Free The Disappointment Artist by Jonathan Lethem Page B

only that I was on the last leg home, though there was always a stirring of my heart at Hoyt, where the grimy subway platform was suddenly enlivened by Abraham and Straus’s windows of ladies’ wear . . .
    When a friend directed me to this passage, thinking he’d solved the mystery of those deserted shop windows in the Hoyt-Schermerhorn passage, I at least had a clue. I searched the corporate history of Abraham and Straus—Brooklyn’s dominant department store and a polestar in my childhood constellation of the borough’s tarnished majesty, with its brass fixtures and uniformed elevator operators, and the eighth floor’s mysterious stamp- and coin-collector’s counters. In the A&S annals I found the name of a Fulton Street rival: Frederick Loeser and Company, one of the nation’s largest department stores for almost a century, eventually gobbled up by A&S in a merger. The 1950s were to such stores as the Mesozoic was to the dinosaurs—between 1952 and 1957 New York lost Loeser’s, Namm’s, Wanamaker’s, McCreery’s, and Hearn’s; the names alone are concrete poetry.
    I’d nailed my tile-work “L”: Loeser’s created display windows in the new Hoyt-Schermerhorn station to vie with A&S’s famous (at least to Alfred Kazin) windows at Hoyt. Kazin’s windows are visible as bricked-in tile window frames today, but like the smashed and dusty Loeser’s windows of my childhood, they go ignored. Meanwhile, aboveground on Fulton Street, the name Loeser’s has reemerged like an Etch A Sketch filigree on some second-story brickwork, as lost urban names sometimes do.
    The abandoned platform was a mystery shallower to penetrate than Loeser’s “L.” The extra track connects the abandoned platform to an abandoned station, three blocks away on Court Street. This spur of misguided development was put out of its misery in 1946, and sat unused until the early sixties, when the MTA realized it had an ideal facility for renting to film and television crews. The empty station and the curve of track running to the ghost platform at Hoyt-Schermerhorn allowed filmmakers to pull trains in and out of two picturesque stations along a nice curved wall, without disturbing regular operations. The nonpareil among the hundreds of movies made on subway property is the subway-hijacking thriller
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
. It was in Hoyt-Schermerhorn’s tunnel that Robert Shaw and his cohorts stripped off fake mustaches and trench coats and, clutching bags of ransom millions, made their hopeless dash for daylight, and it was in Hoyt-Schermerhorn’s tunnel that Shaw, cornered by crusading MTA inspector Walter Matthau, stepped on the third rail and met his doom.
    And then there’s
The Warriors
. The film is based on a novel by Sol Yurick, itself based on Xenophon’s
Anabasis
, an account of a band of Greek mercenaries fighting their way home through enemy turf. Yurick translated Xenophon into New York street gangs; his book is a late and rather lofty entry, steeped in the tone of Camus’s
The Stranger
, in the “teen panic” novels of the fifties and sixties. Next, Walter Hill, a director whose paradigm is the Western, turned Yurick’s crisp, relentless book into the definitive image of a New York ruled by territorial gangs, each decorated absurdly and ruling their outposts absolutely.
    The movie inspired a wave of theater-lobby riots during its theatrical run. It’s a cult object now, lauded in hip-hop by Puff Daddy and the Wu-Tang Clan, and cherished by New Yorkers my age, we who preen in our old fears—call us the ’77 Blackout Vintage—for mythologizing the crime-ruled New York of the seventies more poignantly, and absurdly, than
Kojak
or
The French Connection
. For, in the film, it is the gang themselves who become the ultimate victims of the city’s chaos. In this New York, even the Warriors wish they’d stayed home. For me, a fifteen-year-old dogging the steps of the crew as they filmed, it was only perfect