Walking with Speed Levitch

If there is one place that my three years in New York have taught me to avoid, it’s Midtown — especially at rush hour. On a normal day, my excitement go to Grand Central Terminal at 5:30pm would be wildly out of character, but this was not a normal day. I was going on a cruise. Or rather, I was going on an 80 min walking tour through what I thought was my own personal hell, led by Timothy “Speed” Levitch.

Maybe it's the fact that I'm deep in a pool of existential dread over my impending graduation, or that I'm a person who likes weird things and weirder people, but something about this tour was irresistible. I wanted to go back to the moment when I first moved here and the city seemed limitless. After a certain amount of time living in this city, it seems a little less exciting and it becomes clear that the littlest things like laundry and grocery shopping are unnecessarily inconvenient here.  A tour around the worst part of New York, during the worst part of the day appeared to be the only solution to the funk I was in.

Two friends and I waited for Speed inside Grand Central on the Vanderbilt Avenue side of the information booth. As hundreds of people moved around us to make their trains, we wondered how he would actually find us. We joked that he would suddenly appear from behind a dramatic puff of smoke like the mythical being we had turned him into in our minds. When we finally saw him, he looked surprisingly normal. Aside from his rainbow colored tie, he was just another New Yorker pushing through a crowd.

We awkwardly introduced ourselves to him. He asked where we went to school and revealed he also went NYU, and studied dramatic writing and musical theater. “Is it just us?” I asked, “Well, maybe. You never know who will join us.” Then without any transition he started the tour. “I love standing still in the middle of Grand Central in the middle of rush hour for a few reasons. One is it’s a natural born action thriller. When else in life by just standing do you get so much excitement.” It’s hard to verbalize what it feels like to talk to Speed because it’s unlike any conversation I’ve had before. He spoke quickly and excitedly, almost as if he was reading off a carefully constructed script that was written by someone with an extreme passion for adjectives.

Speed told us we were now part of our own Greek chorus, and rush hour was our own private Greek drama. He pointed to the 120 foot vaulted ceiling and said, “The mythologically characterized constellations are infamously backwards from the way you see them in the night sky.” For most people this would simply be a fun fact to throw into a conversation, for Speed it was only a starting point.  “Some think the painter made a mistake, but the painting is based on a Medieval drawing, where the constellations in the night sky are portrayed through the point of view of the Gods. This has an enormous connotation on the average commute, as we soar across Grand Central's 80,000 square foot Tennessee Marble floor.”  

The magic of Speed’s tours is that for him the most mundane moments have beauty and meaning to them — this is what he calls the cruise. The cruise is freedom and an intense appreciation of the beauty around you. There is of course an "anti-cruise," it can be anything from the cops to the grid system, but cruising is a state of mind and it's always there.

Speed was born in the Bronx, and has been exploring the city since he was a self-proclaimed "teeny bopper and urban explorer,” in the 80s. After NYU, he got a tour guide license from the Central Park Conservancy and dove into “mainstream tourism.” His bizarre way of speaking landed a small cult following which grew when he became the focus of a 1998 black and white documentary, “The Cruise,” about his time as a tour guide on the double decker bus and his adventures having intense moments with inanimate objects.  In it, he wandered aimlessly around New York, vented to the Brooklyn Bridge about his problems, and waxed poetic about everything from the sky to the trash in the sidewalk. Since then he’s moved around the country, giving tours in Kansas and Seattle, finally returning to New York, with his little sister Jess as his tour dispatcher.

Seeing as though five minutes into our tour, he had already turned us and everyone around us into Gods, and it became clear that not much has changed.  After exploring various seemingly unimportant nooks of Grand Central, Speed told us that while we were not rushing this rush hour, we should not be afraid if a commuter works us into their “dance.”  With that in mind he led us through the packed terminal and onto the similarly crowded 42nd Street.

“This is a great view of an intersection,” he said.  “In fact we have a great view of one of the best intersections, 42nd and Lex. Ok let’s do it.” And then we crossed the street. “Intersection in it’s name, optics, and its use in society is all about interconnectedness.” Suddenly a passing taxi loudly honked, interrupting the beginning of his soliloquy about the importance of intersections. He paused said “Take a moment to connoisseur that honk, as honks of the city come tumbling into your present tense take a moment to connoisseur and taste them, based on their voluminousness, density, context and duration.” He informed us that the particular honk we just heard, while brief and high pitched, held within it a hint of “misguided animosity.”

He explained that everything from green means go to red means stop is, evidently, a beautiful example of human evolution. “There are gigantic mute, human agreements, that are currently happening to make this on going dance of cooperation happen,” he said. Speed explained that evolution is moving inward.  Which is to say that according to him, our self-awareness, ability to empathize, and ability to live with one another are evolving. Eventually these very agreements we just witnessed at an intersection will be the building blocks for our ability to telepathically communicate with each other. Keep in mind, Speed does not have much to back this up, his claims are based on “prophets of Gaia, mystics, and some quantum physicists” but that’s good enough for me. His poetic detour about the wonders of intersections ended with a comforting moment of self-reflection that assured me he may not actually be crazy. He said, “Now, I know what we did, and in every pragmatic sense of the term I will grant you, it is called crossing the street. I understand that. But in crossing the street let’s keep in mind we are making a gigantic leap for human evolution and well done!”

After taking the time to point out elaborate decorations on the facade of the Chanin building across the street, Speed told us about a woman who he met while working on the double decker tours. "Of course on the double, mainstream tourism, you get all kinds. One time I had this lady, and I was describing to her all the details of the Chanin building, and she asked me this amazing question that I'm still wrapping my mind around. She asked, 'Why did they bother to decorate the building? It seemed like extra baggage to her." As Speed laughed to himself remembering the story he said "I didn't really have a scientific answer for the lady, I just answered her from the gut, I said, 'You know, they made the building beautiful because they felt beautiful and I'm not even sure if that's true.'"

In that moment I wasn't sure who I should identify with more, the pragmatic woman who sees a building as just a building, or the man in front of me telling me to appreciate the terracotta botany on the third floor of its facade. I chose Speed, because when he talks about the the city around him, he's describing the world that I want to live in. Whatever reality is, Speed's way of viewing the world is far more interesting.

Speed Levitch is a walking antidote to the modern existential crisis. I met him several days after the Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, and honestly me and my friends were quickly spiraling into nihilism. If there was ever a time when I needed someone to show me that the world is still beautiful it was then.

As we walked with him, Speed explained that there are two ways of moving around in this city. One is to commute, which he describes as "the state that we fall into when our urge to get to our destination becomes even more alive than ourselves." The other is to cruise. Cruising, as I've explained is freedom, but it doesn't come so easily. As Speed says it's the willingness to experience "immediate appreciation, of the immediate beauty, immediately upon you."

To him, the sidewalk is not a sidewalk, it's "the skin of the city teacher," which we have the honor of massaging. A taxi is not just a taxi, it is an "emblazoned love chariot, flying through the city, passionately in love, and therefore exhibiting the attributes of passionate love — erratic, impatient, making less than perfect decisions." When someone accidentally crashed into him on the way to a train, Speed didn’t get mad, he said “I like the way you commute.”

He compares his tours to the work of Monet and Manet. Impressionism, he says, was created as a reaction to the camera. Artists at the time devoted hours to painting portraits, and suddenly the camera made portrait painting obsolete. But as Speed puts it, “Impressionism is like ‘In your face camera, do this!’” Speed says that the same thing is happening in the tour world. Our phones can take us anywhere with the tap of a finger and that’s Speed’s competition. “I like to think up tours that the iPhone can't do,“ he said. In response to the phone, Speed offers the world the ability to cruise.

The cruise Speed says, is a natural antidepressant. "Actually, if you can see depression lucidly for what it is, cruising is an antidepressant because by illuminating the beauty around you, you can see clearly that what depression is. For those of us who never get to go to outer space, depression is the only black hole we ever get a chance to explore."

The events of the past week had left me in the black hole that Speed was describing, but for the first time since the election, I started to feel like all was not lost. At this point in the tour, a man came up and said, "Excuse me, are you, Mr. Levitch?" Speed nodded. "I'm Alex, I saw you on the train the other day, sorry are you having a tour?" Then Speed told Alex he was a "living landmark on the tour." Their brief interaction ended with Speed giving him a business card and telling us that "truly the greatest landmarks have heartbeats."

That seems to be one of the things I had forgotten, not just in the past days but but for a long time. As much as I like to think I’m not attached to my iPhone, a large part of my interaction with other people happens through technology. We meet, talk, date and break up through screens. Sometimes the closest we come to acknowledging another person’s heartbeat is the vibration of a phone when we get a message. As deeply as I believe in the importance of empathy and compassion, it takes work to empathize with others. It’s easy for me to forget that we are all connected. Thinking this way takes patience and sometimes we just don’t have it. Apathy is simple, and it’s only a swipe away.

As we reached the end of the tour, Speed started giving a speech about the wonders of Park Avenue. “On Park Avenue, the hot dog vendor and the people eating hot dogs are all vibrating together, and as the human race dwells on Park Avenue throughout the day, walking along this so called boulevard avenue, they're in a constant state of vibration together.  Park Avenue is human interconnectedness in broad daylight, going totally ignored throughout the day."

Thinking about ourselves as collective sometimes feels laughable. Especially this past year, it has when we have been more divided as a people than we ever have been. But there's power in the unity that Speed describes, because it isn't based on ideology, it's based on a mutual recognition of humanity. That kind of vibration is power. It's this power that we're going to have to depend on as we face four years of bigotry and hate. Speed sees it in Park Avenue, but I see it in protests and rallies when strangers come together to fight for human rights.  I still fear the world the future holds for us, but I take comfort in knowing we have our humanity and with it the power to push back against that kind of darkness.

Speed began reciting Walt Whitman's poem, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,  from memory. "You men and women of future generations hence, what separates us?  Time avails not, just as you at any moment are a member of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd. I too felt the quick abrupt questions rising from within. And perhaps tonight the same quick abrupt questions that Whitman felt rising from within himself are the same quick abrupt questions that are currently rising up from within us, that is enabling tonight's rush hour to rush."

I don't know how much of what Speed says is just dramatic writing and how much of it is what he actually thinks, but even fiction has a lot to teach us about reality. I happily dove into the world he painted for me because it offered me beauty, hope, and answers. It turned the ever villainized Midtown into an inviting retreat from everyday life. As my 80 minutes with Speed ended, I felt like I was about to say goodbye to an old friend, not a tour guide I once saw in a movie.

He thanked us for being a part of his "interactive soliloquy" and as we each handed 25 dollars, he said, "So New York to punctuate with a transaction." Speed walked us back to Grand Central, where we once again stood under the constellations adorning the terminal. As my friends and I tried to plan the rest of our night, Speed faded back into the New York crowd and joined the rush.