My Walking Project
I started walking on December 31, 2019. That isn’t true. I started walking when I was a baby. But this walking project started on December 31, 2019, when I walked the length of Manhattan from Marble Hill to Battery Park. When I did that, I didn’t plan for this to become a project. I didn’t plan for it to become the 2020 chronicle that it’s turned into. In truth, I just needed something to do that might make me feel accomplished before the year was over.
2019 was a hard year for me on a personal level. My previous, 8-year-long relationship ended in June, and I essentially had to figure out who I was going to be in my post-breakup reality. Anyone who’s gone through a split like that knows that there are two sides to the fallout that need to be dealt with: the emotional and the pragmatic.
My emotional side has healed slowly but surely, thanks to my human support system. My pragmatic side needed to find a new place to live, needed furniture, needed groceries and utilities and all the sordid details that make up a 21st-century life that you don’t really think about in the middle of a relationship because you deal with them together over long stretches of time.
I cobbled together a new life, or some facsimile of one, over the Summer and Autumn of 2019. By December, I felt somewhat settled, but also a bit stuck. I didn’t want to end the year feeling as if my only accomplishment was a breakup and a move-out. This sense of pseudo-failure clung to my back right up to the night before New Year’s Eve.
My apartment at the time was on 9th Avenue near 48th Street in Hell’s Kitchen, just a short walk from Times Square. New Year’s Eve takes on a certain level of urgency in the neighborhood as tourists pour into the city to celebrate and number-shaped glasses fly off the shelves of every bodega and souvenir shop within a 5-mile radius. From my bed I could see the glow of the billboards and I got an idea.
There’s an episode of the TV show “Broad City” in which the character Abbi turns 30. To celebrate, she and her best friend Ilana decide to walk the length of Manhattan “from the tippity top to the tippity bottom.” I’d wanted to do this for years, but never actually got off my ass and did it. So on the night of December 30, 2019, I texted my new boyfriend/partner with a proposition: I wanted to walk the length of Manhattan the next morning, to end the year with a bang, and he could join me if he wanted to. He agreed (one of the many reasons he’s amazing) and we arranged our plan.
That walk, all 14 miles of it, was a revelation for me. I’ve definitely walked the length of Manhattan before, probably several times, in bits and pieces. I’ve lived in Manhattan for over a decade, and my life has dragged me up and down this spit of land again and again for apartment moves, bad dates, shopping excursions, gallery visits, restaurant openings, birthday parties, and miscellaneous urban exploration. But never in all those years had I walked the entire island, end to end, for the sole purpose of absorbing its miles of sights and sounds.
The way neighborhoods bleed into each other fascinated me: there are places where you just feel yourself leaving one area and entering another. People’s walking styles change, the types of dogs that pervade the sidewalks from one neighborhood to the next can be noticeably different, as well as how much dog crap is picked up or left behind. Walking, in one day, through Inwood, Washington Heights, Harlem, the Upper West Side, Hell’s Kitchen, Chelsea, the Village, SoHo, TriBeCa, and the Financial District, gave me an entirely new appreciation for Manhattan’s incredible diversity. This island is a treasure trove of live and energy and I knew I needed to understand it better.
And so this project was born. I decided the next day that I would try to walk every street in Manhattan by the end of 2020. One year, one island. I didn’t measure the miles it would entail. I just glanced at the map and thought “I can probably do that, sure.” Never in a million years did I expect 2020 to go the way it has, or for this project to change me in so many ways. I’ve accumulated tens of thousands of photos and videos of the city, and I feel like my relationship with Manhattan is completely and irrevocably different now than it was on December 31, 2019.
My walks are documented on my Instagram account, but since Instagram is such a structured platform (and it’s run by Facebook), I knew that I’d eventually like to transfer my photos and my thoughts to a venue over which I have more control. This website is that venue. My hope is that I’ll be able to better showcase New York and my walking project here, and that you’ll join me as I expand into this new way of communicating!