The apartment was across from Penn Station, which meant that for one stretch of months in the mid-1970s, the architecture of my days was decided by trains I never took. I walked east instead, every morning, toward the United Nations, where a man named Frank Smith ran a personal development course that IBM SRI had decided its young people should sit through. I don’t remember most of what Frank said in that room. I remember one thing he said about the street outside it.
He told us we should start looking up. Literally — on our walks back and forth across midtown, Penn Station to the East Side and back, twice a day, rain or not. Not all the way, usually. Mostly it was a floor or three: the window line just above the awnings, the cornice on a building you’d never once registered had a second story, let alone a sixth. The full climb to the rooflines — gargoyles, setbacks, terra cotta lions — was the occasional reward. Almost no one looks up in New York, he said, not even a little. The city trains you out of it. Too much at eye level demands your attention — the cabs, the steam, the man asking for change, the woman walking too slowly in front of you — so everything above your own eyeline disappears by consensus, not just the tops. Habits can be replaced. Look up enough times, even just a floor or three, and you’ll see a different city than the one everyone else is seeing.
I tried it. Walking up past the Pierpont Morgan stretch, or wherever the route took me, chin lifted some small number of degrees, feeling slightly foolish. Most days that was the whole of it — a window line, a row of air conditioners, a sign painted directly onto brick decades before anyone called that vintage. Every so often the chin would tip back further, and there’d be something up there worth the extra degrees. A gargoyle with its mouth open mid-roar, forty years before air conditioning made gargoyles decorative rather than necessary. But that was the rare find. The habit was the floor or three. Nobody else on the sidewalk was seeing any of it, because nobody else on the sidewalk was looking at all.
The chin came back down on its own a couple of times a week, somewhere around a street corner with a slice joint on it, because New York seems to put one on every corner whether you need it or not. You smelled it before you saw it — that specific combination of tomato, oregano, and hot grease that has no name I’ve ever found. Looking up was Frank’s discipline.
The pizza smell required none. It just reached out and took your head by the chin and turned it level again, toward the window with the steam on the glass and the guy folding a slice in half before he handed it over.
It is a small thing Frank Smith said in a room near the UN fifty years ago, and I have carried it around since the way you carry around a key to a house you no longer own. I don’t know what happened to the course, or to IBM SRI’s faith in such courses, or to Frank himself. I know what happened to the habit. It outlived the year, outlived the apartment across from Penn Station, outlived several cities I’ve lived in since that didn’t have the same vertical drama to reward the looking. I still do it. I did it last week on a walk that had nothing to do with midtown at all, tilting my head back on a street in California to find whatever was up there worth finding, and catching myself mid-gesture, thinking: that’s Frank’s, that one, still running fifty years later on the program he installed.
Most of what we’re taught to notice, we’re taught by people who wanted something from us — a sale, a vote, a grade. Frank wanted nothing, as far as I could tell, except that we see more of the city than we’d been seeing. It’s such a small ambition for a teacher to have. Look up. That’s the whole curriculum. And it’s the only thing from that course, the only thing from that whole strange year of being instructed in personal development by a man whose face I can no longer quite reconstruct, that I still do, unbidden, on every street I’ve walked since.
while on the move.
