Heart of the City (4 page)

Aron was blunter: “There’s a huge evolutionary advantage to
anything
that gets people together.” From a strict Darwinian perspective, he seemed to be saying, the quality of a relationship matters less than the quantity of offspring. He shakes his head now when he thinks about those grant makers in the 1960s who thought love unworthy of scholarship. “From a scientific point of view, understanding initial attraction is enormously important,” he said. “Who we are today is determined by who our ancestors were
and
who they were attracted to. If your mother and father weren’t attracted to each other, you wouldn’t be here.”

Sobering thought. But was there anything besides arousal that fanned attraction among strangers? The environmental psychologists Albert Mehrabian and James A. Russell sifted the fairy dust and found a few other ingredients. For a place to make strangers want to “affiliate,” it should be not just arousing but “pleasant” and at least a little “dominance-eliciting.” That is, it should make us feel good and, to a lesser extent, in control. Water-skiing across a mountain lake on a warm day, dancing to a band at a wild party in an old barn, and riding a motorcycle down a country road at sunrise were the sorts of scenarios that put subjects in the mood, they found. Walking into your apartment and finding dirty dishes or cooking in a steamy, foul-smelling kitchen with shouting children underfoot were not. A shortcoming of the Mehrabian-Russell experiment, however, was that it didn’t look at actual places. Instead, the researchers asked a few hundred University of California undergraduates to read short descriptions of hypothetical settings, imagine they were actually there, and then answer a questionnaire about their “desire to affiliate.”

Later researchers, however, took such studies to the street. In the early 1980s, a pair of social psychologists in Australia, Paul R. Amato and Ian R. McInnes, sent assistants to twelve places, among them a public beach, a small park, a shopping mall, and a construction site. The assistants initiated eye contact with strangers, smiled, and said hello. Then they recorded the strangers’
responses. Did they return eye contact? Smile? Speak? The results raised immediate doubts about the then-fashionable theory of “cognitive overload.” That theory had gained ground in the years after a young bar manager, Kitty Genovese, was stabbed to death near her home in Queens, New York, while not one of thirty-eight bystanders called the police. In an influential 1970 article in
Science
magazine, the psychologist Stanley Milgram had argued that the noise, traffic, and crowds of cities were so overwhelming that residents adapted to the overstimulation by tuning out the needs of strangers. Hence, the archetype of the brusque New Yorker, too busy to give you the time of day.

Amato and McInnes, however, found that people in highly stimulating settings could be very amiable, so long as the setting was pleasant. Take, for example, a party, a pickup basketball game, or a downtown pedestrian shopping mall. “Of course, urban settings that are congested, noisy, and dirty (such as the construction sites in the present research) are unpleasant places to be, and hence unlikely to be ‘friendly,’ places,” they wrote. But “people are often attracted to ... large cities because of the high level of stimulation that they offer. To the extent that complex, highly loaded, arousing environments make people feel good, they should facilitate, rather than inhibit, affiliative and prosocial forms of behavior.” Nor, they noted, should anyone idealize the social lives of country folk. “Indeed,” the researchers wrote, “complaints about living in rural areas frequently include the comments that life is boring, there is little to do, and that nothing ever happens.”

What makes a setting pleasant, of course, is somewhat subjective. But studies have found a few near-universals. We like a moderate level of complexity—a mix of shapes, textures, and activity. We like focal points that command the eye and help organize our surroundings. We like water. We like mystery: a feeling that just out of sight there is more to explore. This explains our yen for winding paths and rolling hills. But we also like “legibility.” That is, we want a sense of our bearings so that even as we wander, we
never feel wholly lost. We also like some feeling of enclosure, a sense of containment, as in the streets of old European cities. Contrast the uplift you feel in Venice’s Piazza San Marco or Paris’s Luxembourg Gardens with the vulnerability you feel in Boston’s City Hall Plaza, and you get the picture. “I think it’s instinctual,” Steve Lopez, a Los Angeles architect, told me. “It’s the same reason early man lived in caves. You’re protected. You’re not all alone on a plain unsure of when a lion might pounce.”

In 2005, Andrew Stuck, an urban design consultant in London, began leading groups of single people on walks through major cities. “Together we will devise an index of romance that anyone can apply to any town or city, so they can create a place that generates passion,” he wrote in a newspaper ad seeking recruits for one of his first “Romantic Walkshops,” in Toronto. He paired the men and women and urged them to pay attention to their surroundings. Afterward, he asked participants to identify turn-ons in the physical environment. In cities as diverse as Barcelona, Zurich, and Melbourne, he found a remarkable consistency. People liked hidden spaces and shifting elevations (mystery), fountains (water), and contrasts of lighting, ground surfaces, and building styles (complexity).

Helen Fisher, the expert on the brain chemistry of love, is a native New Yorker who lives on the Upper East Side. A devotee of what she calls “urban hiking,” she told me she knows “every inch” of Central Park and spent many hours in Washington Square Park in the mid-1960s as an undergraduate at New York University. It is no surprise, she said, that people visiting Manhattan landmarks should meet and fall in love. “Those are supremely good places,” she said. “They’re open, they’re full of street life, they’re exciting, they’re full of novelty and adventure—and that drives up dopamine in the brain and can push you over the edge into falling in love.”

Ever mindful of biology, she flirted with an idea I had yet to consider: busy public spaces, of the sort found in Manhattan, are
excellent places to size up the Darwinian fitness of prospective mates. How does an object of attraction assert himself in a crowd? How does she react to stress? Is he physically coordinated? In public settings, away from the comforts and crutches of home, “you see more of the person.”

IN MARCH 2009, I went to see Fred Kent, the founder and president of Project for Public Spaces, a Manhattan nonprofit that advises clients around the world on people-friendly design. Kent is a disciple of Whyte’s, and his organization, a few blocks from Washington Square, is acclaimed for the life it has injected into tired parks and plazas. I wanted to road test the studies I was reading, and I knew that the Project for Public Spaces had succeeded in large part by discounting arid academic research in favor of intuition, pragmatism, and observation.

Kent, looking in his blue fleece vest and open-collared dress shirt like somebody’s fun uncle from Minnesota, joined me at a circular table outside his office. Was there any basis in the real world, I asked, to the notion that great public places could kindle attraction among strangers? Or was I just working myself into a lather over nothing?

Kent was one of Whyte’s young assistants on The Street Life Project, and he recounted some of the researchers’ least expected findings. Lovers, they saw, kissed not in the secluded back areas of parks and plazas, where one might have guessed, but right out front, in the most visible spots. Also, the most crowded public places had far higher ratios of women to men than did the emptiest, which tended to be dominated by men. Women, it turned out, were more discriminating. The ratios were a barometer of a place’s comfort and safety.

Over the course of hundreds of projects, however, Kent had gone Whyte one further. His staff, he said, had developed an unofficial metric for judging the success of a public place: the number
of people publicly displaying affection. Kent doesn’t always share this litmus test with clients, who tend to want harder data. But it is nearly infallible.

“We’re always asked to quantify what is a good place: you’ve got to have economic numbers, you’ve got to have statistical analysis,” Kent said. “But we know right away if a place is good if people are kissing, if they’re affectionate.”

That affection—whether between lover and lover, parent and child, or dog and owner—is a goalpost in the Project for Public Spaces’s approach to urban design. “We’ve always thought about, Well, how do you create a little place that people will come into and drop their guard and smile at someone else? How do you create that little opportunity, that little incident that then helps you start connecting?”

A key, he said, borrowing one of Whyte’s terms, is “triangulation.”

“You need what we say is the Power of Ten. If you enter, say, Central Park, and you have ten little things going on there, from flowers, to a little sign, to a bench, to a coffee cart, it’s a sense of richness that gives you that little ‘aha.’ You can just see people: they might be walking faster, but then they slow down, and then they start taking things in and they’ve changed. You can almost feel a smile coming onto their body. I think there are probably more proposals to marry in public places than anywhere else.”

AFTER A few months of research, the notes I’d taken from dozens of studies began to gel into a coherent picture. I started to glimpse a nexus between passion and place, between architecture and attraction. The findings were tantalizing. But I began to feel that something was missing. The results had been gleaned from lab experiments or anonymous observation. They lacked the warp and weft of real life. The experiments registered the first stirrings of attraction. But then what? Most of the undergrads used as guinea pigs in those studies no doubt went back to their lives,
embarrassed to realize that the experiment’s “attractive subject” was actually a “confederate” of their professor. Whyte made remarkable discoveries. But what became of the chance meetings he observed? What of those people the next day? The next year?

I knew what psychologists had surmised. I had read the sociologists’ treatises and the architects’ manifestos. But I am a storyteller by trade. What if I found couples who had actually met in public? What if those chance encounters had led not just to an exchange of smiles and a batting of eyelashes, but to a wedding day? What might the long and winding path of real life tell us that no amount of academic study could?

I wanted to find out. I chose New York City as my laboratory and began a search for couples. I plumbed decades of wedding announcements. I scoured online newspaper archives. I posted details about my search on Craigslist and on blogs about Manhattan and weddings. I spread word among friends and acquaintances. I took out a classified ad in
The New York Review of Books
. I enlisted a summer intern to buttonhole staff at Manhattan landmarks and ask, “Do you know any great love stories that started here?” I called priests and rabbis, wedding planners and wedding photographers. Several who wanted to help told me I was wasting my time. These days, they said, many people were meeting online, through dating websites. But I persevered. And soon I had more stories than I could fit in this book.

Why New York City? Some reasons, to be sure, are personal. I’ve already mentioned my mother and father’s meeting in Washington Square Park, and the many years my mother’s parents lived there. I was born in Manhattan, and though my family moved to Los Angeles when I was a toddler, we visited often. In the monotony and sprawl of Southern California, I often longed for the compactness and vertical grandeur of New York. Manhattan is also where my mother’s grandfather, Chaim Boris Kruger, entered the United States, in 1902. With just nine rubles in his pocket, H.B., as he was known, settled in the Bronx and
worked his way up from newspaper deliveryman to Harlem news-stand owner before opening a shirt company. Writing in his diary a few days after his ship landed, H.B., then twenty-one, sounded like so many newcomers before and since. “I would like to fall in love or to get into a noble cause for all mankind,” he wrote. But H.B. was downcast and lonely—“sometimes I suffer without any reason”—until he met one Dora Rubin. An entry on the very last page of his dairies, from May 1904, which I discovered only recently, stopped me cold. It wasn’t just that Dora had proposed marriage to H.B.; it was where she did it. “On Williamsburg Bridge,” H.B. had written, “we confessed the words of everlasting love.”