What Was the Office?

It Was Stressful, Filthy, High Stakes—and Where the Action Was

1969: The nonprofit Triangle Association on East 129th Street (above).

WORKING AT: TV KEY, 1985

The Exquisite Pleasure of a Dead-End Job By Mark Harris

I got my first real job in midtown Manhattan on Sixth Avenue. Or, I should say, off Sixth. This was not the Avenue of the Americas of Time Inc. and other places to which I aspired. I was with a small company hanging on for dear life above an Indian restaurant in a dilapidated five-story building with stairs behind a steel door and an ancient elevator that would as soon plunge you into hell as take you up 25 feet. The office had once been somebody’s long, narrow apartment and was now the home of the ancient-times version of a content farm.

At the back end were two rooms, each with three or four desks and an ever-rotating group of sallow young men like me, who were hired to produce capsule movie reviews for an encyclopedic book intended to capitalize on the new craze for videocassettes. I was paid $275 off the books for a 45-hour week. The checks were handed out just irregularly enough to keep everyone in a constant state of anxiety and grievance.

At the front end were two more rooms for the boss and the underboss, who were rarely seen. (A coat on a rack outside those doors, or sometimes a lustrous, special-occasion toupee hanging casually from a hook, was often our only hint that management was in.) The two ends of the office were connected by a hallway covered in yards of badly damaged harvest-color shag. Off the hall was a file room filled with ominously tilting cabinets that groaned when you pulled at a drawer, the tortured vestige of a 1930s kitchenette, and a bathroom with a large tub in which mice would get trapped after falling through a vent in the ceiling. As the junior employee, I was told to kill them.