William Burroughs and (semi) lost New York City

Returning to New York City after years on the West Coast is akin to returning to a theater seat after a long intermission. The set has changed dramatically and many of the characters have changed or departed the scene altogether. The New York that I left featured hand scrawled signs in the windows of nearly every single parked car reading, Nothing of Value in Car!! As little as a roll of paper towels in view was enough to inspire a crackhead to smash your car window. These days I often see unmolested Mercedes SUVs with fancy child seats left inside in plain view. Back then (70s, 80s and some of the 90s too) iPods would have been unthinkable. A pricey little chochke that renders its wearers unable to hear the stealthy approach of someone creeping up on them? Never happen. If the iPod had come about in those days the number of concussed rubes wailing about being mugged would have been uncountable and unbearable. These days your concussion is more likely to result from being stumbled into by someone paying closer attention to their texting than to where they are going.
One of the marks of a great artist is an ability to make manifest the ineffable feelings that comprise our emotional landscape. I grew up on West 103rd Street on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a street that William Burroughs describes at some length in his classic Junky. I found that he had, with preternatural acuity, given voice to many of the sensations that I experienced time and again as I traversed the area around 103rd Street and Broadway as a boy and a young man:

"103rd and Broadway looks like any Broadway block.
A cafeteria, a movie, stores. In the middle of Broadway is an island with some grass and benches placed at intervals.
103rd is a subway stop, a crowded block. This is junk territory.
Junk haunts the cafeteria, roams up and down the block, sometimes half-crossing Broadway to rest on one of the island benches. A ghost in daylight on a crowded street."

A few paragraphs later:

"There are no more junkies at 103rd and Broadway waiting for the connection.
The connection has gone somewhere else. But the feel of junk is still there. It hits you at the corner, follows you along the block, then falls away like a discouraged panhandler as you walk on."

The cafeteria to which he refers was the Horn & Hardart on 104th and Broadway, just north of the Edison Theater (for a brief history go here: http://cinematreasures.org/theater/6193/) . The subway had a beautiful gothic entrance on the island in the middle of Broadway, since torn down (go to 72nd and Broadway to see a similar one). There was a burger joint called the Red Chimney on the southwest corner of 103rd that made fantastic char-grilled burgers. Just south of it was an old time candy shop run by an old man with an impenetrable old world (German?) accent. South of the candy shop was the Great Shanghai Chinese restaurant and the Daitch Shopwell supermarket. The Red Chimney was in a building (still) called the Marseilles, a glorious building that, at the time, was one of the worst SROs (single room occupancy) in the area; a building from which bodies, prematurely dead, emerged on stretchers with monotonous regularity. There are still a handful of SROs left (Hunters Moon on Broadway south of 99th is one but the neighborhood used to be lousy with them.
Today, there is a Starbucks on the southeast corner of 103rd and Broadway and a Subway on the southwest corner. The stretch of West 103rd Street between Broadway and Amsterdam was incredibly seedy when I was growing up. The north east corner building (now Columbia faculty housing) was a taxpayer with small shops at the street level and the Edison Theater fronting Broadway. There was a liquor store and Chinese laundry in the middle of the block on the north side. The liquor store had a sign saying "we don't serve alcoholics". As a child it was the first time I encountered the word. Junky was published in 1953 and my first memories of 103rd and Broadway are from roughly 10 years hence, but "the feel of junk" that he describes was most certainly still in evidence. Apparently it takes a lot to wash it away.
(beautiful day out, time for a bike ride...more later)