Don’t Look Up

April 30, 2026

It’s 1990 and I’m in a yellow taxi. Manhattan at night.

The car speeds and I turn. Behind us the lights of Park Avenue rush away in a narrowing, incandescent ribbon. In the receding distance is Grand Central Terminal, above which rises a monolithic skyscraper. There’s something brazen about the tower, the way it sits perpendicular to the grid. At the top it says PAN AM.

The sight thrills me. I’m twenty-three years-old, unworldly and naive, a kid from an ugly Boston suburb who hasn’t seen or done much. But I’m an airline buff, and here I am in Manhattan with the Pan Am Building framed in the rear windshield. The moment gives me a rush of satisfaction. It feels so exciting, so sophisticated, so New York.

Thinking back to that night, nobody was less New York than me. But the view of that building gave me an energy.

Pan Am had been founded in Florida, but as it grew into a de-facto national carrier and one of the world’s most recognized brands, its identity became enmeshed with that of New York City. Nothing made this more clear than its 59-story skyscraper in Midtown. Pan Am was New York. New York was Pan Am.

The Pan Am Building wasn’t the prettiest of the city’s towers (barely a block away soars the Art Deco splendor of the Chrysler Building). Built in the International Style, it embodied a rational, workmanlike confidence. It was handsome, no-nonsense. One of its architects was Walter Gropius, the modernist pioneer and founder of the Bauhaus.

And then it was something different.

I remember the day Pan Am went Chapter 7 and ceased operations. December, 1991. I was in a hotel room in Burlington, Vermont, when it came on the news.

The logo stayed at the top for a while, but the Pan Am Building became the MetLife Building.

The skyscraper itself remains, unchanged save for the signage. But gone is the romance and much of the New York-ness that made it special. Pan Am was history’s most storied airline and the nation’s commercial ambassador. MetLife’s thing is what, I hardly even know. Insurance?

A few days ago, almost four decades after my giddy taxi ride, I was walking down Park Avenue towards Grand Central. The MetLife logo loomed above me. Nothing is sacred, I thought.

Then I looked at my shoes. And I’m glad I did, because embedded there in the sidewalk was the plaque you see up top. I took its picture. I then walked a few steps further and took a photo of the actual tower.

Things are always changing, whether you want them to or not.

A helicopter crashed up there once, on the rooftop helipad. In 1977. New York Airways. Debris fell all the way to the ground and killed a pedestrian.

Bauhaus. Form follows function and all that. It was also the name of a band. Among the members of Bauhaus the band was David J., who later became a cohort and collaborator with Pat Fish, a.k.a. the Jazz Butcher, a rock musician of the 80s and 90s of whom I became a devotee of the highest order.

Buildings, music, flying machines. They flow and intermingle. One thing leads to another. “Airlines are everywhere,” is a go-to saying of mine. Here you see how that works.

Later, I noticed something. Look at the clock on the statuary facade of Grand Central. In both of my pictures it displays almost the same time.

Photos by the author.