What I Love | William Sanford Nye
What I Love | William Sanford Nye
Jake Naughton for The New York Times
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William Sanford Nye — but surely you know him as Bill Nye the Science Guy — lives in a one-bedroom apartment on the 24th floor of a rental building in Chelsea. Outside his floor-to-ceiling windows: the Empire State Building and the Flatiron Building. Bliss squared. Practically at his doorstep: the N, the R and the 1 subway lines. Bliss cubed.
“The great thing about this location is that I can get on three trains just like that,” Mr. Nye, 59, said, snapping his fingers and realigning his signature bow tie. “That has been a boon to me. CNN and MSNBC, they want to send a car for me when I’m on a show, and I say, ‘I’ll take the train,’ because it’s so much faster, so much faster. It sets me back $2.75, but I’m good for it.”
Over the last two decades, Mr. Nye, a longtime denizen of the West Coast, visited New York City numerous times, finally deciding last year to get a place here (though his house in Los Angeles is still his primary residence).
“I’ve heard that if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere,” he said. “I don’t remember where I heard that, but I heard it someplace.”
Naturally, being a science guy and all, Mr. Nye wanted to test that hypothesis. He analyzed the data — the publication last fall of “: Evolution and the Science of Creation” (St. Martin’s Press), the he wrote while living in the city — and drew a conclusion: Yes, he can make it here all right. “The last year has been just cool,” said Mr. Nye, whose “Science Guy” educational series ran on PBS in the 1990s and collected 18 Emmys. “The opportunities that keep coming up for me have been fantastic.”
He chose his base of operations only after many consultations with friends and much observation. “Not that you couldn’t be happy in any number of places, but this is pretty nice,” Mr. Nye said. “It’s nice that it’s in a modern building. There are a lot of places on the Upper West Side where everything is broken. I love the Upper West Side, but when you’re trying to write a book, trying to take off your vagabond shoes, it’s just easier when all the plumbing works.”
Fortunately, his apartment has pipes a guy can depend on. It also has a serviceable kitchen, a good thing because Mr. Nye likes to cook; he made a spinach pizza from scratch in anticipation of a reporter’s visit. It’s soundproof, an important consideration since he’s hard at work on another book, this one about global warming. And downstairs there’s a gym where he works out and gets worked up daily.
“People take the weights from the gym,” Mr. Nye said incredulously. “They’re 20-pound things. They take them to their apartments and don’t bring them back. These are my neighbors. I’m sure I’ve been on the elevator with some of them. I want to say: ‘What goes through your mind? Do you think you’re the only person who uses the weights?’ ”
Won’t they feel remorseful when they aren’t invited to the science guy’s apartment for pizza or the other house specialty, salmon, and a chance to play with some of Mr. Nye’s favorite toys? The list is long and includes the copper and aluminum Eddy current tubes that he always has on hand to teach visitors about magnetism, the square plates or blocks for melting ice for a tutorial on thermal conductivity, and a miniature Stirling engine for a chalk talk about using heat to drive a piston.
All the furniture in the apartment is rented, aside from the TV stand, a Best Buy acquisition; the computer table Mr. Nye bought at Staples and assembled; and the very handsome and very heavy solid teak dining table he bought himself almost 40 years ago after graduating from engineering school. “There’s not much going on here aesthetically,” he acknowledged.
The fact is, Mr. Nye doesn’t seem especially interested in what he sits on or stretches out on in the living room. He’s too busy looking above that leased couch at his Geochron, a world clock that looks like a framed map of the world.
“I sure prefer it to many pieces of art,” Mr. Nye said. “I think part of it is that it lights up. My friends make fun of me and call me Shiny Object Man.” He’s almost equally entranced by his Mova globe, an orb whose rotation is powered by ambient light and by the images from space that play on his flat-screen television. It’s a cosmic eyeful that comes courtesy of his Raspberry Pi, a computer that can be programmed to receive a feed from the International Space Station. A theme is emerging here: He calls the clear glass light fixture that hangs over the dining room table the asteroid.
Some of Mr. Nye’s treasures, like the collection of Lamy fountain pens, the eraser shield and the French curve hanging on the wall by his computer, are decidedly more down to earth. And they are, every one of them, possessions of long duration.
Perhaps because of his efforts to reduce his carbon footprint, Mr. Nye is judicious about accumulating for the sake of accumulating. But some things were irresistible. When “Undeniable” was accepted for publication, he bought himself a shaving brush and a chrome stand.
And after years of walking through airport concourses and admiring a gold-tipped blue bowl, part of the inventory at Taxco Sterling, he finally gave in and bought it at Raleigh-Durham International Airport after a visit to his sister last Thanksgiving. It now sits on his coffee table.
“It reminds me of ‘Starry Night,’ ” Mr. Nye said, referring to the celebrated van Gogh painting. “It’s not something anyone needs. It’s just cool.”
There are some problems that challenge even Bill Nye the Science Guy. He still hasn’t figured out a satisfactory storage system for his many bow ties, a collection that, thanks to his fans, keeps expanding. The dowel he’d been using for the job recently fell off the bedroom wall, and now it’s back to the drafting board.
“This is the current state of the art,” he said with a sigh, reaching into his closet and pulling out a multitiered skirt hanger with dangling lengths of stripes and solids. “It’s an issue, an unresolved issue.”