The Sidewalk Astronomer of Second Avenue

I met Felton Davis on New York City’s Second Avenue on May 20, 2016. I know this because he snapped a shot of my friend Sarah and me looking at the Moon through his Orion 8-inch reflector and emailed me the picture. Like thousands of other passersby who’ve chanced upon Felton and his scope, we hadn’t expected to get a close-up view of the Moon that night. It was a delightful and poignant experience, and I immediately signed up for Felton’s email blasts. Over the years, his informative, down-to-earth messages about space regularly hit my inbox just when I needed some present-moment zen.

Felton has been offering New York City residents and tourists close-up views and in-depth knowledge of the planetary bodies in the sky above this light-polluted city since 2012, when he bought his telescope for $500. “This is the toy that I wanted when I was 10,” he told me. “I just had to wait about 50 years to afford it. At first I set up on the roof of my building, but it was lonely up there. I wanted to be able to share with people on the street.”

And so Felton’s “East Village star parties” were born. A few nights every month for the past 12 years, he has let strangers use his scope and shown them how to take zoomed-in shots of the Moon through the eyepiece. Later, he posts the images on his “2nd Avenue Star Watchers” Flickr. “Most telescope nights have just been the waxing Moon, because the waning Moon is over by the FDR Drive,” he says. “However, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and occasionally the rings of Saturn can be seen from the street.”

Big-picture perspective

Felton finds the modern era’s tech obsession both isolating and deeply troubling. “There is a profound alienation from nature, especially in big cities like New York,” he says. “Urban life functions like a prison, keeping everyone looking down at their devices and losing all awareness about the vast universe.” Clearly, he and his telescope have helped with that. “People in line to look through it are having a blast, and they start meeting and talking and sharing,” he says. “It is a great joy to see social barriers come down.” He’s especially proud that many children have gotten their first close-up view of the Moon through his telescope.

His star-party routine is simple but not easy. Step one: Check the weather and make sure clouds won’t obscure the sky. Step two: Check the Starry Night app and pay attention to where the planets are. Step three: Send an email blast so followers know the telescope will be out. Step four: Hoist the 40-pound scope into a cart and wheel it to wherever visibility is best on 2nd Avenue. Step five: Wait for the Moon to rise — and stargazers to arrive. Step six: Find the Moon through the eyepiece and adjust the scope every two minutes to keep it in place.

Clear skies make for the best viewing, so most of Felton’s telescope nights have taken place in either intense heat or bitter cold. “It’s all about who’s there at the moment,” Felton says. “People are impatient. They’re a bit spoiled. They want the best Full Moon shot when they’re on their way home from work. If you tell them that at 1:30 in the morning, Saturn is going to be over there, they’ll say, ‘Forget about it.’ They don’t want to get up in the middle of the night, even to see the rings of Saturn.”

A former postal worker, Felton has eccentricities that would put Pluto’s orbit to shame. For one thing, he doesn’t have a smartphone. For another, he’s the only Presbyterian volunteer at the legendary nonprofit Maryhouse, which has published The Catholic Worker since 1933. He’s been arrested for protesting a few times, too — most notably in the ’90s for opposing NASA’s use of plutonium as a power source in the Cassini mission.

Felton has been answering the door and otherwise volunteering at Maryhouse for 35 years; the charity offers showers, clothing, and lunch to women in need. “If you’re unhappy about the way things are going, volunteer at Maryhouse!” he says. “There’s always a lot going on. It’s a workaholic’s dream!”

But it can be a nightmare as well. “There are a lot of people who are not online, who don’t have any money,” he notes. “They get swept up, locked up, hospitalized.” Several of the women Felton has helped and befriended over the years have died suddenly, violently.

For Felton, astronomy is spiritual. “I don’t relate to church,” he says. “It’s too ritualized. But standing on the corner with my telescope, there’s room for spontaneity. We have to try and keep an awareness of a greater serenity. In the Bible, that’s the heavens: a power over all that none of us control.

Calm amidst chaos

NYC’s lively East Village isn’t part of my usual orbit, so hanging out with Felton was an eye-opening — and sometimes heart-pounding — experience. He greeted me by removing a tightly rolled paper scroll from underneath his arm and unfurling it down the sidewalk. “This is the timeline of human history,” he announced dramatically. A wayward breeze twisted the scroll; one by one, a random group of bemused passersby stopped to help me straighten it and hold it fast. “Four point six billion years, charted as 10 million years per inch,” explained Felton. Duly impressed, the strangers and I snapped photos.

“One point five hundred million years ago, the first eukaryotic bacteria began,” Felton continued, gesturing at the center of the scroll. “That’s all this is. In fact, most of the history of life and evolution is about bacteria. Then, 600 million years ago, the trilobites appeared. For 320 million years, it was only trilobites and plankton. The trilobites ate plankton for breakfast, ate plankton for lunch, ate plankton for dinner. And for dessert? Plankton.” He paused, then walked to the end of the scroll and touched it with the toe of his shoe. “Human beings are way down here, after the fifth mass extinction of the dinosaurs,” he said.

Having made his point, Felton rolled up the scroll and the two of us sat down on folding chairs on the Maryhouse stoop. From there, our conversation covered the waterfront: How the first trilobites to develop eyesight must have felt. Newton. Galileo. How plastic inhibits photosynthesis. The original Star Trek. Einstein. Aristotle. Why the Verrazano Bridge is five inches wider at the top than the bottom. The redshifting of galaxies. “The big news in cosmology is the re-evaluation of the large-scale structure of the universe,” Felton told me. “Astrophysicists have recently discovered that, instead of expanding steadily outward, galaxies are actually turning, like a curved flower arrangement twisting in the wind.” Much like his amazing scroll, I thought.

Intermittently, the atmosphere of Third Street interrupted our talk. An ambulance screamed by, emergency lights flashing. A ginormous truck rumbled past. A huge black SUV pulled up and parked at the curb, rap on full blast, bass pounding. Another ambulance, siren wailing. A broken utility table stood forlornly on the sidewalk next to us; inexplicably, a neighbor suddenly decided to move it to the trash area, slamming it repeatedly on top of the metal cans. Then a woman started running up and down the street in front of us; a fourth-floor window opened in the apartment building across the way: “Go girl!” her friend (roommate?) yelled down. I noticed a Psychic signboard across the street. “Ever go?” I asked Felton. “No,” he said flatly. He’s not into those kinds of stars.

Meanwhile, several locals — some of them obviously Maryhouse regulars — stopped to greet Felton, and vice versa. “How you doing?” asked Man #1. “Will you be out there tonight?” asked Man #2. (“Yes, beautiful crescent Moon,” responded Felton.) “Felton is astronomy,” offered Man #3. A woman pedaled up on her bike and stopped at Felton’s feet. “I need juice, milk, canned fruit,” she blurted, dismounting. “I’m starving. I didn’t eat in two days.” Felton opened the Maryhouse door for her and pointed her toward the kitchen. Outside, another local came over to chat. “I don”t bring the streets to my home,” she offered. “I haven’t been inside [jail] in at least two years.”

The April day was bright and brisk. I watched, open-mouthed, as the wind took the Amazon delivery guy’s empty cart across the street and sailed it toward First Avenue. I jumped up, ran to retrieve it, moved it out of harm’s way. By the time I returned to the stoop, another Maryhouse patron had taken my seat. “He’s a renaissance man,” she told me, upon learning that I was interviewing Felton for Astronomy. “He knows everything about everything. But he tries to keep it on the down low. He has humility with it.”

Felton and I moved inside to give her space and get away from the cacophony. “I never liked New York City,” he remarked.

Felton was born in Alabama, but his parents were in the Army Medical Corps so the family moved around a lot. They summered in Fernandina Beach, Florida, where the night sky was clear. “When I was 11, we lived in New Orleans during the Cuban Missile Crisis,” he said. “They posted a diagram in the paper showing the 500-mile radius that would result from a nuclear blast in Cuba — and our house was inside that line. The other boys and I said, ‘The grownups are going to get us killed! Keep the Boy Scout canteens full of fresh water every day! Don’t wait for the blast: As soon as the air raid siren goes off, we get on our bikes, ride down to the river, get on the levee, turn right, and head up the river to Baton Rouge.’ We had it figured out. There were only two rules: Number one, don’t look back, and number two, no girls.”

Felton’s journey to the Big Apple was elliptical. He went to Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida where he sang in the choir. Ultimately, though, he decided that he wanted “the challenge of a meaningful life outside the prison of capitalism. I was the guy who thought that everything was wrong in the world, and I had a list of all the things that had to be changed,” he told me. In the ’80s, he ended up protesting in DC. “It was an apocalyptic time,” he explained. “We were thinking that Reagan was going to start a nuclear war. The guy next to me says, ‘What do you do when you’re not standing on the steps of the Pentagon?’ And I said, ‘I have a backpack. I bum around. And I get in trouble. You know: I’m told to get out of the street, and I refuse. If the world’s coming to an end, I’d rather be here saying no at the Pentagon.’ Then I asked him, ‘What do you do when you’re not here at the Pentagon?’ And he said, ‘I live in this community in New York City called Maryhouse, started by Dorothy Day. We try to balance activist work with service.’” So Felton came to New York.

Felton’s retirement email hurt my heart. “I have physically not been able to set up the telescope since November,” he said. “I was showing the Full Moon, and I couldn’t get the telescope into position because of neck pain and the freezing cold. The Moon was coming out from behind the bank building and people were jumping up and down, saying, ‘I want to see! I want to see!’ My whole body was getting stressed out. And I’m like, ‘I can’t do this.’ A young guy walked by, and I said, ‘Can you help me? Can you stand here for a couple of hours? I need someone to turn that blue knob, and then the red one. I’ll look through the eyepiece and tell you which way.’ He did it — and I haven’t been out since.”

A CAT scan revealed that Felton’s neck is hypoattenuated. “That’s the sad news,” he says. “The happy news is that a member of our Catholic Worker community wants to take over for me, starting with tonight’s crescent Moon. So the project will continue.”

Of course, Felton planned to be on hand to assist. “It’s a wonderful night to do it,” he says. “Beautiful weather. The crescent Moon will come up and occult the Pleiades; once the occultation begins, the stars will disappear one at a time.”

And passersby lucky enough to happen upon Felton, his new protégée and his old Orion reflector on the sidewalk will be invited to raise their vision from a bustling New York sidewalk to the lunar orbit and beyond, and gaze in wonder at the beauty and silence of space.