A place of memory… Nothing lasts forever. I get that. But it was still troubling to learn that the Hotel Pennsylvania, a shuttered old New York hotel across from Madison Square Garden, is expected to be razed. It’s not that I have a particular affinity for NYC’s older buildings — I very much do, as it happens — it’s just that the Hotel Pennsylvania has hosted many a comics convention since the 1970s, including my first solo outing when I was about 12 or 13 years old. I didn’t know comics conventions were even a thing until about 1979, when my mother took my sister and me into the city for Beatlefest. Paula, who is 4 1/2 years older than me, had fallen under the Fab Four’s spell well after they’d broken up but was eager to experience all things John, Paul, George and Ringo, whether it was Beatlemania on Broadway or Beatlefest, a major convention now known as the Fest for Beatles Fans. Anyway, evidence suggests that Beatlefest was at the Americana Hotel — now the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel. (For years, I swore this show was at the Pennsylvania but now I think I was wrong.) Either way, we took the elevator up and landed on a floor where there was a convention, all right — a comics convention. It was the wrong floor and it was as if Captain Marvel zapped me right between the eyes: I peered into this big ballroom and there was table after table of old comics just waiting to be stared at and bought. Even though we were there for Beatlefest, my Mom took pity on me and gave me a little bit of cash to go enjoy myself. (Begging was involved.) I had just enough to pick up one or two things but the main upshot was now I desperately wanted to go to a comics convention for real, for a whole day. Months passed — my memory isn’t clear on how many — but eventually, I got my wish: a day at the Creation Convention at the once and future Hotel Pennsylvania, perhaps known at the time as the New York Statler. It was not only exciting that I got to go — it’s that I got to go by myself to a big New York event:...