On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes (20 page)

Jaywalking is a civic traffic violation, but I happily do it. I rationalize my behavior by noting that crossing the street against the traffic light makes me pay more attention to what I am doing, rather than mindlessly following the traffic signals. And that is the psychological component: sharing attention. Kent agreed: “You’re actually safer because you’re making judgments based on eye contact.”

Our jaywalking during this walk might have been the most eye contact I would make on the street all day, in fact. In the city, eye contact is carefully wielded, as I saw when my son stared at a destitute man limping toward us. Moving along a sidewalk on a summer’s day, full to D-crowd levels, eye contact is fleeting and reserved for estimating others’ walking paths. To stare—to look continuously into the eyes of someone else—is laden with meaning. Between passersby, the intent can be provocative or salacious:
I hate you
or
I want you
. But it also may be, as it is between driver and walker, path-directing. By holding someone’s gaze, you actually control his movement to some extent, obliging him to move around you. One psychologist I walked with described a quasi-mind-control game she used to play with unsuspecting fellow bus riders. She would try to “seat” people on the bus by making eye contact. “Nobody likes to be looked at, so they keep walking” as long as they noticed her looking at them. If, then, she turned away,
“that’s when they sat.” The rule against maintaining eye contact with strangers makes any eye contact powerful. Conversely, in a context where eye contact is supposed to be made, one person can, in theory, “move” the other by looking just to his left—forcing him to adjust himself until he can make eye contact again. I tell my undergraduate students to test this out with their professors, looking just to the right of the lecturer. Often, their gaze unconsciously inclines her (or me, as the case may be) to move more and more to her left to get back within her class’s line of sight.

Some research suggests that the very presence of signs, traffic lights, crosswalks, and raised curbs, all intended to make walking safer for the pedestrian in a car-filled city, actually make it less safe. In the Netherlands, the traffic engineer Hans Monderman came up with the idea of a “naked street,” empty of all these safety accoutrements. His idea was that by forcing us to look at each other—walker to walker, walker to driver, driver to driver—we could use eye contact to negotiate our routes. A few cities are attempting to enact this planning idea; at a main intersection in one Dutch city, Drachten, through which pass tens of thousands of cars, bikes, and walkers a day, traffic moves slowly and perfectly smoothly.

When we arrived across the street, my gaze left others’ faces and, as is often the case, it went to what was underneath our feet. I asked Kent how much he thought about what was underfoot.

“Designers think it’s very important,” he hedged. I knew a geologist who did, too.

“From your perspective . . .”

“It’s not. This is what’s important,” he said, motioning at a wall. It was a long, uniform wall of one of the ubiquitous branch banks in the city. Kent frowned.

“People walk faster by banks: there’s nothing to do in a bank. Banks used to have a ballroom on the second floor in small towns,
so that people would come and get familiar with a bank, and associate it with pleasure. But a bank has become more like a place you just go to the bathroom.”

I reflected on the last time I associated visiting a bank with pleasure. A ballroom featuring, say, a pianist playing Gershwin would surely improve my impression of the mushrooming banks in my neighborhood.

Kent and I (quickly) walked by. We headed west on a long street that used to be industrial, then artists’ residences, and now was full of the commerce of handbags, designer clothes, and technology. My gaze stayed down. Something sparkled underfoot: the sidewalk was studded with small glass domes, lit up from underneath. These, Kent explained, were remnants of the street’s industrial past. The only natural light workers in the basement of these buildings got was through these small sidewalk domes. With the advent of incandescent light, the roles were reversed, and they brought artificial light from the basement aboveground.

These domes are rare now, the sidewalk equivalent of finding an early-twentieth-century copper penny in your pocket-book.
³
We only noticed them because we were looking down at the ground. Funny, that: we were out to take a walk and see what was around us; what was underfoot should not have reached our consciousness. It turns out, though, that walkers of all ages spend a lot of time looking at the ground a step ahead of their toes. A recent study reported just how much time. The researchers sent pedestrians out to take a walk while fitted with a device tracking their eye movements as they walked along a level, unremarkable sidewalk. The walkers spent nearly one-third of the walk fixated
at the near or far path—just as much time as they spent looking at the objects around them.

If the research is accurate, we might expect we would know a whole lot about our sidewalks. But I would guess that if I stopped a random pedestrian and queried him about the sidewalk, I would get a description along the lines of,
It looks like a sidewalk—
gray concrete, poured and leveled, divided into squares, hmm, that’s about it. The sidewalk seems uninteresting and ahistorical, but this is borne of perceived familiarity. Sometimes we see least the things we see most.

Our use of the sidewalk—as a walking path—is now so entrenched that I cannot imagine it any other way, but unobstructed mobility was not always the point of sidewalks. They were public spaces. There has always been panhandling, ware-selling, soliciting, and loitering going on among the walking. Once automobiles began encroaching, the mixed use of public space—horses following egg sellers abreast newspaperboys and people idling, convening, and chatting—was sorted into its constituent parts. The street belonged to cars. The sidewalks were for the people, but “Street Departments” were formed to inspect them and regulate their use.

Though sidewalks date back four thousand years, their popularity waxed and waned. In the nineteenth century, the sidewalk began its latest climb: 876 linear feet of it in Paris in 1822 swelled to 161 miles by 1847. At the same time, sidewalks began to be intentionally separated from the road by posts or by egg-shaped stones placed beside the route. These markers actually created a new location: the curb, or the gutter. It was not just a politically charged area (destination for unsavory loiterers) but also where dogs could be led to pee (and, in the wee hours, one might find more upright urinaters). Until last century, many sidewalks were still made of wood or gravel. Adjacent property owners were
responsible for paying for and tending the paths. But there was little restriction on the position of their buildings or doorways, so the sidewalks in front of them were often irregular enough to require stairs to connect neighboring lots.

Now we walk on concrete, for the most part, set in slabs and drawn into squares or rectangles as it sets to dry. It is layered over a waterproof membrane and compacted sands. There are other options: stone slabs, cobblestones, bricks, even monolithic asphalt laid in a continuous sheet. But concrete is cheap, reflects light instead of getting warm with the sun, and it feels solid—not settling awkwardly like bricks or becoming slippery like stone. It does not, I am sorry to say, go down to the center of the earth: to stand on a sidewalk is not necessarily as secure as we imagine. City sidewalks are often hollow underneath, just covers for basement spaces that extend out from the building. Concrete also lasts for many decades, during which time dropped gum and splattered soda collect the dust of the city and darken.

I admired a particularly well darkened corner of the sidewalk, in front of a corner tobacco and magazine shop. Those blotches may go back eighty years, I thought, mildly disgusted.

At this point in our walk, nearly midday, the street was increasingly crowded with the sort of pedestrian activity that brought a smile to Kent’s face: loitering, chatting, socializing. General liveliness. I navigated around another vendor’s cart that was reducing the walkable sidewalk space by half. This is the sort of thing that the early sidewalk ordinances regulated against: in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century, there was even a municipal Bureau of Incumbrances tasked to remove the barrels of dead fish, bales of merchandise, pots of flowers, and squatters or loiterers in order to provide smooth thorough-faring. I suspected that Kent would be pleased that the Bureau was eventually dismantled. But “incumbrances” turn out to be facilitators in some
ways. On another day, in a public lecture hall not far from where we were walking, I asked Iain Couzin, a mathematical biologist who studies “collective behavior” in animals at Princeton University, how the crowd of people in the auditorium should proceed smoothly out the exit doors, or proceed down a busy sidewalk so as to minimize congestion. To answer, he invoked fluid dynamics, describing the motion of fluids and gases, as well as the motion of people:

“It’s counterintuitive, but putting in a barrier can actually increase flow,” he said. As long as it is visible, a bar or a pole in an exit door, or an obstruction in the path—just a little off of center—makes movement through the door or down the path run more smoothly. This paradox is related to the “packing problem”: “if you’re trying to pack all these things in [to a small space], putting this thing off center and people having to avoid that breaks the symmetry, and then you get oscillating flows [through the space], which is much more effective.”

If a corridor is narrow, the crowd (or fluid or gas) oscillates going to and fro. It self-organizes. At some level, it does what these walks were doing: making me notice something new. In that way, an obstacle can aid movement, instead of stopping it altogether.

Kent himself suddenly stopped. We had worked our way around the block in a labyrinth path that led us back to his office before I had expected it to. Despite all our slowing down, we finished the walk quickly. Back up in his offices, he saw me admiring the open feeling of the space, dotted with colorful chairs, and slyly quoted Whyte, “Please, just a nice place to sit.” A person’s experience in the urban environment, Whyte thought, had a lot to do with whether there was “a little something” they could control—like a chair not just to sit in, but that could be adjusted to their liking. His videotapes of people sitting in chairs in public spaces
showed lunchtime workers reliably making small adjustments to their chairs before sitting.
⁴
One of Whyte’s realizations was that people could feel very comfortable in a fundamentally noisy, public environment, if they just had a nice place to sit.

With that, Kent sat down and wished me well. Out I walked, slowly, to a totally changed, crowded, social street.

¹
By contrast, there are now thousands of surveillance cameras in Manhattan set to constantly monitor the behavior of persons in their view. In some areas of downtown, there are nearly as many cameras per acre as there are
residents
per acre in Denver, the city nearest to where I grew up. But it is an open question whether anyone watches the video they record. While many have bemoaned the lack of privacy that cameras seem to impose, I find myself tickled that all of my walks undertaken for this project were recorded and registered in the aggregate of superintendents’, police, and store owners’ tapes.

²
Six and one half feet per second is the high end of comfortable fast walking: it is around 4.5 miles an hour, or, in New York City, ninety blocks an hour, an incredibly brisk pace. More people walk around five feet per second. This holds for the average healthy adult, though, not for the very old or very young. (On my walk with my son, we might have managed five feet per minute.) Until recently, the recommended time allotted for pedestrian travel across a street on the walk sign was based on the assumption that people can cover four feet every second. Even this conservative estimation almost certainly excludes most disabled and elderly walkers, whose pace leaves them barely halfway across the street by the time the light turns. With the latest walk-signal revision, they have been granted an extra couple of seconds.

³
Until the 1980s, the “copper” penny was around 95 percent copper and 5 percent other metals; not since the nineteenth century has the penny been fully copper. Pennies currently produced are mostly zinc, a less expensive metal, though the cost of production of one penny is, as of this writing, 2.41 pennies.

⁴
More than one thousand lightweight chairs now dot the block-long Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan, and nearly all of them are regularly warmed by Manhattan behinds. Kent’s PPS contributed to the park’s renovation in the early nineties; it is a wildly successful public space.

“What is life but a form of motion and a journey through

a foreign world? Moreover locomotion—the privilege

of animals—is perhaps the key to intelligence.”

(George Santayana)

“An older gentleman was resting in the median. . . . As he resumed, he teetered, and I swung widely around him so as to not knock him off course.”

Before concocting the character of supersleuth Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a doctor in training. Fans of his writing will see many allusions to his medical interest in the pages of his books, but the biggest allusion comes in the form of the behatted Holmes himself, modeled on one of his medical-school professors, Dr. Joseph Bell. Bell was a member of an increasingly disappearing class: doctors who are able to make diagnoses simply by looking carefully at the patient in front of them—before taking a single blood test, ordering an X-ray, or even placing a hand on the patient. For the cast of one’s skin, the smell of one’s
breath, one’s posture and step are all diagnostic, in the language of medicine, of the condition which brings the patient to the doctor’s gaze. To his students, Bell would exhort that they learn “the features of a disease or injury . . . as precisely as you know the features, the gait, the tricks of manner of your most intimate friend.” One’s friend can be identified in an instant amid a crowd, but so, he suggested, can a disease, if you know what you are looking for.