City Mouse, Suburban Mouse

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Last night over dinner across the street from Lincoln Center, a visiting suburban friend described knocking over three people at Bergdof's that afternoon as he accompanied his wife shopping.? His excuse was – he just didn’t see them.? I wonder sometimes if getting a visa to visit and shop in New York City should not include proof of having taken a course in Walking – Ed.? Please excuse the following jaundiced look at suburban visitors.

A part of urban living is street sense. It is an awareness of risk and the ability to project a sense of belonging that communicates to other people on the street.? In medieval towns, pedestrians kept a wary eye out conscious of the habits of many dwellers to fling the contents of their chamber pots out their windows.? With the advent of plumbing, traffic lights, concrete and asphalt, urban eyes are usually earth bound.? From the retailer perspective, this is all good—it keeps your eyes more or less in the zone of store window displays.

These conditions do not allow city walkers to see much that’s out of that zone, however.? New Yorkers in particular are always stunned when by some odd chance they look up and notice what’s on the second and third floors of the buildings they pass every day. When visitors come to town, they walk and look according to rules, and habits acquired elsewhere, like at the mall.? They do that little gee-whiz-ma-lookit-how-tall-that-one-is dance when seeing a real skyscraper up close.? We native walkers will sometimes come upon a group of people standing stock-still, looking at some fixed point up high on a building’s facade, and we’ll be briefly misled into thinking there’s something of genuine interest up there—like a jumper, or maybe King Kong.? Then we look a little closer and realize we’ve been fooled by a bunch of bedazzled tourists, or sometimes even worse by an effete architectural tour.? That’s when we sneer and shoulder our way past, irritated at being had by a bunch of rubes that don’t have to get anywhere.

There’s something so innocent, so childlike and trusting, about how visitors walk in a city.? They lack pedestrian radar, that combination of peripheral vision, hard-won experience and ESP that alerts you to the taxi that’s about to occupy the space where you’re standing, or the bike messenger who’s speeding into your intended path, the only warning his frantic whistle.? These walkers don’t anticipate the typical urban decision points.? In malls, there are no crosswalks, or construction sites or dog poop.? For instance, native walkers will usually begin to plot a turn well before they reach the corner, whereas visiting pedestrians walk as though they’ll be continuing in that direction indefinitely, and when they do hit an intersection they halt, convene, swivel in all directions, and only then begin to figure out where they’ll go and by what path they’ll go there.? Urbanites instinctively know that we can’t just stop in the transit lane, any more than a driver would stop in the middle lane of a super highway, however deserted.? Urbanites have a special set of body vocabulary, from a dropped shoulder to a briefcase or pocket book shifted that all tell our fellow traveler what our intentions are.? The frustrations we have are when people occupy the same space, assume the same privileges yet don’t speak the same language.? I am reminded of stories of primates that humans have taught sign language that go into fits of rage when introduced to other members of their species that don’t sign back.

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Next time you walk a city street take a minute and see if you can pick out the urban vets from the suburban yokels as they perambulate down the sidewalk.