On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes (18 page)

 • • • 

As we rounded the final corner on our walk, a group of loafing pigeons, startled by a passing bike, lofted upward. Until that moment I had not realized what was so odd about our urban-wildlife tour. In part, it had held more
traces
of wildlife than actual wildlife. But more than that, even those animals we saw were remarkably quiet. Mute, even: any sounds made by birds in flight were largely lost among the sounds of the city. When these pigeons took off, though, we heard their wings slapping the air and their bodies. Until then, they were silent-movie stars, padding along not twenty feet from us in complete silence. Pigeons are typically far from silent. Males coo as they woo, generating a large round warm noise while they puff their chests, spread their tail feathers, and try to look mate-worthy. When eating, pigeons hammer their beaks against the ground, messily spraying food around them. Their long nails scrape the ground audibly as they walk. But our pigeons stepped lightly, cooed psychically, and muffled their pecking. And we had only to look around us to see other stars of this spontaneous silent film: above our heads, dried and curled leaves noiselessly rustled on a towering oak; to our right, apparently weightless squirrels leapt from a stone wall to a tree trunk. All make sound, and all were close enough to be heard, but we were not bothered by not hearing them.

And just as in silent films, without sound the scene we saw was
suspended in time, the action having no clear beginning or clear end. I watched a dog across the street venture forward, unhurried, noiseless. It felt like a little peek at infinity.

 • • • 

I asked Hadidian if he had any predictions about what the next animal to move into the big cities might be.

He smiled and was silent for a minute. When he spoke, he began slowly, almost cautiously, then quickly built into an outpouring of tumbling sentences.

“The real question is what animals will truly come to adapt to cities and accept the urban environment for the opportunities it presents, and it certainly does present a lot of opportunities—food, shelter . . . I’m sure you know about the phenomenon called the Heat Island effect?” (I did not.)
⁵
Hadidian continued all the same. “So an animal could subsist in a more northerly latitude than the species might usually be found.” Thus we see the mockingbird, a warmth-loving bird, in the Northeast; the beaver and Canada geese are, as we all know, so well adapted to human presence that they are considered “problems.”

“I guess it depends on the city. I mean, twenty years ago people didn’t think that javelina would be colonizing Tucson, Arizona.”

“What is that?”

“A peccary? The wild pig.”

“They are in Tucson?”

“Yeah.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“On the street?”

“Well not by day, but yes. They’re in backyards. They come to water.” Wild pigs, in search of a good drink in the desert, have lived in Tucson, a city of half a million people, for twenty years. In some cities of Germany, wild boar—feral hogs—are common sights on the streets. A wild boar in New York City would surprise me, I have got to admit.

“Wouldn’t coyotes have surprised you?” Hadidian reminded me of New York’s alarmed, overblown reaction to the arrival of a handful of coyotes,
Canis latrans,
in the city parks over the last few years. Some Chicagoans are surprised to learn that there is a well-established group of coyotes living in the city proper. Night dwellers, the animals may grow up, mate, reproduce, and die unseen by the human nine-to-fivers. “It’s eye-opening to realize. They shelter in, like, shrubs by the post office.” Hadidian pointed to a few bushes packed into a small space beside the sidewalk. “You could have a coyote (nesting) in a place like this. People would walk by all day long, never look, never see it.”

I hung back behind Hadidian to take a closer look. No coyote. As far as I could tell.

When I grew up in the foothills of Colorado, canids around our house were not so surprising. But then again, in my early childhood we never saw elk, a five-hundred-pound animal which is now common enough in Boulder that the animal has its own street signs. The city of Bristol, England, has foxes like we have stray cats. When Hadidian began studying urban wildlife twenty-five years ago, even deer were not around.

My question was unanswered. Maybe there is no profit in predicting the next urban animal. Maybe we just have to wait for it, and keep an eye out. But if you are interested in hurrying up the process, take a cue from Hadidian’s raccoon tale. Plant a persimmon tree in your city and see what shows up.

¹
Lotor
is Latin for “washer,” alluding to their habit of dipping food in water before eating.

²
It is not a crazy crash of screeches, flashing lights, and possibly predatory or confrontational creatures approaching me: it is a subway car approaching the station.

³
When I have played this video in my psychology classes, students feel confident of their final numbers, but most of them count incorrectly, a phenomenon I cannot explain as expectation’s responsibility.

⁴
This is true for monkeys who have been tested in this game, too. And they respond faster than humans in every trial.

⁵
I have since learned: the mean temperature of a city with a million residents can be up to 5.4 degrees warmer than the suburb outside the city—up to 22 degrees warmer on some evenings.

“We must always say what we see,

but above all and more difficult,

we must always see what we see.”

(Le Corbusier)

“Moving aside to let someone pass, I was nearly seated in a small alcove along a building—perhaps a place to sit, but it was lined with spikes. I did not sit there.”

I was late to meet Fred Kent. Google Maps pinpointed his office as being at Twenty-fourth and Broadway but I arrived there and it was not. I chastised myself, remembering the convoluted mathematics that figuring out the cross street for a Broadway address in New York City takes. Surely I should not have expected the ever-seeing but uncaring Google Maps to be up to it.

Until recently, the NYC street address algorithm was printed in the front of those print-age relics, phone books, alongside numbers for the local emergency room, the FBI office, and instructions on how to perform the Heimlich maneuver. This seemed apt, for the algorithm answered an urgent need: the translation of an arbitrary number to its location in space. For Broadway, one needed
to take the building number, drop the final digit, divide by two, and then subtract either 29, 25, or 31 from that figure, depending on the initial address. The pleasure of completing this calculation was reliable, and each figuring brought forth in my head an image of the intersection that was my now-known destination. Knowing the calculus for any given street was a marker that one was a true Manhattanite, just as the realization that on side streets the odd-numbered addresses were on the north marked one as a sufficiently long-term resident to have had a couple of odds and evens among one’s past apartments.

Today, phone books appear more often in buildings’ recycling bins—still encased in plastic wrap—than by a telephone, and one emotionlessly asks Google Maps to bring up a bird’s-eye view of a building’s location. Well, on this day it failed me, and I found myself a mile uptown of the Project for Public Spaces, where I was to meet its president, Kent.

I emailed an apology, fruitlessly phoned, then briefly jogged, and finally taxied to the correct address downtown. When I burst in, the office was still but for the sound of computer keypads being tickled in the distance. I spotted Fred Kent chatting amiably with someone across the room. He waved off my apology. “Time doesn’t matter,” he calmly welcomed me.

What does matter to Fred Kent is space: how urban space is used or not used; usable or inhospitable. Kent founded PPS thirty-five years ago after working with the urban sociologist William “Holly” Whyte, a masterful observer of the behavior of people in cities. In the 1970s, Whyte and a posse of young volunteers set out to determine how the design of the city—in particular, New York City—worked or failed to work for urban dwellers. His group placed cameras atop buildings and light posts (quite unusual for the time), set out with clipboards and observation
sheets, and
watched
.
¹
They watched where people sat and how they negotiated walking by one another. They noted who loitered, who flirted. They captured the dynamics of bus-stop queuing; they even recorded a day in the life of a trash can on Lexington Avenue. Though I admit to being curious about that trash can’s day, I was walking with Kent to try to see, through his eyes, the theater of the sidewalk, played out by the people who find themselves on it.

Despite leading PPS for four decades, Kent is more public than presidential in his bearing. His height forces the individual of average altitude to strain to look him in the eyes, but he wears a perpetual almost-grin that puts one at ease. On the day we met, he was pleasantly rumpled, in a way that bespoke attention to things more important than whether one’s shirt is properly creased. Unlike the majority of New Yorkers who do their best to avoid looking like tourists, Kent carried a camera with him and began searching for places to point it as soon as we stepped out the door.

He immediately found something. We were barely a half block into our walk before I had to maneuver around a vendor’s huge food cart. Kent stopped outright—not to begrudge it, but to admire it. Just as the food cart is an adjunct to the city sidewalk, this cart seemed to have its own adjuncts: protrusions, displays, and containers that widened its girth. Kent snapped a picture.

“This is not just a little cart . . . that’s the Cadillac of carts,” he
said admiringly, later adding, “The vendors add a lot [to the city], because they tend to slow you down.”

Before I could protest—after all, weren’t vendors a nuisance at every moment except when you wanted a salty pretzel?—Kent segued to his next assessment: “Oh, that’s a bad window.” I followed his gaze to a modest shop window featuring clothing designs set back from the street. “It’s too recessed and it should really be farther forward—so you spend a little more time there.”

We were on one of my least-favorite blocks: Broadway in the Village. To someone who enjoys walking in the city, this street made me second-guess my hobby. Its sidewalks are constantly busy with slow-moving pedestrians clutching recent purchases and looking at the storefronts, up in the air, and anywhere but where they are going. The storefronts that attract their attention are ubiquitous and cluttered—to my eye, visually messy. I must have furrowed my brow at Kent, because he smiled and set to explaining himself by gesturing to a crowd of loiterers outside the clothes shop’s entrance.

“See this? People stand right at the entranceway, right at the traffic flow, so then you slow down even more.”

I looked at the folks checking their phones and leaning against the building’s wall, adopting the poses of the unhurried and idle. There were enough of them that they had begun to crowd the sidewalk, and both pedestrians and people entering the store were obliged to slalom around them. And then I realized what Kent saw.

“You view slowing down as
positive,
” I offered.

Kent answered without hesitation: “Sure, yup. Yes! It’s
social
; it’s kind of getting a sense of something. That’s what a city is.”

To Kent, the density of shops on Broadway was ideal. A good urban experience, in the Whyte spirit, was one that encourages us to slow down and loiter. I tend to see a surfeit of slow walkers and
loiterers as hindering my progress on a rushed morning. These same people were viewed by Kent as essential constituents of the urban landscape.

Already, on that block of Broadway with Fred Kent, I was starkly reminded of the very simple truth that there are many ways to look at the same event. So, too, might we look at pedestrians not just with tolerance, or with acknowledgment of their role in making the city rich, but also as impressive collaborators in an unlikely sidewalk dance. As Kent and I stopped at a corner, a large group of people clustered around us, all of us waiting to cross the street. Car traffic steadily puttered past. The light turned and both our side and the opposite sidewalk exhaled large groups of people onto the street. Kent lit up: “It’s a platoon!”

A
platoon,
to researchers in the field of pedestrian movement analysis, is a large collection of bunched-up, unaffiliated walkers. Fifth Avenue in Midtown serves as the prototypic platoon generator: the walking signals running up and down the avenue are not synchronized to allow the normal walker to make the light for block after block; they are synced for car traffic. Given the pace the average person walks in the city—well south of two meters a second—pedestrians get stopped at nearly every light.
²
Once the light turns, two large platoons set forth toward each other—and toward what is called a “likely conflict.”

It is not that cities have not studied or planned for pedestrian
movement. Indeed, I spent a happy afternoon with a book that details just what we can expect to find on our sidewalks. The charming
Highway Capacity Manual
(HCM)
is a product of the Transportation Research Board (TRB), one of the private, acronymed national advisory committees trying to analyze, assess, and model all elements of contemporary civilized life. Charged with describing not just highway activity, but that of the pedestrians and others who might affect how those thoroughfares run, the
HCM
characterizes six stages of sidewalk traffic. Their description essentially ranges from “fancy-free walking” to “feeling oppressed in a crowd.” At one end, “level A,” movement is open and unimpeded. You have whole blocks of sidewalk to yourself—at least 130 square feet. You can, the manual cheers, “basically move in (your) desired path” without having to alter your course for anyone. At level B we take the leap into “impeded”: there are others in sight, and you may need to choose a side of the sidewalk, but you can still walk at whatever speed you want. Then comes level C, constrained: though you are walking normally, you are not alone. If some of the other pedestrians are walking toward you, unspecified “minor conflicts” might occur. D, from constrained to crowded: some of these others are in groups, and you can no longer walk at the speed you want or pass people with ease. At this point you are down to only a paltry 15 square feet for yourself. This is the highest “tolerable” flow rate for the design of pedestrian walkways. Congested, level E: there are what could only be described as
a whole lot of people
. Everyone slows. You might even have to slow to a shuffle. Don’t bother trying to forge a perpendicular path to a group this size. By F you are packed in tight. Your speed is probably down to less than a foot a second. If you shuffle, you’re glad for it. Essentially, you are waiting in a queue, and a queue in which contact is frequent and unavoidable. There is, in the lingo,
high jam density
.