Likelihood of Success

Meeting across the river

Apr 19, 2007 Americana

Drop off at North Bergen

There’s a special world commuting across the river from Midtown Manhattan ’round midnight. I know it pretty well. I’d like to blame that fact on lawyering, but time management is not a forte of mine. And I do a little blogging, see, which does not help.

Usually slogging your way across the dense waist of the island is so hopeless that you can hardly tell what kind of distance you’re traversing getting from, say, Third Avenue and 53rd — where I work now — to the Port Authority Bus Terminal on Eighth Avenue and 42nd. It is a kind of “tell me when it’s over” experience.

This late at night I avoid the subway, not because it’s dangerous, but because the trains are so few and far between and the rats along the tracks of the E line at Lexington Avenue a little too frolicsome for my delicate sensibilities. So I took a cab, and it seemed as if, despite the relative lull in traffic — there are still always garbage trucks, vans unloading, construction sites, so it hasn’t ever been a straight shot across the City since probably the Civil War — I was in the darned thing for ten minutes and I only looked up to see my old office at Fifth Avenue. In other words, that’s where I would have started out five years ago.

Third Avenue and Fifth Avenue are not nearly as close as they sound, as any New Yorker knows; in between are not the largely imaginary Fourth Avenue but the three avenues of the Holy Trinity — Lexington, Madison and the double-barreled grandiosity of Park . Even at midnight I felt each block. At Fifth I looked out my window at the vagrants sleeping on the steps and under boxes at a church that has been the subject of litigation over the inalienable right to sleep in the street; at Sixth — what they call the Avenue of the Americas, in order to separate out tourists from locals — the constant traffic around the Hilton, the dregs of some testimonial dinner emptying onto the street; at Seventh you can begin to feel the vibration of Times Square, and then a left onto Seventh and down Broadway, into the belly of the neon beast, where night is day and 50-foot-tall underwear is always appropriate.

But seven dollars and a tip later, I was at the Port Authority, which is in the midst of a campaign to convince its countless numbed denizens seeking a nothing more than a seat on the bus or a fast way to the subways below the terminal — admittedly, like Times Square just outside, eons more pleasant and safe than when it was a festering crackhouse during the glory of the Koch Administration — is really a tony shopping mall you might like to shop or dine in rather than a bus station. No one is buying.

There are two buildings, connected by elevated walkways that cover a cross street permanently closed to traffic on September 11, 2001, that comprise the “Port Authority,” as the terminal is known. For security and cost savings they close the south building, whence my bus usually departs, after 10 PM and we are sent skyward to the fourth floor of the terminal. In a coy little bit of humor, the terminal management assigns, from 10 until 1 AM, when the last 320 bus runs, gate 320 to bus 320. Usually the buses and the gates are not coordinated at all (they could not be), causing endless confusion among people from colorful foreign lands.

But there is always confusion, anyway, on the fourth floor launching pad to New Jersey. That is because gate 320 is usually the gate that is used for the short bus ride over to Hoboken, a yuppie wonderland that half-empties into the City until around this time. Then the commuters, frequently soused from their night of “clubbing” in the big city, head back under the Hudson to sleep it off. But in this condition they frequently get the gates wrong. We regulars, mainly the park and ride crowd at this hour (the German and Korean tourists staying in nearby hotels have already finished their night at the Lion King) know how to spot these lost souls, however: They are either visibly drunk (or once on line you can smell the booze) or, more likely, the are just too young and good looking not to be going to Hoboken at this hour. We gently point out the line they really want to be on and wait for our crumpled return back to suburbia..