On Looking: Eleven Walks With Expert Eyes (6 page)

We were nearing our leonine home again. Following my son, our route had zigged, zagged, and doubled back, covering the same street going west and then east. Now we were heading past elm petals and a parked funny truck: already, these were old news. Now he was nineteen months and three hours, and he was too cool for those infant entertainments. He ignored these finds and instead insisted that we walk backward. For my son, backward, sideways, and serpentine routes were just as good (maybe preferable)
to a forward gait. Behind us, the setting sun cast long shadows, and it lay our own shadows at our feet, hounding us.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing at his shadowy doppelgänger on the sidewalk.

“That’s Ogden’s shadow. And there’s Mama’s shadow. Hello, shadow!” I waved. My shadow, probably six feet taller than I am, waved back.

My son was something between alarmed and transfixed. I encouraged him to talk to his own shadow. He did and, to his delight, the shadow returned his greeting. Passing a cast-away bookcase on the street, left on the curb for trash pickup, his shadow leapt onto the bookcase, crisp and dark against its white painted pine. This shadow was shorter, almost matching the height of my son. As he went to examine it, the shadow got shorter still; stepping back, it lengthened and enlarged.

And that was how we spent the next ten minutes: running up to the shadow (“Little!”) and scooting backward (“Big!”), accompanied by the guileless laughter of a toddler discovering another way the world works.

Even between the bookcase shadow and home, I noticed more shadows. A perfect silhouette of a water tower (I thought of its standpipe comrade) was graffittied on the familiar tall building down the street. Every object on the sidewalk had a shadowy appendage. The shadows reminded me of the complexity of our landscape, the sheer numbers of objects on top of one another in the city.

At the steps to our building, my son roared in recognition and prepared himself to step up. I looked at this small, wondrous boy facing a too-high stair and lifting his knee to his chin to climb it. I held his hand tighter. This was a walk I did not want to come to an end.

¹
 Which neurons, and which synapses, is another, wooly question, one yet to be answered. And how neural activity comes to
feel
like a stub, or like remembering, may be unanswerable.

²
 The proliferation of McDonald’s and Starbucks in far-flung locales notwithstanding. Chain stores abort vacation-vision.

³
 It is almost reason enough to have moved to our current block that on its corner sits one of the last handful of telephone booths in the city. Seldom used but by children shooed inside by their parents, it is nonetheless a fine anachronism in a city filled with phones unboothed and tethered to our ears.

“To find new things, take the path you took yesterday.”

(John Burroughs)

“A pretty, red brownstone, with a gracious, curved stoop, sat between a large stone building and a handful of white- and red-bricked specimens. But I barely looked up. There was too much to see on the ground.”

Find yourself pushing past a man stopped on the sidewalk to examine the stone slabs under his feet, and you might have just missed Sidney Horenstein. This would be a shame, for what this man knows about that bluestone, you want to know. A geologist by training, Horenstein began teaching college, eventually dropping the teaching but keeping the field trips that he had developed in his classes. He has spent forty years coordinating environmental outings for the American Museum of Natural History in New
York City. And he can still be found enthusiastically leading small walking tours around the outcroppings of earth found in upper Manhattan.

I found him at the staff entrance to the museum on a chilly day in autumn. Horenstein approached me smile first. With my reporter’s microphone over my arm, I was recognizable as the person who had telephoned him yesterday on a whim; and he was as easily recognizable as the geologist who answered his own phone after one ring and who had agreed to meet me in as much time. Bespectacled, he was dressed comfortably for a stroll, in layers under a light jacket, his voluminous gray hair curling out from underneath a baseball cap. He epitomized the rumpled, unpretentious, slightly distracted scientist of childhood books and my imagination.

Don’t be fooled, though, by the casual cap and easy manner: Horenstein is a man who knows vastly more about the past, oh, four hundred million years of the city than you do, and is about to gently let you in on how little you know. He began introducing me to his enthusiasms gradually. As we left the building, before officially setting out on our walk, I made an offhand comment about the paving stones underfoot in the vestibule to the museum, assuming that asphalt would be less interesting to him than a “pure” rock or stone. He glanced at me from under his cap and grinned.

“Well the thing is, there are only two things on the earth: minerals and biomass [plants or animals]. Everything that we have got here has to be natural to begin with—so asphalt is one of those things.”

After all, asphalt pavement is a mix of a viscous residue from petroleum, with mineral aggregate thrown in—that is, just rocks, sand, and sticky stuff. Such a concoction is “pure”; it is even recycled. To Horenstein, the buckling of the stones revealed something of the natural topography of the earth underneath. Then
he pointed out how even the shape of the paving stones alluded to a natural phenomenon. Hexagonal, they were modeled after the stones used in the long, straight ancient Roman roads. These were made up of basalt in the surprising six-sided shape that naturally forms when lava cools and shrinks.
¹
Back in our vestibule, we did not need to move an inch to see geology in the city: it is just exactly where you are now.

What an epiphany to reconceive a city—which feels just like a jumble of man-made objects—this Horensteinian way. When we think about geology, we think about what is underfoot. But Horenstein maintains, yes, it is what is under us—but it is also what surrounds us: we are inside of the geology of the city.

“What I
see,
” he said, gesturing at the museum and its moat-like landscaping around it, “is this: this [building] is a big giant rock outcropping, and this is a grassy plain in front of it, with scattered trees.”

In other words, an ersatz natural landscape writ small—mountain and steppe—repeated a dozen times on every single block. Each building is, of course, forged of stone or hewed from a once-living tree. So-called man-made objects are just those that began as naturally occurring materials and are broken apart and recombined to form something customized to our purposes.

Viewed with this lens, the city feels less artificial. The cold stone is natural, almost
living
: it absorbs water, warms under the sun, and sloughs its skin in rain. Like us, stone is affected by time, its outer layer softened and its veins made more prominent. And viewed as a natural landscape, the city feels less permanent: even the strongest-looking behemoth of an apartment tower is gradually deteriorating under the persistent, patient forces of wind,
water, and time. Weather continuously wears at the building, carving its influence by subtraction. Dirt stains; rainwater leaves a trail of salt tearing from a sill to the ground; a decorative copper touch oxidizes—and then its greenness washes onto the stone below it; steel rusts earthly red. Little is as convincing of the naturalness of the city as the process of weathering. Stones become covered with moss; ivy creeps up, disjoints, and eventually obliterates brick; wood darkens with moisture and lightens with age, then gets worn into a soft-cornered version of its former self. Eventually, this town—all towns—will dissolve and become fodder for another generation’s construction.

Together we climbed up a few marble stairs out of the museum. Each step was irregularly concave, worn down by the footfalls of countless visitors ascending, and rounded at their leading corners, from countless descents. This erosion is petrified human activity. Each of those steppers toed the marble and pushed seventeen (or so) of its molecules forward, or to the side. After millions of steps, these gentle shovings changed the shape of the rock from tabletop flat to soft undulance. I reached for the handrail, a shiny stripe streaking along its top. The brass was polished by the oils from the sebaceous glands of the millions of hands matching the feet. While I was mulling over the effects people have on rocks, Horenstein brought me back to considering the effects rocks have on people.

For Horenstein is a geologist, after all. As we walked together, he was at once there and not there: walking
with
me but also discreetly smiling and nodding at his “friends,” as he called the various stony spirits we passed on the street. And we were surrounded: when you begin to look at stone, it is varied—and everywhere. On the building, on the street; the sidewalk, the sidewalk curb; around tree pits, as fences, as walls. Steps and ramps and overhangs and decorative finials. “Every rock has distinctive characteristics: minerals, grain size, the overall look,” Horenstein said. “And so you
come to know them like friends. When I walk with people, I don’t pay much attention to [the rocks]; it’s not courteous. When I walk by myself, I pass these places and they greet me.” These friends are well traveled. In a sentence, Horenstein named more than sixty different kinds of rocks he spied on the face and interior of his stately museum. Red granite from Missouri sits next to Rhode Island granite, which is next to stone from the Thousand Islands, a result of quarries closing during the extended construction of the museum building. Inside, a coral reef from the Midwest communes with nearly four-hundred-million-year-old German stone.

Keeping them company by the curb were bollards of iron ore (age unknown) and the relative newcomer, the gingko tree. Horenstein and I stopped to admire the tree, a bright spectacle of yellow leaves and orange fruits on a gray November morning. It had dressed for autumn, yet in its very dressing seemed more robust and lively: it was living and changing on our time scale, quite unlike the iron and granite nearby. Viewed with geologist’s eyes, the
Ginkgo biloba
is a most appropriate tree for a city of rocks. The gingko is known as a “living fossil” because it is mostly unchanged from possibly two hundred million years ago. I, and any New Yorker who has walked outside of his house, know the tree for a different reason. Its fruit smells, as a number of early horticulture books gently suggest, “disagreeable.”
²

Horenstein and I waited at a street corner, and the cold-absorptive property of the stones underfoot were beginning to make themselves known to the soles of my feet. But Horenstein
seemed unaffected by the transient cold. He was looking into the past: across the street lay Central Park. While everything, even the asphalt pavement, is natural in some sense, “no part of Manhattan island is truly nature; everything’s been modified,” he said, as if anticipating a question about the park’s origins. To most city visitors, the park feels like
the
natural element in the city; but Horenstein pointed out that, in fact, the park was constructed, just as the buildings that line it were. Or, looked at another way, one might say that both are equally natural: it is all stone, after all.

The short version of the story of the design and construction of Central Park by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux is well reported on. A rectangular plot of eight hundred forty acres in what is now more or less the geographic center of Manhattan, the park was at the time of its completion north of most of the city’s population. It began opening for strolling and recreational business in 1858, replacing fields of sheep and pig farms and bone-boiling mills, and displacing hundreds of squatters who had set up more or less permanent camp on the open territory. Although it looks like a natural landscape, this is by design. The park epitomizes landscape
architecture
: it is a constructed naturalness, with only bits and pieces of the original, undulating topography remaining.

Indicating with his head toward a boulder peeking over the retaining wall to the park, Horenstein said, “Well, right there, that’s a natural outcropping.” The rock was enormous. Rising from the ground at a sharp angle, it could have looked fearsome, but time had smoothed and softened it. I could see two children playing on its other side, mere parkas-with-legs as they clambered up and down its shoulders. “That’s what this whole area would look like [before] they removed some of the hills.”

“You can see where they went,” he added. He nodded toward the short stone wall that surrounds the park. Those hills that did
not fit Olmsted and Vaux’s plan were leveled, beheaded, and lopped—and transformed into blocks that formed the wall.

“So they’re cousins?” I asked. The liveliness of stones that Horenstein experiences was beginning to rub off on me, and the relationship between park and park wall vaguely, and unpleasantly, reminded me of seeing chickens eating meal made of other chickens.