Going through the backlog of Stuff I Want To Post About:

A couple months ago, I decided -- for the sheer hell of it -- to take a walk on Broadway.  All of Broadway -- or at least the portion on the island of Manhattan, for as you head northward, it turns into Route 9 and goes to within 600 feet of the Canadian border.

It's been done a bunch of times before, but I'd never done it.  So on a brilliantly sunny Saturday, I took the train to the Marble Hill Metro-North station (it's one of NYC's quirks that Marble Hill, though on the mainland, is politically part of Manhattan), walked along the river to the Broadway Bridge, paused to watch the rowers practicing on the Harlem River, then turned right, setting foot on Broadway at 9:46am...

...and six hours and twenty-one minutes later, my hands touched the railing at Battery Park.  (2.19 mph, on average, but that includes a few stops.)  According to GMaps Pedometer, it was 13.86 miles.

Impressions:

• The upper reaches were pretty empty, with only a few fellow pedestrians.  I didn't realize how heavily Latino upper Manhattan is -- I knew there was a sizable Dominican population, but I was impressed at the sheer numbers of signs in Spanish all the way to Harlem.
• I was also surprised at how much of Broadway I'd walked before, in various chunks -- the area from 181st Street down to about 160th, a stretch in the 140s, and pretty much everything below 118th Street.   I was always pleased to note familiar landmarks -- Riverside Church made its appearance at 135th, the Empire State Building at 37th, and the Woolworth Building around Houston.  Even though I'd seen more than half of the walk before, it was a new pleasure to watch the various neighborhoods I'd walked rolling into one another.  It's like when you take the bus versus riding the subway.  Habitual subway use gives you somewhat deep familiarity of the areas around each subway station that you use -- you know how to get to your destinations from that one point.  Riding the bus gives you a greater, big-picture sense of how it all fits together.
• I stopped a few times:  to watch an asshat protester at 59th, to lean on some scaffolding and make a phone call at 54th, to pick up an extra memory card for my camera at Union Square, and to get lunch (and discover, to my chagrin, that I really should have worn sunscreen) at Great Jones Street.
• My mood was better when I could walk unencumbered by crowds walking all over the sidewalk.  It was mall pace from about 53rd to 40th (the pre-matinee hordes), and all through SoHo, which was jammed with trendies.
• I drank five large bottles of water on the trip, and probably could've gone for a few more.
• When I switched from the west side of the street to the east side (just below Union Square), it felt more momentous than it should have.

Oh, and I took pictures.  Lots of them.  One every block, in fact.  (It was such a brilliantly sunny, high-contrast day the pictures didn't come out quite as well as they could have; I was shooting more for documentation than art at any rate.)  I think I might try to make an animation out of some of them at some point.

So:  What's next?  I need to decide.  I could walk the Broadways in Queens and in Brooklyn, to complete the triumvirate.  (I don't believe they have them in Staten Island or the Bronx.)  Or maybe I'll walk from JFK to Manhattan, a la Will Self, or walk all the Manhattan streets, as Caleb Smith and others have done.  Or perhaps something else?  You tell me.

Comments

[Vinny]

I don't know about Staten Island, but there's definitely a Broadway in my hometown (Da Bronx). It's adjacent to Van Cortlandt Park ;-)

[Vidiot]

Ah, good to know. I think I see a plan emerging...

[romanlily]

How cool that you did this. Now I understand the context for some of the photos I saw on your photo site a couple of months ago.

I really enjoy your writing about the city.... your knowledge of New York is impressive.

[Chuck]

This sounds like a really great thing for a first-time visitor to New York to do, to get a real look at the city.

Hmm.