If you want a perch from which to observe the circadian train wreck of modern industrial society, you could do worse than a corner booth in the Tick Tock Diner. A 24-7 neon beacon holding down the corner of Thirty-Fourth Street and Eighth Avenue, the Tick Tock serves up Manhattan on a plate. Breakfast all day. Corned beef on rye. An actual Manhattan if you’d like. The rainbow columns of Madison Square Garden glow across the street. The train to everywhere is directly below. Down Thirty-Fourth, the Empire State Building fills the sky, its sixty-eight thousand LED lights pumping power into the cosmos. That pale smudge to the left? That’s the moon.Article continues after advertisement
When a Knicks game lets out at the Garden or concertgoers from the Meadowlands pour out of Penn Station, crowds pack the Tick Tock’s orange-and-green banquettes and the line snakes out the door. But even in the thin hours, people find it. The cop warming her hands around a coffee. The Times Square revelers not ready to call it quits.
And me. I found myself at the Tick Tock in January of 2025, down from Vermont on business, nursing a cup of decaf and a bad case of insomnia and deciding I needed to make some changes in my life. The insomnia hit in middle age, eyes snapping awake at 1:00 AM, maybe 2:00, with a grim clarity that there would be no sleep before 3:00, maybe 4:00. “The brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives,” Sir Thomas Browne lamented in 1663. If only. Brother of death, come get it anytime.
