Lucinda Rosenfeld
For this young novelist, the George Washington Bridge Bus Station is the airlock to her Jersey-girl past.

Though I grew up barely five miles outside the city, in New Jersey, it wasn't until college that I got up the nerve to cross the bridge in a non-familial (i.e., non-Saturday afternoon excursion to the Museum of Natural History) context. And though I moved to the city after graduation, I still considered New Jersey home. I went there often -- for dinner, or to play tennis with my father, or to raid the Hadassah thrift shop in Teaneck with my mother, having spent the previous portion of the day or night trying to pass myself off (usually unsuccessfully) as some terribly sophisticated young thing. The George Washington Bridge bus terminal became my parents' and my agreed-upon meeting and retrieval ground for such occasions.

In ten-plus years, not much has changed.

The favored routine is for me to catch the A train to 175th Street, where I walk a gently ascendant underground passage that connects the subway to the bus terminal, climb a flight of stairs, and exit onto Fort Washington Avenue, where -- with any luck -- my father's Chevy Celebrity is parked out front. In the pre-cell-phone era, there were plenty of times when I'd be unable to predict my time of arrival and would simply call collect from "George" on one of the station's public pay phones, which would be my parents' clue to come fetch me A.S.A.P. (Needless to say, my parents, who never turn down the opportunity to save 75 cents, always declined George's request.)

It was in those waiting moments that I came to know (and love) the G.W. Bridge bus terminal in all its depressive grandeur. The concrete, camel-toe-shaped mausoleum that sits on the corner of Broadway and 178th has its own kind of romance: the romance of nowhere.

Indeed, at most times of day, the place is deserted but for a few retirees shuffling toward OTB (the nexus of all bus-station activity) and a lone runaway leaning against the pay phones, sucking on a filthy-looking lollipop. Other regulars include an impeccably groomed white-bearded old man my father is convinced was a famous physicist in another lifetime. News and concession stands share space with a menacing-looking check-cashing joint called Your Friendly Neighborhood Credit Union. There is also an incense wagon, a bookstore filled with last year's best-sellers, and, most ominously, behind a windowless hardwood storefront, bridge dentists, begging the question: Why would anyone get their cavities filled at a bus station?

Over the years, the G.W. Bridge Bus Station's distinctly unwelcoming walls have served as a powerful reminder that, like most people who live here, I am not a native of this city, nor will I ever be, as much as I sometimes like to pretend otherwise. In that sense, it has been a corrective to certain illusions I like to maintain about myself. It also seems to underscore -- if not undermine -- my stubborn refusal to settle down and stop trying so hard.

John Waters
A young man from Baltimore gets a sentimental education at Hellfire.

Well, I always liked the club Hellfire in the days before AIDS, when they still served liquor there and everybody did drugs. It was the only S&M sex bar where both male and female heteros and homos of all classes mixed with abandon. Some people even checked their clothes into little lockers when they entered. I, of course, never did. I used to see Jerzy Kosinski every time I went, and he never checked his clothes either.

Hellfire made me feel relaxed and oh-so open-minded. You could be standing there talking to a slumming uptown art maven brought there by a bunch of raunchy gay friends, and suddenly you'd see an erect penis poke through a glory hole and hit her in the back. "Excuse me," she'd politely say, as she moved slightly to one side and continued the conversation. A lesbian couple I knew had a fight in the back, and when it became physical, a crowd of masturbators suddenly surrounded them, watching in glee. And using the bathroom -- well, here was a real dilemma if you didn't know the geography of the place. One bathroom had real toilets, the other human. I always tried to imagine the water-sports enthusiasts on the way home after a long night in the bathtubs at Hellfire. Did their doormen ever get a whiff, and if so, were they too polite to comment?

The old days of Hellfire are long gone. But it's time to bring back some kind of shock to the nightlife in Manhattan. Come on Hillary, we voted for you. Get behind the opening of a new sexually mixed Mineshaft -- it's your political duty.