Free The Disappointment Artist by Jonathan Lethem Page A

brackets of irony around our sense of the city’s dangers. Lynn and I were soon joined by Jeremy and Adam, other kids from Dean Street, and we all four persistently found crime and chaos amusing. The same incidents that drew hand-wringing from our parents and righteous indignation from the tabloids struck us as merry evidence of the fatuousness of grown-ups. Naturally the world sucked, naturally the authorities blinked. Anything was possible. Graffiti was maybe an art form, certainly a definitive statement as to who had actually grasped the nature of reality as well as the workings of the reeling system around you: not adults, but the kids just a year or three older than you, who were scary but legendary. The entire city was like the school in the Ramones’ movie
Rock
’n’ Roll High School
, or the college in
Animal House
—the dean corrupt and blind, the campus an unpatrolled playground. Our own fear, paradoxically, was more evidence, like the graffiti and the conductor’s affair, of the reckless, wide-open nature of this world. It may have appeared from the outside that Lynn and Jeremy and Adam and I were cowering in this lawless place, but in our minds we romped.
    The names of the three limbs of the subway—the IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit), the BMT (Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit), and the IND (Independent Subway)—are slowly falling from New Yorkers’ common tongue, and the last enamel signs citing the old names will soon be pried off. Slipping into shadow with those names is the tripartite origin of the subway, the fact that each of the three was once a separate and rival corporation. The lines tried to squeeze one another out of business, even as they vied with now-extinct rival forms: streetcars and elevated trains. On this subject, the language of the now-unified system, the official maps and names, has grown mute. But the grammar of the lines and stations themselves, with their overlaps and redundancies, their strange omissions and improvised passageways, still pronounces this history everywhere.
    The early subway pioneered in crafty partnership with realtors and developers. Groping for new ridership, owners threw track deep into farmland, anticipating (and creating) neighborhoods like Bensonhurst and Jackson Heights. But the IND, which built and operated Hoyt-Schermerhorn, was a latecomer, an interloper. Unlike its older siblings, the IND clung to population zones, working to siphon excess riders from overloaded lines. The city’s destiny wasn’t horizontal now, but vertical, perhaps fractal, a break with the American frontier impulse in favor of something more dense and strange.
    The new trains running through Hoyt-Schermerhorn quickly moth-balled both the Schermerhorn trolley and the old Fulton elevated line— but first the station had to be dug. Construction of new stations in a city webbed with infrastructure was a routine marvel: according to Stan Fischler’s
Uptown, Downtown
, tunneling for the IND required, beyond the 22 million cubic yards of rock and earth displaced, and 7 million man-days of labor, the
relocation
of 26 miles of water and gas pipes, 350 miles of electrical wire, and 18 miles of sewage pipes. What’s notable in period photographs, though, is the blithe disinterest in the faces of passersby, even at scenes of workers tunneling beneath a street where both a trolley and an el remain in operation. The Sixth Avenue tunnel at Thirty-fourth Street was an engineering marvel in its day, a dig threaded beneath the Broadway BMT subway and over the Pennsylvania Railroad (now Amtrak) tubes, as well as an even-more-deeply buried water main. “The most difficult piece of subway construction ever attempted,” is almost impossible to keep in mind on an F train as it slides blandly under Herald Square today.
    Alfred Kazin, in
A Walker in the City
, wrote:
    All those first stations in Brooklyn—Clark, Borough Hall, Hoyt, Nevins, the junction of the East and West side express lines—told me