All The Things You Were

Friday, February 19, 2010

When I launched MEIER, my marketing agency, in the summer of 1979, we built our gray flannel walled offices at 37 West 57th Street. We were on the third floor, overlooking the wide, bustling, street. My own space in the agency had an arched casement window, that I could open on the rare fine, quiet night, and angle to catch surprisingly fresh air, as the breeze ran from the Hudson, a few blocks west. One early evening I came in to find a saxophone player on the sidewalk in front of our office building. He was clearly talented and I stopped to listen, and then asked him to play Jerome Kern's "All The Things You Are". He played it beautifully, and when he was done, he asked if I worked in the building. I pointed up to the third floor where the windows were lighted against the dusk. “If the little arched window on the right is lit, it means I’m in”, I told him. From then on, when he arrived at the building, he would look up to see if my window was lit and if so, he would play "All The Things You Are" – to let me know he’d arrived. It was one of those great private New York things that couldn’t as easily happen anywhere else in the world.

I know it's crazy, but when I pass 37 West 57th Street today, it feels as though my studio is still upstairs. Darcey is up there, leaning over the mechanical boards, trying to get something ready to be delivered that night to the New York Times, Sunny Bates is waiting to tell me what funny thing happened to her during that afternoon. And we're still in our twenties and scurrying (too fast, I know now; not fast enough, I thought then) toward the future. I’m sure I hear "All The Things You Are" playing somewhere, in the hum of the city.