He is out of West Village but still in Crown Center Shops. The stores are more conventional here but still — for him — troubling. Here and there along the corridor there are benches, like benches in museums. Lord Snowden is a men’s haberdasher, Habitat a furniture store, Ethnics a gallery of folk art. There are too many specialty shops, a place that sells yarn, another that does soap. There is The Board & Barrel, with its gourmet cookware; The Factory (a hardware store). There are The Bake Shop, The Candy Store, The Cheese Shop, The Flower Shop, The Sausage Shop, The Fish Market, The Meat Market, The Poultry Market, The Produce Market. And these, with their bare, spare generics, are somehow even more coy than the shops that are puns and double entendres. Though he feels that they have missed a bet, that they might have put in a broker and called it The Stock Market.
Yes. It is precisely what he had thought. As if America has lost a war with France, say, or England, or with, perhaps, its own past, knuckled under to its history. What’s a nice guy like me doing in a place like this? he wonders. A man of franchise, a true democrat who would make Bar Harbor, Maine, look like Chicago, who would quell distinction, obliterate difference, who would common-denominate until Americans recognize that it was America everywhere. The Stamp Pad, indeed. He would show them rubber stamp!
He sees a sign for the Crown Center Hotel and makes for it. No detours. No doglegs. No catwalks. No ups, no downs.
And is standing in the lobby of the hotel. There is, incredibly, along the width of its western wall, a waterfall, a tall slender stream of water no wider at its source than the stream that might come from heavy firehose, but opening out as it drops, spreading, diverted to two channels like the twin barrels on a shotgun, hugging, lower down, rocks, slipping over what appear to be mossy boulders, splashing plants, lichen, citrus trees, and spilling finally into a collecting pool, a sort of hemisphere of walled-off bay. The waterfall is reached by escalators, by exposed balconies two stories above him. Guests, tourists, stroll along iron-railed gangways that crisscross the waterfall like bridges in Japanese gardens. They stand at different levels, as if on scaffolding, spread out and up and down like notes on sheet music. And Flesh watches a woman toss change in the pool. Several sit for their photographs. He has guessed the appeal. It is the appeal of surrealism and odd juxtaposition. Something pit-of-the-stomach in the notion of bringing the outdoors in, just as the elevators at the tower end of the lobby, though entered from the lobby itself, climb the outside of the building, riding up gravity like effervescence in club soda. An appeal in inversion. He suffers a sort of vertigo for the people displaced above him in the air on their balconies and catwalks and scaffolds like so many window washers or house painters or construction workers. He has himself just come from the Center’s suspended cubes, sick in his stomach and feeling the heavy, off-center nausea of the weight, for example, in loaded dice.
He looks away from these human flies and sees that he stands above an excavation, an upholstered pit, roughly at the center of the immense lobby. It is a sunken barroom, the depth of the shallow end of a swimming pool. Low, handsome furniture — chrome, leather the color of the cork tips on cigarettes — is grouped in a deliberate randomness which gives the illusion of a house made up entirely of living rooms. There is something odd about the bar, though he cannot at first put his finger on it. He still holds his light suitcase, his garment bag rests on his arm like a towel on the sleeve of a waiter. He walks around the perimeter of the bar. The tops of the drinkers’ heads are at a level with his knees. The waitresses, carrying their trays, come up to his chest.
Then he realizes what is so strange about the bar. There is no bar. People are served from low consoles about the size of shields. (An impression reinforced by the crown and heraldry emblazoned on their fronts.) But that still isn’t it. Not entirely. Now. Now he knows. The consoles are not unlike the rolling carts pushed up and down the aisles of airplanes. The girls might be stewardesses, the young men stewards.
The franchiser understands the place now. With its nature brought indoors and its machinery out, with the lowest point in the lobby giving the sense of flight. The elements have been split, transposed, not just inversion but an environmentalist’s hedge against the continuity of the present. He might be, he might be in some zoo of the future. This is what a waterfall was like. Those were called trees. Those smaller things plants. When there was still fuel, people used to fly in heavier-than-air machines to go from one place to another. They were served food and drink on them. If you’ll come this way and step into the machine, you can get a good view of the outdoors, the “streets,” as they were called in those days. People used to move about in them.
They were way ahead of him, way ahead of the franchiser with his Robo-Washes and convenience-food joints, with his roadside services and dance studios and One Hour Martinizing, with his shopping center movie houses and Firestone appliance stores and Fotomats. Why, he was decadent, a piece of history, the Yesterday Kid himself, Father Time, OP Man River — his America, the America of the Interstates, of the sixties and middle seventies, as obsolete and charming and picturesque as an old neighborhood.
(Later that night he would go with other men to a restaurant called The Old Washington Street Station. He would read the legend on the back of the menu: “Surrounded in an atmosphere of early Kansas City history, The Old Washington Street Station invites you on a journey through our historic past. Ninth and Washington was the location of one of Kansas City’s first cable railway powerhouses. For your dining pleasure, an authentic reproduction of an early Kansas City streetcar has been provided in our main dining room. We invite you to make yourself at home, enjoy our good food, your friends, and fond memories of Kansas City’s rich heritage.”