That One Guy Going to Hoboken

In the old days you would come up from the 4 train at Courtland Street, up a couple plain flights of stairs with brown brick balls that could have been anywhere, and at the top of the stairs you came right out into the big inner hall, the indoor plaza that was like a plain-brown-wrapper shopping mall in muted colors in need of a renovation. There were businesses the edge for commuters, but a working class slant---discount shoes, for example, and others one might find a strip mall somewhere in the middle of Nebraska. The look and feel of it reminded me of the concessions level in the Astrodome. All of that made me love it dearly.

In the midst of all this would be hundreds of people going in the various canonical directions inside the hall, from one subway down towards one of the halls that fed out in various directions in plaza around the North Tower.

In those days I would always make my way through this stream in the same direction. Somehow no one ever collided, and there was no overt rage. People just did their thing, and went their directions, and you were all this together.

At the far end of the hall was the giant mouth of the entrance to the PATH trains, with a massive bank of escalators descending past a  sprawling advertising placard that spanned the mouth.  In the morning all of the escalators but one would be coming up, and I would need to find the single one that was going down, all while hoping to arrive in between the giant surges of people that came up the other escalators when the train arrived from New Jersey.

"Oh, you're that one guy going into Hoboken in the morning," Stacy once told me, when hearing me describe my commute.