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By Root 695 0

and in the thirties local entrepreneurs opened franchises up and down the East Coast and along the rapidly expanding network of thruways and turnpikes. Times Square, with its great mass of tourists, was a natural site for the new chain, famous not only for its ice cream but—a reminder of its eastern seaboard origins—for its fried clams. The first Howard Johnson’s in Times Square opened on Broadway and 49th Street, across the street from Jack Dempsey’s bar and just east of Madison Square Garden, in the late 1940s. It was a tiny place that sat no more than seventy-five people. Joseph Sherry, the manager of the current Howard Johnson’s at 46th Street and the self-appointed custodian of the restaurant’s Times Square history and cultural status, says that, as he understands it, the comic Lily Tomlin perfected her gum-popping wiseacre coffee-shop waitress routine behind the counter at 49th Street, while Gene Hackman, decked out in white gloves, worked as the doorman, for in those glorious days patrons of Howard Johnson’s were greeted at the door.

Sherry himself began working straight out of high school, in 1966, at yet another Howard Johnson’s, on the other side of Broadway at 46th Street. Sherry is a Jewish immigrant from a Middle Eastern nation where he was so ill-treated that he does not wish to dignify the country in question by allowing its name to be printed next to his. He is, by now, a worldly, well-traveled man, but he speaks with a more or less equal sense of pride of the United States, New York City, and Howard Johnson’s, which took him to its great orange bosom and raised him over the years from waiter to manager. He avoided talking to me for weeks, possibly out of a sense that a person of his station need not stoop to press interviews, but once we sat down in a banquette, with the little placemats advertising A-1 Steak Sauce, he opened the spigot of reminiscence and a veritable geyser rushed forth.

“We opened at seven and we closed at three or four in the morning,” Sherry said of the sixties. “And we were jam-packed. People raved about Howard Johnson’s. They would come just for the fried clams. And the Howard Johnson’s hot dog and hot dog bun was the talk of the town. Times Square was tremendously glamorous in those days. People were well dressed. They would come to eat at Howard Johnson’s like they would come to eat at the Club 21. Remember, in those days the theater opened at nine, and people would come for dinner beforehand. Then the break was at eleven-thirty, and inevitably everybody would want to go to Howard Johnson’s for a sundae or an ice cream soda. I would have two hosts that would only handle the overflow from the theater. The night manager would be back behind the counter helping the counterman make sundaes. Later on, the Latin Quarter down the street would close, and those people would come for ice cream.” A waiter came over and whispered that a supplier had been waiting to talk to him for close to half an hour. “Make him wait,” said Mr. Sherry imperiously, and he turned back to me. “This is to my knowledge the oldest restaurant left on Broadway,” he went on. “There used to be an Automat right on this block, and a Schrafft’s across the street, and the Nathan’s where the Disney Studio is now. We had a stand across the street where we sold coconut champagne and nonalcoholic piña coladas. We used to sell hot dogs like hot potatoes.”

Sherry dates the decline of Howard Johnson’s, and of the neighborhood, not to the Gulf War but to the administration of Mayor David Dinkins, from 1989 to 1993, whom he blames for a crime wave which, to be fair to Dinkins, actually started three or four mayors earlier. In any case, Sherry understands that he is now the captain of a ghost ship. But he takes his job with the utmost seriousness, for he feels that Howard Johnson’s offers the balm of the past to visitors dizzied by the spinning vortex of the present. “We’ve kept the décor of the eighties, we’ve kept the sense of nostalgia,” he says—as if his boss, Mr. Rubinstein, had committed his fortune to keeping the restaurant