#1 in an Occasional Series—Do the Hustle
I came home from DC last night after spending five blissfully slothful days with Jen over Thanksgiving weekend. She lives in a fairly quiet neighborhood that's up and coming, at the back of a building set back from the street. I had a great time, slept late, cooked, ate, yakked, finally met her friend Carlos, but hardly left the house, which was fine with me. It took 5 minutes to get from Jen's house to Union Station, then another 10 minutes to get around the traffic circle to the drop off point in front of it. Inside the station, all the chain stores were open and everyone was lining up in nice tidy lines to get on the train.
While it's true that visitors scuttle into New York like rats, coming through the underground gloominess of Penn Station, there's something terribly fake about Union Station. I used to really like it, before Grand Central was renovated in a similar way that still somehow preserved its grittiness. Now Penn Station just looks like a suburban mall with pretensions.
The train on the way back wasn't even that crowded, surprisingly, or at least it didn't feel like it until we got off and filed up the escalator at Penn Station around 10 pm. That took a good ten minutes all by itself. I think we were all too tired to do anything but file up the escalator without grumbling. No stampedes like there usually are. We came in way at the back of the platform, and I wonder how long those things really are? There was at least one train parked ahead of ours, the Acela that had preceded us, and it felt like we were walking from at least 9th Avenue, which gives you some idea of how vast the train yards are beneath the city.
Upstairs, on the LIRR/NJ Transit concourse, all the greasy cheesy delis were closed, with gates over their entrances. National Guardsmen stood around in their cammo, eyeballing travelers. Near the turnstiles to the 1/2/3/9, one of the Music Under New York performers was playing jazz harmonica.
At around 10:15, I caught the number 9 up to Times Square to catch the Shuttle to the 6 and came up the stairs from the platform into a virtual circus: The guy with the found percussion set was banging away at his junk (literally junk, too: it's just a collection of crap he's found on the street, from old 5-gallon paint drums to garbage can lids) in a hot, hopping rhythm. He's one of the first street musicians I encountered in my first year here, almost 20 years ago. Some group had set up a couple of tables to give people stress tests and about a half dozen people were lined up waiting or watching or having theirs explained to them. A woman was sitting in a fold-up canvas chair and sketching people on the platforms. Folks were to-ing and fro-ing with luggage, coming back from their holiday weekends. The trains were packed. It could have been the middle of the day. And it all made me smile, all the hustle and activity, all the movement and energy at that time of night. It wasn't near anybody's bedtime, despite the fact that we were all going to work tomorrow.
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