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The Hot Dog Will Survive. The Room Might Not.

Victor Victoratos hears the question before some customers order. They have come to Boulevard Drinks for a hot dog, but they need to know how much time is left. “When is your last day?” He says everybody asks. The question has become part of the transaction, alongside the food and the change. There is affection in it, and a little dread. People want the answer even when they already know it. Victor says April 1 would have brought 70 years at this Journal Square address. The business itself goes back to 1937. A customer can do that arithmetic while waiting at the counter, though it will not make the coming move easier to understand.

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Eight to Seven

The midterms end tonight, November 3. Four days later, on Saturday, November 7, the country crosses an anniversary almost nobody has circled on the calendar. It is one hundred fifty years since the presidential election of 1876, the night the United States voted and then could not say who had won. The count ran for four months. It finished in a borrowed courtroom and then in the House chamber, in the small hours of a March morning, by a margin of one electoral vote. Congress resolved it with a procedure invented on the spot. The price was collected from people who had no seat in the room, and they kept paying it for the better part of ninety years. I count 1876 the worst election in American history. The election of 1860 brought on a war, but its count was honest; in 1876 the count itself was the fraud. The country is still legislating in its shadow, and this is a good week to read the record it left.

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The Last Closed Sunday

The World Cup final fell on a Sunday this year. The largest crowd of the summer poured out of MetLife Stadium, and the stores at American Dream were open and selling. Ten miles north, the biggest mall in New Jersey was dark. Westfield Garden State Plaza closes every Sunday. Paramus Park closes. The Bergen Town Center closes. Nearly every other retailer in Bergen County closes, because a statute older than any of the malls says clothing, furniture, appliances, lumber, and home furnishings may not change hands on the first day of the week. Bergen County likes it that way. The voters have said so twice, both times by landslide. The voters never got a say over the ground under American Dream. That is where the case lives.

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The Dead Already Paid for Washington Square Park

New York University made an announcement this week. The school pledged $6 million over four years to the Washington Square Park Conservancy, the nonprofit steward of the nine-and-three-quarter-acre square at the foot of Fifth Avenue. The university’s own headline chose a gambler’s verb: “Doubles Down.” The money is real. The park needs care, and the Conservancy has paid for horticulture crews and free programming there for years. NYU students treat the park as their quad because it is one. A school without a campus was handed a campus by geography, and the students love the ground they borrow. Grant all of that. The gift is generous, and the park will be cleaner for it.

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The Last Memorizers

The examiner names two places. A square in Islington, a hospital across the river. The candidate sits across the desk in a Transport for London office on Baker Street and calls the run out loud: the streets in order, the exact curb where the passenger is set down. Each appearance gives him four of these calls in about twenty minutes. Marks come off for wrong street names and banned turns. Hesitation alone can sink an answer, because a route that cannot be recalled at traffic speed cannot be driven at traffic speed. This is the Knowledge of London, and it still begins and ends the same way, with a human being reciting a city from the skull.

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The Square Outlived the Paper

I live in a tower named for a square named for a newspaper. My building is called Journal Squared, three glass sections rising beside the Journal Square PATH station in Jersey City, one of the busiest stations in the system. The square below is Journal Square, which the city created in 1923. The newspaper was the Jersey Journal, which ceased publication on February 1, 2025, at the age of 157. Two of those three things still exist. The paper is not one of them.

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The Receipt Democracy Must Not Give You

William Wade Dudley wrote a letter in October 1888. He was treasurer of the Republican National Committee, and he spent that autumn worried about Indiana, where the presidential race would turn on voters of no settled loyalty, men the campaigns called floaters. Floaters drifted to whichever side paid. His instructions to an Indiana county chairman were precise. “Divide the floaters into blocks of five, and put a trusted man, with necessary funds, in charge of these five, and make him responsible that none get away and that all vote our ticket.” A Democratic mail clerk on the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad had noticed the heavy mail flowing from Republican headquarters to Indiana Republicans. He opened one letter and passed it to his party. The Indianapolis Sentinel printed the letter on October 31, 1888, under a banner headline.

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