The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [154]
The Edison, McHale’s, the Colony, and other such places, which together constitute the surviving vestiges of the indigenous, all occupy peripheral locations in the global crossroads that is Times Square. Within the four corners of the crossroads itself—which is to say, 42nd Street between Broadway and Seventh to the south, and 47th between Broadway and Seventh to the north—Times Square is almost as uniform, as gigantic, as “totalized,” as Disneyland or the Strip: it is one pulsating global media–financial services–information–entertainment zone. All traces of an older, more localized, more organic life have been obliterated.
And yet not quite all. There is one holdout, one irrelevancy, one outpost not so much of nostalgia as of pathos: the Howard Johnson’s on the northwest corner of Broadway and 46th Street. The Howard Johnson’s is Times Square’s very own “Night Café.” When I sat down one day on one of the orange Naugahyde swivel chairs at the lunch counter, I had two other customers for company; another half dozen or so were scattered around the orange banquettes that ran back toward the bar—also empty. “Shake, Shake, Shake” was blaring out over the tables with their little hooked coat stands; over the silent, lingering waiters; and over the little wooden cubicle toward the front where the cashier sat, with the boxes of saltwater taffy displayed in the shelving above. I had never seen such a lifeless place in Times Square.
The counterman was a roly-poly man with a soft face and a black mustache. Irfan Anwar had been born in Kashmir, raised in Lahore, and then immigrated to this country; fourteen years earlier, he had landed a job at Howard Johnson’s. Irfan moved with great deliberation, and not only because of his bulk: it had been many years since haste served any purpose. When he had first started working, Irfan said, “Every day we would be serving lunch to five hundred people, six hundred people. If you came here at lunchtime, you would see the people lined up four deep. And then came the war in the Middle East.” Irfan maintained, not altogether logically, that the 1991 Gulf War had destroyed the restaurant’s fortunes, and indeed had wreaked havoc on the block. “There was a Burger King just up the street. I think it was maybe a hundred years old,” he explained. “And soon after that, it closed up.” Irfan felt that everyone was hurting. I asked about the Edison Coffee Shop, just around the corner on 47th Street. The Edison, I pointed out, was usually jammed. “I do not know this place,” Irfan said. This was after fourteen years.
There was something almost uncanny about the Howard Johnson’s, so profoundly removed did it feel from the roaring world outside. Just up the block, at the 47th Street corner, fabulous-looking young people with money to burn were flocking to the Blue Fin, a glassed-in bar and restaurant affiliated with the new W hotel. Here was the new Times Square consuming class—the fashionistas from Condé Nast, the editors at Random House, the bankers from Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers. They might have enjoyed the retro warmth of the matzoh ball soup at the Polish Tea Room, but you wouldn’t catch them at Howard Johnson’s even on a lark. While the Blue Fin was hopping, a few old ladies sat at the Howard Johnson’s counter delicately drinking ice cream sodas. Even the ice cream flavors bore the stamp of the retrograde: maple walnut, butter pecan, mocha chip. One day I ordered a turkey burger for lunch, and I received an article that bore no discernible relation to the austere, low-fat item that now graces coffee shop menus—a defrosted patty so thickly slicked with grease that even the pita bread in which it came was hard to hold on to.
The most exotic thing about Howard Johnson’s was the waitstaff, which had been drawn from