To revisit the long-closed Gimbels Corridor is to relive New York’s past-tense future. In the early 1970s, conditions in the pedestrian tunnel presaged the bleeding city of the 1980s and early ’90s. Filthy, fetid and unpoliced, it entertained rampant lawlessness, squalor and decay years before they fully possessed the streets.
Before it was walled up, the passageway — parallel to the basements of Gimbels department store and the Hotel Pennsylvania beneath West 32nd Street — linked the Herald Square subway station with the one at Seventh Avenue/Penn Station. Vornado Realty Trust plans to reopen it one day as part of a new office tower project.
Prior to a recent “tour,” I hadn’t set foot in it since 1974 or ’75.
Back then, the interminable, 800-foot stroll, as long as four city blocks, was too much even for my youthful spirit of adventure. Street weirdos and sex hawkers on Eighth Avenue were amusing; knife-wielding hustlers, legless beggars and the howling insane in a dimly lit corridor a mere nine feet wide for much of its length were not. The mad harmonica player who stalked me end to end was the last straw.
Once you were inside, there was no way out except to reach the other end. In the midst of teeming Midtown, bare-bulb fixtures like those in mines marked a path through a Calcutta-like sprawl of diseased, predatory humanity.
The corridor seemed to exist beyond the reach of any authority. Vornado says it’s owned by the MTA. The MTA says it’s owned by Amtrak, which told me it thinks it owns a portion of it. Who was in charge 35 years ago is an even deeper mystery.
Could today’s looming service cuts and upticking crime rate similarly preview much worse to come? We should pray not, but the prospect, however remote, might please certain factions of the intelligentsia wistful for the misery of the past.
A New York Times op-ed column last Tuesday, which celebrated with tongue in cheek the “miracle” of today’s miserable Penn Station, stated, “People love to say they miss the ragged, gritty, vivid aura of New York in the ’70s.” Since the Gimbels tunnel fed into Penn Station, we may presume it’s among the joys some yearn to recapture.
Others miss subway graffiti, which proclaimed the criminal underclass’s dominion over the trains. James Wolcott expressed in Vanity Fair last year a nuanced but no less unfathomable preference for the “rubble” of the bad old days. Jimmy Breslin said he preferred hooker-filled Times Square to today’s “Disneyfied” version.
“30 Rock” star Tracy Morgan told TimeOut NY last week that the city of the ’70s was “more relaxed.” While he allows it was “more dangerous in the ’80s,” he says the city’s “soul” has been lost, and it seems to him, since 9/11, “like a police state.”
Out of their minds, every one.
The “soul” of Morgan’s lamented lost city reposed in the Gimbels tunnel, which foresaw the dysfunction and pathologies that would rule the city to come. Soon after I last used it, the municipality went nearly broke; the Bronx burned; infrastructure and transit fell to ruin after a generation of “deferred maintenance;” and murders swelled from 800 annually to 2,262 by 1990. And the tunnel? A rape epidemic finally prompted somebody to seal the ends shut in the early 1980s.
Vornado hopes to modernize and widen the passage as part of improvements it pledged in exchange for city approvals to replace the hotel with an office tower. A fine and overdue project, it will finally banish the tunnel’s stubborn ghosts.
Or maybe not. It was skin-crawlingly creepy on my recent walk-through — not only because of grimy signs for “Gimbel Brothers” or spooky remnants of a couple of fast-food joints.
Picking through vermin traps and rubble, we reached the point near the Sixth Avenue end where the harmonica man rose out of the dark as if in a bad dream. Toothless, oozing blood and worse, he blew his mangled tune in my face. The faster I walked, the faster his pursuit. How far to Seventh Avenue?
Those who romanticize our dark age need a tour, too. The harmonica man’s song is still down there for those who care to listen. Heed the echo, and tremble.