also an inveterate looper, though I do it less these days. I'll still sometimes loop to place myself at the right exit stairwell, to save steps if I'm running late. I've looped on the 7 out to Shea Stadium, searching for a friend headed for the same ball game. More than anything, though, I looped as a teenager, on night trains, looping as prey would, to skirt trouble. I relate this form of looping to other subterranean habits I learned as a terrified child. For instance, a tic of boarding: I'll stand at one spot until a train stops, then abruptly veer left- or rightward, to enter a car other than the one for which I might have appeared to be waiting. This to shake pursuers, of course. Similarly, a nighttime trick of exiting at lonely subway stations: at arrival I'll stay in my seat until the doors have lain open for a few seconds, then dash from the train. In these tricks my teenager self learned to cash in a small portion of the invisibility that is not only each subway rider's presumed right but his duty to other passengers, whose irritation and panic rises at each sign of oddness, in exchange for tiny likelihoods of increased safety.
Other peculiarities helped Hoyt-Schermerhorn colonize my dreams."
goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-3491594/Speak-Hoyt-Scher...