The experiment of the cinema is over; perhaps that of the city is coming to an end. The old gears no longer rotate, the revolutions of the PPH no longer direct crowds to the city’s heart via Pearl Street and the Battery; what was once a true attraction, the source of the city’s life, has become a curiosity. The PPH has the atmosphere of something old and obsolete, even haunted, a spectacle not of novelty but of chance discovery, of daydreams, memories—if not of childhood, then of a previous youth, vanished and mysterious.

The hexagon rotates as always on its central axis, sixty feet above the heads of visitors, who until recently could expect to look up and see their faces glowing in its six panels, framed by LEDs embedded in the joints. The pleasure then was of anticipation, of knowing that at any moment their faces could be selected from the crowd and made enormous and segmented, as by the eyes of a fly, at the top of the revolving tower, from which they could be seen throughout the park and beyond, even on the Battery from certain locations, especially on clear summer nights, just as the neon letters sizzled to life. (Those same spectators could imagine, if usually in retrospect, that their faces had seen the entire park from that vantage, and the pier, the port, the sea.)

In later years it made for a lonely experience, because the crowds only appeared in the summer, and sometimes there were no crowds, just a handful of visitors, or only one, whose face would be blown up for nobody else, for as long as it remained in range of the Eye. Wandering alone among the empty attractions, the shuttered kiosks, the disused bandstands, the lethargic rides, the Crystal Pool (locked), the booths, unoccupied, their long black curtains fluttering in the sea wind, the carousel, not in spin, though piping the same tinny bars of Scott Joplin (such is its age), this person from time to time would glance up at his own solitary face, an omnipresence he had perhaps forgotten, massive and rotating, collecting the light of the city or the sun depending on the time of day. The experience was like watching a fly move across the surface of a wall, only the fly was one’s own face, and the wall was one’s own face. (In the peak months there are still hundreds of visitors, even at night. Tourists will come in July, they will radiate out to the waterfront, now the city’s focal point, they will take advantage of its breweries, but the postcards of a century earlier, sold in facsimile in the visitor center, show crowded Pearl Palace autumns, crowded Pearl Palace winters, fur coats, dance halls long burned down. Revitalization projects are proposed, implemented, abandoned, and each meets with modest, inadequate success. When the Eye rests on a child’s spiral of cotton candy and the smile that tears it apart, the future of these projects can be discerned all too clearly in the haruspical whorls of pink and blue. The revolving faces, now projected only on certain holidays, will become another pool of nostalgic dreaming, visited in July by a handful of urban explorers with a taste for obscure emotions.)

One problem is that the screens are visible from so far away. The name Pearl Palace View has been claimed by five successive establishments. In the PPH’s silver decades, when it was a cinema, it was easier to watch movies from the Pearl Palace View Apartments than from the seating area. (Another problem: the height of the hexagon and its six identical, gradually rotating surfaces has always ensured that spectators do not watch the movie so much as watch the apparition of the movie in play. What they spectate is the impression of spectacle, which is also what they remember. The appeal of the PPH has always been strongest in the memory of the visitor and the effect of its description on the mind of another.) From the balconies of the most famous Pearl Palace View, once a nest of luxury, now a hotel with mediocre reviews, wistful suicides often contemplated a last light show of distant faces, perhaps hoping for a final glimpse of one that circumstances had denied them forever. It was on such a balcony that the Eye had been imagined; an urban developer stepped out for a cigarette, his mind occupied by an entirely different problem, that of self-promotion; waving a swirl of smoke from his eyes, he had a vision of the stationary hexagon in brilliant motion, and of his face and those of his associates glittering on its panels. He immediately grasped the advertising potential of the PPH. It seemed to him, further, that the images on these panels could be projected onto neighboring buildings to create a vast reflection of his business interests; the same principle, he reasoned when he proposed the plan, had civic and political applications, or it could be used for mass entertainment; it would certainly revive the Pearl Palace, which was once the soul of the city, along with shipping, meatpacking, etc. In the end it was undesirable to extend these fascinating objects throughout the city, since any tall building, according to the proposal, could double as a projection screen. Nobody wanted the city to become a television set or a frame for the portrait of an individual face; the Eye was found to be cheaper, more conservative, less intrusive. Then it will just be a novelty, the developer warned, and it will only interest visitors for a few years; it won’t mean anything at all. (But this is to recapitulate the history of nearly every grandiose project submitted to a board of officials.)

Many of these living purse strings, the trustees of the city, anxious to abate the collapse of tourism, still wish to return the hexagon to its original function, that of a massive fixed film projector, a huge open-air cinema by the sea, and to surround it with a perimeter shield to discourage non-paying pedestrians and hotel guests, who would only see the beacon light and neon letters (controversially, since the PPH is a classic feature of the skyline), but the hope of duplicating its original success is pure fantasy. It was lucrative in the era of silent pictures, when the art form was a novelty, its narratives safely disregarded, and it was only necessary to hire an organist to play a Wurlitzer under the adjacent bandshell to fill the area with sound. Tourists and idle citizens happily paid their fees and crowded into the seating area to stare for a while at the film sixty feet above before the lights of other attractions inevitably guided them along the paths that connected the grounds of the Pearl Palace to the shops of the commercial district. The most recent revival was a notable failure; the very high screens were unsuitable for watching new movies; older films were preferred, but only those most familiar to audiences, therefore unruinable; cineastes made fun of the poor picture and sound quality; the novelty of the six screens added nothing but neck pain. Technical issues abounded; the most memorable screening hinged on one of these; a system glitch at a showing of Speed (1994) resulted in a loop of the exact sequence in which the villain is killed, six or seven seconds repeated three dozen times on screens visible across wide swathes of the district, from the moment Dennis Hopper looks up from the roof of the train to see the glowing red light fixture of the subway tunnel to the moment he hits it, splitting his head from his shoulders. The audience, sparse and drunk, applauded after the third repetition of the scene and burst into laughter at the fourth. As Dennis Hopper’s head continued to encounter the light fixture, the laughter died down and a strange fascination fell over the audience, attributable in part to a general assumption that the error would soon be corrected by the screeners or the machine itself, although the loop continued for more than three minutes. The repetition must have been hypnotic; perhaps it even gave the audience a satisfaction that the film denied, that of repeating, as in the first eons of an everlasting hell, the pleasure of contemplating the villain’s well-deserved punishment; this satisfaction, after the tenth time, and certainly the thirtieth, and so on, will have caused a biliousness, an excessive satiety resulting in malaise; even so, the fascination persisted, the public was attentive, the head was continually obliterated; an effect was produced of an almost liturgical or jurisprudential awfulness, a release that spectators secretly found absent from conventional screenings, and which they could not repeat at home, in private viewings, without feeling strange or embarrassed. Later, on summer nights, the movie was shown again and again, the loop recreated with deliberate and ironic humor for a small but loyal group of fans who brought music and kegs. Interest has grown; the screenings have become more regular, less humorous; there is even a touch of solemnity to the proceedings. The opinion of the city is that they generate a subtle morality, a shared catharsis that drowns out aggressive emotions, and even in daylight the loop is often shown, though the sun darkens the image to a blue haze in which the villain’s eyes can be seen burning.

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Addison Zeller lives in Wooster, Ohio, and edits fiction for The Dodge. His work appears in 3:AM, The Cincinnati Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere.