From Madison Avenue to Madison, Wisconsin

New York, New York. 1988 to 2019, with two breaks in Europe. I fell in love with the city before I ever lived there, when I saw Dog Day Afternoon. The books, the movies, the shows promised grit, chaos, brilliance, and characters too big for anywhere else. When I arrived in 1988, the city delivered. The characters, the color, the power, the elegance, the creativity, the openness, the respect. It was all there, pulsing through the streets.

I built my career in its towers. My client was the Bank of New York at One Wall Street, and later I rebranded the Empire State Building itself. I worked on Madison Avenue, where brands were not just products but mythologies. Power was never abstract. It was a face, a handshake, a dinner table, a call at midnight. I crossed circles, hustled, found love, made money, lived fast. I met the people who ran the world, and some of them still do.

But New York was never only about the living. Its stones carry ghosts. Trinity Church on Wall Street, where Washington prayed after his inauguration, was where crowds later gathered again in shock and ash on 9/11. The Brooklyn Navy Yard still whispers of the USS Monitor, the ironclad that shifted the balance of naval war. And near Pratt, where I taught while learning from Ted Lewin, stood Fort Greene Park, crowned by the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument, the grave of thousands of innocents starved and murdered by the British, their bones once scattered in the mud. At Pratt itself the old steam whistles blew and the generator throbbed through the halls, reminders that the city’s power was never just metaphor. From Ted I learned how to stay childish, how not to let polish kill wonder. New York never lets you forget that history and labor are buried under every step.

And when night came, the city became my university. Richard Serra showed me how steel can bend space. Chuck Close taught the patience of vision. Andy Goldsworthy revealed the beauty of impermanence. Dizzy Gillespie lit joy like fire through a horn. Thom Yorke bent sound into something unearthly. In dives and subway tunnels, unknown musicians played like their lives depended on it and then vanished back into the dark. And there were the clubs, smoky, frightening, intoxicating. Chelsea warehouses, Alphabet City basements, rooms where sweat and sex collided with bass, where you stumbled into dawn unsure if you had been broken or remade.

The food carried the same extremes. Dan Barber proved food could be philosophy. Daniel Boulud made dinner into theater. Yet the city’s heart was on the street. A Yemeni cart on 14th serving lamb over rice that tasted like exile and home all at once. A Dominican woman in Washington Heights pressing plantains so crisp they cracked like glass. A basement in Queens where fish head stew could have humbled Noma. A bakery on Myrtle Avenue turning out bread so alive it felt like it might walk off the counter. Food by people no one will ever know, meals that never made a list, plates that burned themselves into memory more deeply than any Michelin star.

Fashion was another gospel. Andy and Kate Spade spun whimsy into an empire. Diane von Fürstenberg carried power in the line of a dress. Clothes in New York were not fabric, they were signals, armor, seduction.

New York gave me scale. New York gave me velocity. It gave me spectacle and reinvention. It taught me how to fly without asking if I could land.

After decades at that speed, I needed something else. I needed to slow down. To change the trajectory. To stop climbing to the top and reaching down to the bottom, and instead stand still in the middle. To feel the base. The ballast. The monolith.

And then came Madison, Wisconsin. Lakes and trees, flowers and ice, snow and rocks. Sandhill cranes drifting over fields, their cries deeper than traffic ever was. Beauty everywhere, steady and merciless. But beneath it all, pillars of society so rigid they hardly move. Slower, smaller, sure of itself yet twitching with an inferiority complex. Claustrophobic when you push against it.

Madison gave me stillness. Madison gave me friction. Madison gave me the long stare at myself when the noise falls away. Here the walls do not move. They make you move inside yourself.

I left Madison Avenue for Madison, Wisconsin. After all the towers, the dinners, the neon, the noise, what I got in the end was a Sandhill crane croaking at my dog. And somehow that feels about right.