At the end of the block ahead I can see the tracks of the West Side Line where they pass through the walls of the old industrial structures. I remember when they opened the elevated line in 1934: the West Side Improvement Project. What a brilliant idea it had seemed at the time, getting those freight trains up off street level.
I remember, as well, when the line closed in 1980. The last shipment they sent down the rails was a load of frozen turkeys, cargo that seemed like a punchline for a joke that no one could be bothered to write. Now most people seem to think it should be torn down, and I expect it will be, once the city finds the money. I wish they could leave it standing, fix it up, run trains on it again—or come up with some other function for it, though I can’t imagine what that might be. Everyone is always too quick to discard things.
When I get to Wendy’s block there are no marked addresses, only a cramped compound of interconnected brick buildings that stretches to all four bordering streets—and indeed beyond, by way of a pedestrian skywalk that spans the space above my head like a latter-day Bridge of Sighs. Some of the buildings are windowless; some that aren’t are boarded up with graffitied sheets of plywood. Not one betrays so much as a flicker of light.
The stubborn insistence of the human body—even an old one like mine—on keeping itself alive is a source of increasing amusement for me. On this deserted street, my unreasoning heart and lungs have commenced their rote double time, my pupils yawn, and even my steady knees have acquired a quiver.
But like all impulses, the desire to preserve oneself can be mastered, controlled. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to walk all the way back to Murray Hill tonight still lugging this incipient amaryllis.
About halfway along the block, amid a line of boarded windows, I find a set of double doors propped with a mop bucket; from the bucket’s handle rises a spray of helium balloons. The door opens—with a haunted-house groan and no small effort on my part—on a hallway lit at its far end by a platoon of votive candles. There’s no buzzer, and from the music I can now hear pounding above, it’s unlikely that anyone would be able to hear it if there were one.
Behind the candles a piece of pink poster board leans against the wall. PETER’S N–Y–E PARTY, I read as I draw closer—not Peter and Wendy’s; just Peter’s—7TH FLOOR FOLLOW THE LITE! Around the text, the poster is collaged with dozens of tiny hand-tinted prints of the same black-and-white photograph: the appraising face of a handsome heavy-lidded young man. Wendy’s name may not be written on the poster, but the photo clearly announces her presence, reassures me that I’m in the right place.
The hallway extends parallel to the street in both directions, but more candles scatter to the left, leading toward what looks like a distant freight elevator. My hosts’ trail is charming and romantic to be sure, but also entirely unsafe: the propped door and low light create a perfect workspace for muggers and rapists. I hate thinking this way but also can’t justify partaking in plain foolishness; I pause to search my purse for my trusty penlight, click it on, and proceed.
The bluish oval that it casts discovers a ceiling veined by pipes, ducts, and conduits, none of which provides a good clue about what this place used to make, or store, or process. The walls show signs of having been whitewashed so long ago that the whiteness is all but gone; here and there there’s a flash of some more elaborate adornment. At one point a pair of pale painted hands takes shape from the darkness, each holding a doubloon-like circle—one black, one white—in its long bloodless fingers, as if illustrating an occult ritual.
As I study the image, I spy words painted above it, and I angle my beam upward to read.
OREO SANDWICH, it says.
The shock of recognition almost jolts the light from my hand. At once I know exactly where I am, and I can’t suppress a laugh—though I don’t much like the sound of it when the echo sends it back to me.
This is the old National Biscuit factory: an amalgam of packaging plants, storehouses, loading docks, offices, and industrial-scale ovens that has overflowed this Manhattan block since Teddy Roosevelt was police commissioner. In disuse now for more than a quarter century—ever since the whole operation trimmed its name to Nabisco and decamped, like so many of my other aging neighbors, to New Jersey—this was once the nation’s snack laboratory par excellence, where wizardly denizens invented tricks that would change food forever.