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all corners of the globe. There was Ivan Pinto, a bald, coffee-colored, bespectacled gentleman in his mid-sixties whose name and accent were so unplaceable that he dared visitors to guess his origins. Trinidad? No. Guyana? No. “I come from Bombay,” said Ivan, “but I am a Christian. We tend to live apart, and so do not pick up the Indian accent.” There was a very black man with his hair shaved high above his temple on one side: Michel Valmont. “Like Liaisons Dangereuses?” “C’est ça,” he said delightedly. Michel was a linguist. Born in Martinique, he spoke French as a mother tongue, but he had also picked up some Danish and German. One afternoon I heard Michel saying something guttural to a Nordic-looking tourist he was escorting to the bar. “What was that?” I asked. Michel said that he had been speaking Dutch, and the young man confirmed that Michel had been speaking identifiable Dutch to him.

There was always time to talk to the waiters, who were pretty much the only denizens of Howard Johnson’s in the long, lassitudinous period between lunch and dinner. By three-thirty, the place was virtually lifeless. Even happy hour, which started at four and lasted until seven, and featured mixed drinks for $3.25, only marginally enlarged the crowd. One afternoon, I sat at the U-shaped bar in the back talking with Victor, the bartender, who had spent the previous twenty-eight years working, first, at the Chock full o’Nuts on 50th and Eighth, and then here at the Howard Johnson’s, which had opened up in 1959. I asked Victor why the bar didn’t have a television set. “I been asking Mr. Rubinstein for years if we could put in cable,” he said. Kenny Rubinstein owned both the franchise and the real estate it sat on. “He hasn’t got to it yet.” A few minutes later, two men in suits walked out of the kitchen, and Victor, pointing to one on the left, said, “That’s Kenny.”

Kenny Rubinstein was in his late forties, with curly brown hair and a solid build. I walked over, introduced myself, and congratulated him on having preserved this last little shard of old Times Square. It was the wrong thing to say: Rubinstein assumed that I was being sarcastic, for what real estate man would feel proud of having the last unimproved property in the core of Times Square? “I don’t know how much you paid for that jacket you’re wearing,” Rubinstein said testily, “but I’m sure whoever sold it to you could make a pretty good profit if he sold one every week. But you can’t sell one every week.” I wasn’t sure where Rubinstein was going with this conceit, but then he said, “People think that if you own a property here, it’s easy to make a fortune, but they have no idea. They think IBM comes along every week; but I’m still waiting for IBM.”

The Rubinsteins, it turned out, were another Times Square real estate family, like the Mosses, the Brandts, and the Dursts but not quite so successful. Kenny’s father, Morris, had bought the parcel that included Howard Johnson’s, as well as another right across the street, on the east side of Seventh, some time in the fifties or so—Kenny was hazy on the history, and Morris was dead. Morris had held the franchise for several of the Howard Johnson’s in Times Square, as well as for the Chock full o’Nuts where Victor had worked, back when they were profitable entities. Now the land underneath the Howard Johnson’s was worth immensely more than the restaurant, but Kenny’s ship hadn’t yet come in. He said, “I can count on one hand the number of serious discussions I’ve had.” Kenny had fond memories of Times Square when he was a boy, but he would have unloaded the Howard Johnson’s in a second; the only thing stopping him was that he was asking a very large number for a fairly shallow, and thus not altogether desirable, site.

Howard Johnson’s was not, strictly speaking, an indigenous institution. Howard Johnson himself was a restaurateur from Quincy, Massachusetts, who made a better grade of ice cream and began building a local chain of restaurants in the late twenties. Johnson appears to have invented the idea of restaurant franchising,