![]() A cop gave me a ticket and turned me around to go home and get money for a token. I myself was detained, not arrested, trying to breeze the wrong way through an exit gate, flashing an imaginary bus pass at the token agent, on my way to high school. And the pay phone in the station was widely understood to have drug-dealers-only status. ![]() Or should it be considered as a Heisenbergian "observer" problem-do we arrest you because we see you? Would we arrest you as much elsewhere if we were there? However ridiculous it may seem, it is true that within sight of that police substation my father, his arms laden with luggage for a flight out of JFK, had his pocket picked while waiting on line for a token. ![]() The presence of cops and robbers in the same place has a kind of chicken-and-egg quality. The station also housed one of the borough's four Transit Police substations, a headquarters for subway cops that legislated over a quarter of Brooklyn's subway system, so perhaps it was merely that suspects nabbed elsewhere in the system were brought there to register their actual arrest? I've never been able to corroborate the legend. Its two border streets, Hoyt and Bond, were vents from the Fulton mall area, where purse snatchers and street dealers were likely to flee and be cornered. A neighborhood legend held that Hoyt-Schermerhorn consistently ranked highest in arrests in the whole transit system. Elegant blue-and-yellow tile-work labeled them with an enormous L-standing for what exactly? The ruined dressmakers' dummies and empty display stands behind the cracked glass weren't saying. Most telling and shrouded at once were the ruined shop-display windows that lined the long corridor from the Bond Street entrance. Like some Manhattan subway stops, though fewer and fewer every year, it licensed businesses on its mezzanine level: a magazine shop, a shoeshine stand, a bakery. The station itself gave testimony to the lost commercial greatness of the area. Now, no less vital in its way, the place was full of chain outlets and sidewalk vendors, many selling African licorice-root chews and "Muslim" incense alongside discount socks and hats and mittens. Fulton had suffered a steep decline, from Manhattanesque grandeur to ghetto pedestrian mall, through the Fifties and Sixties. The Hoyt-Schermerhorn station stood at the border of the vibrant mercantile disarray of Fulton Street-once the borough's poshest shopping and theater boulevard. My Brooklyn neighborhood, as I knew it in the 1970s, was an awkwardly gentrifying residential zone. In fact the place was cool and weird beyond my obsession's parameters, cooler and weirder than most subway stations anyway. Personal impressions and neighborhood lore swirled in my exaggerated regard. It was the first subway station I knew, and it took years for me to disentangle my primal fascination with its status as a functional ruin, an indifferent home to clockwork chaos, from the fact that it was, in objective measure, an anomalous place. On that principle, Hoyt-Schermerhorn was the most famous subway station in the world. "When you're a child, everything local is famous.
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