Compass Rose
Miss NOLA and I engaged to meet up for our trip to Queens at the Grand Central IRT station. That's the subway station, not the famous railroad terminal, alongside which it runs. Actually, the subway runs up under Park Avenue until it hits the south edge of the Terminal, where it turns towards the east for a few blocks before resuming its northeasterly course under Lexington Avenue. Because of this deviation from its normal path, the IRT station is one of the most disorienting in the world. You mount the stairs from the platform and have absolutely no idea where you're going.
Unless, of course, you do this every day, as most of the people who pass through the station seem to do. I drew this conclusion after standing by a pillar for twenty minutes waiting for my friend, who was not late. I wasn't standing by any old pillar, but by the one at the center of the gigantic compass rose laid into the center of the concourse level. I has been a while since I've stopped at Grand Central, but I was pretty sure of this feature's existence. It took some back-and-forth to persuade Ms NOLA that she would be able to find it; quite naturally, she thought I was talking about meeting near the big clock in the Terminal. Which would mean leaving the subway and possibly paying another fare just to get back in to catch the Nº 7 train. Waiting at the center of the compass rose in the concourse was therefore something of an act of faith.
It was like standing in the middle of the Bay of Fundy in a storm. The concourse was never remotely empty, but there were strong tides in which huge throngs of people made their way through the turnstiles and across the concourse. Very few people seemed to have any doubt about where to go, or even seemed conscious of where they were. They were, for the most part, on their way home, so, for them, the concourse was a halfway-unreal zone of oblivion through which they passed from one stairway to another (or, in the case of the shuttle to Times Square, a long passageway). Although reasonably clean, the concourse does not invite lingering, or even attention. It is so not an in-the-moment sort of place.
The good thing about the compass rose was that it didn't appear to be in anybody's flight path. The only person who came near me wanted to know if he was, in effect, in the Terminal. "Big clock," he said. I directed him toward a flight of stairs on the other side of the turnstiles, and I hope that he found his way. The crowds themselves are very disorienting. People swell along like schools of fish, parting to get round an obstacle and then rejoining.
The phenomenon is even more intriguing because, this being New York, these schools are certainly not homogenous. Every sort of ambulatory human being passed before me, from every part of the earth and from every socio-economic zone. The division between people dressed for the office and those who weren't was fairly even. But almost everyone belonged, temporarily, to the species commutator urbis.
Then Ms NOLA appeared, and we made up our own little school. After all, we had to think where we were going.
