New York
John Lennon Came to My School When I Was 8. Or Did I Imagine It?
One morning in the mid-1970s, a solemn announcement came over the intercom at Friends Seminary: “Noted person John Lennon is now in the meetinghouse. Walk, don’t run.”
We didn’t run. But we wanted to.
I ended up perched with the rest of my second-grade class on a hard wooden pew in the balcony of our Quaker school’s meetinghouse on East 16th Street in Manhattan. Built in 1860, the meetinghouse was old, dignified and a little creaky; it had absorbed the echoes of abolitionist debates, suffragist meetings and restless kids failing to sit still. That morning, I wasn’t sitting still. We were children, but we knew the Beatles.
And then, suddenly, there he was: John Lennon.
I remember the hush — a collective inhale — and then the whispers. I’m pretty sure Lennon was dressed in black when he entered. That’s how I always remembered him. He soon stood onstage in his wire-rimmed glasses, looking exactly like the face I’d seen staring from album covers. He was right there.
A ripple of laughter broke the tension. I can still hear his voice, his dry jokes, the wry expression when one boy asked about the beautiful woman who’d accompanied him — not Yoko Ono, but someone else. But the words themselves? Gone. Did he talk about music? Politics? Did he sing? Why was he even there?
For years, I clung to the memory like a relic. It was one of those surreal childhood moments that made me wonder if I had imagined it. It was a story I could tell anywhere — When I was in second grade, John Lennon came to my school! My 22-year-old daughter had heard it so many times she could recite it. But recently, when I brought it up, she looked at me skeptically. “Did that happen?”
I was stunned. Of course it happened. Didn’t it? If this had happened today, there would be mounds of evidence: blurry TikTok clips, tagged Instagram posts, shaky iPhone videos capturing every joke. But in the mid-1970s, an event like this could actually fade and disappear.
I called the Friends Seminary alumni office. They had heard of the “legendary” event but had no photos or records to verify it. Strangely, it hadn’t even appeared in the yearbook that year.
“When did this happen again?” the receptionist asked.
“It was 1974,” I said. But even as I answered, I realized I wasn’t totally sure myself. “Wasn’t it?”
A quick plea in a Friends Seminary alumni Facebook group opened the case. Within hours, former students and teachers chimed in, each clutching their faded scraps of memory. A composite portrait started to come into focus, but nothing concrete.
Alice Stern, who is 65 and a retired librarian, remembers how Principal Seegers — a cautious but friendly Quaker with glasses and a full head of gray hair — stood on the stage and read Lennon’s credentials from an index card as though he was a guest from the Board of Education.
Then Lennon said, “OK,” exaggerating his Liverpudlian accent for effect. “Fire away.”
Apparently we did.
A former 10th-grader remembered asking if the song “#9 Dream” had a hidden backward message. The answer was yes.
An ex-middle schooler recalled blurting out: “What does ‘goo goo g’joob’ mean in ‘I Am the Walrus’?” Several people remembered this question. No one remembered Lennon’s answer.
Some swore he played guitar, but that was wishful thinking. Lou Rowan, a long-retired English teacher who is 83 and living in the South of France, told me that Beatles songs had played on a tape recorder before the discussion began, but Lennon waved off requests to perform.
The most mundane answers endured all these decades.
Did he have pets? Yes, two cats: Major, white with black spots, and Minor, a black tuxedo cat.
A lower-school boy even asked how much money he had, and Lennon replied with a smirk: “A whole lot.”
When the assembly was over, Lennon exited the auditorium and was heading to an interview with student reporters when a sixth-grader named David Rauch made his move.
Ignoring faculty warnings, David dashed forward with a ripped notebook page for Lennon to sign. Now 60, he is associate general counsel at Wells Fargo, lives in Hermosa Beach, Calif., and still has the page, 50 years later.
“I got his autograph first, then asked for the woman with him on the same page because I thought it was Yoko.” It wasn’t Yoko. But May Pang, who was Lennon’s girlfriend at the time, signed anyway.
We students didn’t realize it, but this was near the end of Lennon’s infamous “Lost Weekend,” when he and Yoko were separated. She had kicked him out of their Upper West Side apartment at the Dakota, and he spent 18 months publicly boozing around Los Angeles with musicians like Keith Moon and Harry Nilsson. Soon after his appearance at the meetinghouse, he would return to Yoko, and almost exactly nine months later, Sean Lennon would be born.
May Pang, who was in her early 20s then, had started as John and Yoko’s assistant but, at Yoko’s urging — some say orchestration — had become his companion during the couple’s separation.
Hoping for clarity, I called Ms. Pang, a retired music executive who lives in Forest Hills, Queens, and is 74 now. She remembered the assembly well, but she ruled out 1973 as too early. She recalls her time with Lennon and was fairly certain the visit to the school was in 1974.
“It was for Rick, some kind of makeup for a school event we missed when we were out in L.A.,” she told me, and confirmed that Lennon did not bring his guitar or sing. “Rick” was Rick Sklar, the longtime program director for WABC radio and an early Beatlemania champion. He was also the father of two Friends students and a member of the P.T.A. Through his connections, pop stars like Patti LaBelle, Harry Chapin and even Alice Cooper made house calls for assemblies and school fair concerts. Lennon’s appearance was his latest production.
“Let me know if you get the exact date,” Ms. Pang said. “I’m so curious now.”
I thought that would be unlikely, but then Ms. Stern, the retired librarian, called back with a breakthrough: She had dug through old boxes and found a copy of “Genesis,” the upper school’s sporadically published newspaper.
There he was, on Page 3 of the February 1975 issue (Volume 4, No. 3): John Lennon, peering out from a grainy black-and-white photo in his cap and wire-rimmed glasses.
“Beatlemania returned to Friends Seminary on Friday, January 23, when John Lennon paid a visit to our school,” the article begins. Everybody misremembered the year. Unfortunately, Jan. 23, 1975, was a Thursday, not a Friday. But there was another clue: The photo of Lennon was taken by a student photographer, Christopher Gibbs.
I called Mr. Gibbs, who is 66 and a music professor at Bard College, and told him about my quest. Did he have any other pictures from the day Lennon came to our school? Alas, he didn’t think so. But he said that there was another student photographer there that day, Scott Frances, a senior at the time and the best photographer at Friends Seminary. He had shot for the yearbook and went on to have a long career as an architectural photographer.
Mr. Frances, 66, lives in Sag Harbor on Long Island and is still a working photographer. He remembered photographing Lennon, but it was a traumatic memory. There were no pictures of John Lennon in the Friends Seminary yearbook because he had lost the negatives that very week. He didn’t even have the contact sheets.
“They vanished,” he told me. Fifty years later, he still hasn’t given up the hunt.
“I keep looking,” he said with a rueful laugh.
Then Mr. Gibbs called back, excited. He did find more photos — and his diary.
On Jan. 24, 1975, he had tersely logged his day:
“Saw John Lennon during third period.”
“Most of the questions were very stupid.”
“Listened to some classical music.”
“‘Young Frankenstein’ is in theaters.”
If the diary of a teenage boy can be trusted, we had confirmation of the date that noted person John Lennon appeared at the Friends Seminary meetinghouse.
I called Ms. Pang back with the fleshed-out story.
“Wait!” she said. “Give me the date again?” There was a long pause. Then: “That was probably the last time I was out with him as a couple.”
A few days after the school event, Lennon told her he was going for hypnotherapy to stop smoking — and then he moved back into the Dakota.
She hadn’t seen it coming.
She and John were days away from buying a house in Montauk, she told me. The next item on their shared calendar was meeting with Paul and Linda McCartney in New Orleans. “They had just visited us a week earlier and were going to New Orleans to record,” Ms. Pang said.
Within weeks, the papers reported the news: John was back with Yoko, who soon became pregnant with Sean. From that moment on, Lennon effectively became a recluse, rarely seen in public and never to tour again. May was erased, at least officially. According to her memoir, “Loving John: The Untold Story,” which was published a couple of years after Lennon was shot to death outside the Dakota, they would secretly reconnect at odd times until his death.
Her tone was wistful, with a touch of finality.
“You kids caught him at the last moment of his public life,” she said.
How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.
We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?
Ryan Compton knows a thing or two about gigs. To make it in New York, he has worked as a retail associate inside the Museum of Modern Art’s gift store, a cashier for a downtown taqueria and a paint mixer for Takashi Murakami. He has experienced the paradox of a city both known for its artists and for pricing artists out.
Financial constraints forced Mr. Compton, who is from South Jersey, to move away from New York twice over the course of two decades. He has lived in Baltimore, Chicago and Philadelphia, but remains convinced the resources and people inside New York are unparalleled.
“You never know who you’re going to run into,” he said. “Everyone’s curious about each other.”
Since moving back in 2022, he has whittled down his source of income to a single gig as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he made $51,000 before taxes last year. It’s his second time at the museum. He first worked there part-time in 2011 before leaving in 2015 to earn his master’s degree in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
“I know I couldn’t afford graduate school and the cost of living in New York at the same time,” he said.
A third try at New York life has forced Mr. Compton, now 46, to confront the sustainability behind a career as both an interdisciplinary artist and a security guard — even inside one of the most famous museums in the world.
Love at First Sight (With New York)
As an undergraduate student at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Mr. Compton looked forward to spending weekends at his friend’s apartment gallery in the East Village in Manhattan.
A combination of showing face and knowing the right person led to his side project at the time — fashioning 3-d printed stuffed animals with skull faces — which were featured in an issue of Vogue Japan. He even sold a few inside a handmade craft store in Tokyo’s Ginza district for about $1,000.
“I was interested in the contrast between fuzzy-shaped animals and skulls,” he said, later adding, “You know, stuff when you’re a 20-something-year-old being kind of edgy.”
The early moment of success propelled Mr. Compton to chase after opportunities to showcase his work. While supporting himself financially through retail and service jobs, he helped write the artist Roman Ondak’s interactive performance piece at MoMA, “Measuring the Universe;” and worked as a collaborator for “No Souls for Sale,” an experimental project temporarily at Dia Chelsea and later, the Tate Modern in London. Both went unpaid.
“The chance to work in modern art before I was 30 is unheard of,” Mr. Compton said. “It only happens in New York.”
A Slower Pace
Tens of thousands of people flock to the Metropolitan on weekends, and it’s Mr. Compton’s job — one he has found increasingly difficult — to make sure the art is untouched. He believes social media has altered the way visitors engage with the museum. Think more selfies and poses leaned against Hellenistic marble.
The one hour work commute from Parkchester in the East Bronx gives him time to prepare for a long day ahead. He splits a two-bedroom with a co-worker for $1,000 a month and pays $50 in utilities. Heat and water are included in his rent, and his roommate covers the cost of Wi-Fi. He pays $90 each month for his phone bill.
The slower pace of the residential neighborhood matches the stage of life he’s in now. In the last few years, Mr. Compton has slowed down as he has come to terms with the expenses behind his art.
He no longer has free access to fabrication laboratories pegged to his university, and he has opted for the more cost-friendly hobbies of zine-making and book binding. He is, however, eyeing a $1,000 3-d printer. For now, he has settled on $20 a month Photoshop subscription.
The largest constraint tempering Mr. Compton’s spending is his $100,000 student loan debt from graduate school. The window for his deferment period closed, and even with some money he inherited after his mother passed, he says he needs a miracle to finish paying off his loans. “I’m not sure what to do anymore,” he said.
Splurging on Plants and Experimental Harsh Noise Records
Mr. Compton may not have any children, but he is a proud “plant dad.”
His apartment houses $1,000 worth of plants sourced through Facebook groups, pop-ups and by following Brooklyn Horticulture online. He typically pays $30-$50 for medium to large sized plants, but he is constantly on the lookout for deals.
When he isn’t at home with his plants, Mr. Compton treks into Manhattan to do his weekly grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s. He prefers the prices there to local spots in the Bronx and estimates he spends $70 each week.
A cash guzzler of Mr. Compton’s food budget is the $20 a day — an additional $80 a week — he spends at the Metropolitan’s staff cafeteria for breakfast and lunch. When working 12 hour shifts, “I’m not gonna go home and make something to bring the next day,” he said.
On his days off, he seeks out affordable food deals. He frequents Vanessa’s Dumplings in Chinatown for their $8 dumpling special.
When in the mood to treat himself, Mr. Compton rides the train a few more stops out to Ridgewood, Queens and Bushwick, Brooklyn, to visit his favorite record stores like Fringe Records and Nexus Records. An experimental harsh noise aficionado, he spends no less than $100 each visit.
His biggest and most recent splurge was a 10-day trip to Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka in Japan in February. He was able to cut his $900 round trip ticket to $700 with credit card points. Add in the cost of hotels, meals and souvenirs, he spent close to $5,000 total.
“I wanted to go because my artwork had been to Japan, but I haven’t been to Japan,” he said.
Looking Ahead
Mr. Compton wants to strike a balance between saving and enjoying the life he dreamed of in New York. To help pay off his loans, he considered applying to be an art handler for the Metropolitan, a job with a slight pay bump. But without his present benefit of overtime pay, he’s afraid he would be making less than he does currently.
Over the years, Mr. Compton has found community among other security guards at the Metropolitan, who, like him, are artists. He has also built inroads with notable names at the museum, one being Sheena Wagstaff, the former chairman of modern and contemporary art, who he said took the time to know Mr. Compton not only as a co-worker, but also as an individual, too.
Because of his connections, he feels like he has nowhere else to go. He considered a quieter lifestyle upstate in Westchester or the Catskills, but believes he will make less money outside of the city. And, of course, he would have to leave the place he’s called home for the majority of his adult years.
“I did four other cities, and they weren’t as good or great as I like New York,” he said. “I always end up here.”
We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.
You made it time. If you want to look a little longer, just scroll back up and press “Continue.”
Look up.
Before you commute home to suburbs like Tarrytown and Larchmont, or race toward the next stop on your tourist map, take a minute.
Look up to see the stars.
One hundred and twenty-five feet above you are 2,500 stars and six signs of the zodiac along the ecliptic, a line that represents the path of the sun across the sky:
The signs are joined by a few others: Orion, Pegasus, Triangulum and, in the center of it all, Musca Borealis (the Northern fly, or sometimes called Apis, the bee). The Milky Way streaks across the ceiling in the opposite direction. The whole thing is ringed by intricate plaster moldings along the clerestory windows. Fifty-nine of the stars twinkle.
Who says there isn’t magic in Midtown?
The original early 1900s plan for the ceiling was to build a massive skylight so commuters could look up at the actual stars:
But time and money were short, so the architects asked the artist Paul Helleu to design a version of the sky on the ceiling instead. Helleu took inspiration from star atlases from the 1600s. His main resource was the Uranometria from 1603, a lushly illustrated volume that was the first detailed cataloging of individual stars, their positions and brightness. See how similar the figures are. This is Aries:
Here’s Taurus, the bull:
A heart balloon — one of several — had floated up the day we took this photograph, nestling between Orion’s club and Taurus’s horn (maybe an earthly sign that this heavenly hunt might finally resolve).
Converting the flat drawings of a spherical sky re-projected onto a semi-cylindrical vaulted ceiling would have been no easy task. The design work was done by a famous scenic designer and muralist, James Monroe Hewlett, and was overseen by the Columbia astronomy professor Harold Jacoby, who in 1910 assured a panicked public that Halley’s comet would not hit Earth.
Dozens of painters got to work. The terminal opened at midnight on Feb. 2, 1913. The New York Central Railroad boasted “that many school children will go to the Grand Central Terminal to study this representation of the heavens.”
Two weeks later, a commuter from New Rochelle (and a hobby astronomer) looked up at the ceiling and realized that west was east and east was west and the sky was not, actually, in a proper arrangement. Only Orion was shown in the “correct” orientation. He wrote a “wrathful” letter to the station. As The New York Times reported in 1913, officials at Grand Central “did not deny the charge that things were a bit mixed, but held that it was a pretty good ceiling for all that.”
How this happened is still a matter of debate, given Professor Jacoby’s astronomical blessing.
Michael Allison, a former NASA planetary scientist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (and a former adjunct in the Columbia astronomy and astrophysics department), met me last month at the great clock under the ceiling to explain his theory.
“I’ve stared at the ceiling I don’t know how many hours,” he said. “I keep hoping I can discover one more thing.”
The liberties taken, Mr. Allison said, like re-sizing the constellations to fit the space and flipping Orion (in relation to the rest), were carefully done. Ultimately, a good marriage of art and science. He thinks Jacoby was a victim of big project bureaucracy, that it was all a mixup.
Jacoby probably expected the design he approved to be projected overhead, where the result would match the plans if you held them above you. The painters put them on the floor instead. Hence, the flip.
But this “heavenly view” — the stars as if they could be seen from above, looking down — may not be a bad view at all.
“There are just so many bad things happening in the world now that I think the sky offers a perspective that can lift us above that,” Mr. Allison said.
For Deirdre Newman, the great-granddaughter of the muralist Hewlett, who painted the ceiling, the imperfection “is what art is.”
Ms. Newman, it turns out, is also a painter of murals and ceilings. But these days, if she has to flip an image, she just hits a button on the projector.
“Anytime I make a mistake painting, I’m like, this proves that it’s art,” she said. “It is not perfection, and it shouldn’t be — it would be a sad thing if it was.”
The stories that we’ve given to the stars over millenniums, some of the most retold tales in history, are hardly orderly — stories of fate, violence, betrayal, revenge, sex and punishment. Cancer helps Hera in pinching a rival’s foot. Orion, son of Poseidon, is placed in the stars by Zeus, locked in an eternal hunt. The two fish of Pisces (Aphrodite and Eros) are linked together to escape the monster-of-all-monsters, Typhon.
Or the stories are totally different if you were Babylonian or Egyptian, Greek or Roman. Today, the stars mean something else again to a devoted user of the horoscope app Co-Star, seeking reassurance after a breakup. And to a commuter standing in Grand Central, looking up while waiting for the train, the stars might just be a momentary diversion, a decorative way to pass the time. Or more.
Take what you want. Take what you need.
***
By the 1940s, the ceiling had fallen into disrepair, so they painted a whole new one on four-foot-by-eight-foot asbestos sheets over the old one. This is the version that exists today. Eventually that second ceiling, too, grew dark with grime and had to be cleaned from 1996 to 1998. The difference was stark. As you were zooming in, you may have noticed a little dark square by Cancer. They deliberately left one bit of the uncleaned ceiling here:
The best time to take all of it in — the ceiling, and the majesty of the station — might just be coming this weekend. The setting sun will line up with Manhattan’s street grid and should (pending clouds) bathe the terminal in a beautiful golden glow Saturday at 8:19 p.m. and Sunday at 8:20 p.m. I plan to be on the east balcony looking west on Sunday for that moment.
See you there.
How we took the photograph
To generate a high-resolution panorama of the ceiling, The Times captured 232 close-up images. We then used software to stitch these photos into an equirectangular projection, to approximate the curve of the ceiling. We also developed custom computer vision software to ensure consistent color blending across varying lighting conditions. To optimize for display efficiency and clarity during navigation, the image was then re-projected into the shape of a cube. We think it’s still a pretty good picture for all that.
This is an installment in our series of experiments on art and attention. If you liked this one, you may like these past exercises: a finished, unfinished portrait; a sudden rain over a bridge; a unicorn tapestry; some buckets from Home Depot; and a Whistler painting.
Sign up to be notified when new installments are published here. And let us know how this exercise made you feel in the comments.
Welcome to Day 2 of the Metropolitan Diary challenge, part of our celebration of the column’s 50th anniversary. On Day 1, we gave you tips for identifying your New York City story. Today, we’ll help you write it. (Missed Day 1? It’s not too late to start.)
What makes for a good Diary? It’s simply a good story that happens to be set in, and capture, the essential New York-ness of the city. While this isn’t a full writing course, we do have guidance on the kinds of elements that the submissions we publish include. They typically have: a beginning, middle and end; sharp details; catchy dialogue; a bit of surprise; some humor, warmth or emotion. But there is no formula, so flouting these loose rules can be worthwhile.
Don’t worry if you don’t think of yourself as a “writer.” Focus on being a “storyteller.” Pretend you are telling your story to the person who’d most appreciate it, using whatever conversational language or pacing that would hold their attention. Do it out loud if you want, maybe give that person a call and tell them your story (or tell it to them again). Then write it down.
That’s the big picture. For more tips, read on.
Here is an example of a published Diary that we (and readers) really liked, and a few thoughts on why that may help crystallize yours.
Unacceptable
Dear Diary:
I went to a new bagel store in Brooklyn Heights1 with my son.
When it was my turn to order, I asked for a cinnamon raisin bagel with whitefish salad and a slice of red onion.2
The man behind the counter looked up at me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t do that.”3
— Richie Powers
One of this item’s best qualities is that it is short and snappy. Only 53 words! Although we will use stories of up to 300 words, many don’t need to be that long and the column doesn’t work if we don’t have a mix of long, medium and short, so we are always looking for stuff like this. Here’s another one!
At Attention
Dear Diary:
It was December 1967. I had just finished basic training at Fort Dix in New Jersey and was traveling to Boston in uniform. For reasons I no longer recall, I stopped in New York City on the way.1
Walking on the Upper East Side2 in a snowstorm, I spied another man in a uniform. He was older, and his cap bore the familiar gold band that identified him as an officer.
I rendered a snappy salute. It was not returned. 3The uniform was unfamiliar, so I guessed he was a foreign officer. Military courtesy still required me to salute.
A little farther down the street, I encountered another officer and offered another salute that went unacknowledged.4 His uniform was strange to me as well.
The third time it happened, the man I saluted ignored me while holding the door for a couple 5on their way into a large apartment building.
I realized I had been saluting doormen.6
— Stephen Salisbury
To get your storytelling muscles going, think through or jot down the answers to some of these questions.
Let’s start with setting the scene.
- When and where in the city did this happen? Is this place well-known?
- Was there anything particular about that point in your life that’s relevant?
- What did you see, hear, smell? Was there something notable about the weather?
Now, let’s move to the middle, the meat of the story.
- Did you have an exchange with someone?
- What details are important to how events unfolded, especially in setting up the ending?
And now, the end.
- What’s the resolution? Is there a punchline?
- Does the story end with a sense of shared humanity or some other warm feeling that lingers? You don’t need to name it. A good description will often allow readers to feel it too.
- Why has this experience stayed with you?
- Lines like “and that’s why I love New York” are almost always unnecessary.
That’s it. Keep your story simple and use the kind of plain language you use in conversation. You are sketching a moment in time. The details are important. Let them move the story along. Have fun and good luck.
Once you’re done, read through what you’ve got. What details are less important and can be left out? (Remember, there is a strict 300-word limit.)
Write your Metropolitan Diary however you like, on paper, on your phone or wherever! When you’re happy with what you’ve written, put your diary entry into the box below, fill out your information and submit it. You might just hear from me about including it in a future column.
This is the official submission form, so make sure to double-check your work before hitting submit.
That’s it! Submit your Metropolitan Diary.
By transmitting your submission, you grant The New York Times Company a perpetual, royalty-free license to use the submission in any medium. They may be edited, and may be republished and adapted in all media. You may reprint your story elsewhere after it appears in The Times.
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