Interview: Lucy Schiller

Confessions of a Scavenger Hunt Writer

The 1920 Wall Street Bombing

Not long after my book came out I got a DM from Lucy Schiller. Lucy is a writer and teacher with work in the Columbia Journalism Review, the New Yorker, the Baffler, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. (Personally, I loved this essay in Popula [RIP] about naming companies.) She received her MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. You can read some of her writing at www.lucy-schiller.work. She was working on a big project and wanted to interview me about ideas of authenticity and time. In the process she told me about this very interesting job she used to have: writing scavenger hunts for corporate retreats in big cities.

As soon as I heard that I knew I had to talk to her for Other Day. So here it is, my interview with Lucy Schiller and this weird job she used to have:

David Banks:  What the hell is this job?

Lucy Schiller: Oh, it was wild! It was my first real salary job ever, and it paid $40,000 which was for me still kind of the most I've ever made, and this was immediately post recession. I found it online, in some weird corner of the Internet. It looked like it might be fake. I had applied to like 150 jobs. Honestly, that's probably an exaggeration. But I applied to a lot of jobs at that point, and somehow got this.

At the time I had returned to my parents' house and I was living in my childhood bedroom. That’s where I did the Skype interview with these people who said they lived in New York and had a scavenger hunt company. I moved to New York and started this job, and it was just utterly bizarre but also interesting in a lot of ways.

My job title was writer/editor for a company that billed itself as creating and providing scavenger hunts for corporate team building events, public groups, and then also for, like private birthday parties and private functions. So there were three separate tiers there.

There were the corporate events which were usually designed to resuscitate the spirits of tired workers or provide “team building,” or get groups of people together from across a company who maybe didn't spend a lot of time together. In particular venues where we either had scavenger hunts already written, we could just tailor to each group, or, if they were gonna pay a lot we could create new ones from scratch. Places like natural history museums, art museums, and then also outside, like in historic neighborhoods. For instance, the Lower East Side, or Wall Street, or Chinatown but then throughout the country as well. It wasn't just specific to New York.

That was the corporate side of things. I would often be writing these hunts or editing them in New York. Actually, I'm visiting New York right now and I was showing my friends around. And I was just like, “I know, a huge amount about the history of the city because of this job.” I actually do feel very lucky to have received the kind of bizarre education and history that I got through this job.

But a big part of my job —daily, maybe weekly, but probably more often daily— was walking these one-and-a-half-hour to two-hour routes that we created through New York. So I needed to go see if things were broken, i.e. if there was some new street art on a building that was covering up other street art that we were using in a question on a scavenger hunt. Or, if there was scaffolding put up. If something in a shop window —which we tried not to use, but would use in desperate moments— was switched out for something else. If there was a street closure. And the city was changing so quickly and always is too, so that was kind of an ongoing concern.

I also would fly often, kind of last minute, to cities around the country and create new hunts there, or just checking on ones that we'd written, maybe two years ago that we had no idea if they were still possible to put on.

Then alongside the corporate team building ones there were ones for the public, which happened every weekend in most major cities, and still do. And those are ones that have this dependable public interest in them because they're in an interesting place, or they're an easy, off-kilter way to explore somewhere, that you think you know, like a museum or a neighborhood. And then there were ones for people's private private birthday parties as well.

And then there was this other little aspect that I always thought was interesting, which were scavenger heads that we created that could take place anywhere. They seemed like they were location specific, but they actually were not in any way and so what you would do to kind of make sure that a company thought that you were tailoring it to them was that you would slightly alter a question, or slightly alter something that they needed to find, so that it reflected a specific piece of the company's history or lore, or the environment in which this was taking place.

For instance, a lot of companies would want these scavenger hunts right outside of their office parks, and we're not gonna necessarily —unless they're paying us a huge amount of money— send me to go find non-visible pieces of history or visible interest in a landscape where there's almost nothing to find besides, like, a water fountain that everyone knows is already there, or, you know, just like grass. And so what you would do in situations like that is ask them to take a photo of themselves as a group like jumping in the air in front of a fountain, or go find five pencils because you're a pencil company and bring them back. Things like that. They're a little more more cohesively understood as traditional scavenger hunts.

What I thought was more intellectually interesting, though obviously complicated, was finding evidence of particular pieces of history, and then almost reverse engineering their discovery for people: trying to get people to almost look at the landscape through the way that you slowly train them to over the course of the scavenger hunt. They learn to understand the way that you're asking a question as directing them towards a particular building. And then they look at the question again, and they're like, “Oh, I think this means that I should count the number of gargoyle on this building,” or “I think we should be looking for something involving a synagogue,” or something like that.

A lot of my job was just walking around by myself with a notebook, and then my iPhone, and trying to find historic plaques which are always helpful in looking for things that were unchanging pieces of the landscape but that also revealed something about the larger history of it.

David Banks: What are some other cities you wrote scavenger hunts for?

Lucy Schiller: San Francisco, Seattle, Nashville, Phoenix, Chicago, Boston, Denver, Portland. I went up to Albany one time.

David Banks: Do you remember anything from the Albany one?

Lucy Schiller: I remember that I had a really bad cold, and I finished my work early, and I got a really cheap massage somewhere. This is so gross I'm sorry, and my nose is just like dripping onto the floor. I don't remember more than that. I don't remember what we put on the hunt but I'm sure it was like oriented towards, you know, state politics.

David Banks: And our giant Empire Plaza.

Lucy Schiller: Yeah, I wish I could remember more from there. I took a lot of trains to strange places like the Norwalk Aquarium in Connecticut. You know, it's very hard to write something for zoos and aquariums. They’re the worst places to try to write scavenger hunts, because their unnatural spaces. Meaning, they’re artificially constructed. They aren't interested in history. They have plaques in extremely evident places, there are live animals, and there's vegetation. It's intentionally, very bare of anything other than what they're trying to show you.

A big part of this job was to help people feel like they could personally discover a city in a supposedly authentic, or like deeper way that other people just walking through wouldn't have access to. There was this idea that we tapped into of the hidden history of a city. Like you wouldn't know, unless you're listening to us, that the little scars on the side of the JP Morgan Building, near Wall Street, are from the 1920 anarchist bombing.

David Banks: I’d like to know more about your process. Like, okay, you've landed in Connecticut or Nashville, and then what? It doesn't sound like you start with a blank slate.

All right, and that’s the end of the free preview. If you want to read the rest of my interview with Lucy and learn her hunt-making process and much more please consider a paid subscription. There you’ll also get access to my full interview with Vic Christopher from last month.