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A Walker’s City
28 Apr 2003

Stephen Graham, the English travel writer, describes his night walks through all of Manhattan in his 1927 book New York Nights.

“It is five a.m. Something of the burden of the city has been lifted. The air is light. The heart seems freed. I feel happy to be walking. I love the space and the quietness. I have got rid of the idea of going to bed, got rid of the routine of daily life. New York and its millions, its wealth, its mysteries, are mine. There is a sense of conquest. The majority of people are asleep—but I am not the least sleepy. It seems as if life has just begun. I am dancing on a springed floor. The stones of the side-walks help me to leap along First Avenue, grim, empty, gloomy Avenue One, which has no turning to the right except little bottle neck lanes which go down to the edge of the water of the East River. I spent many nights in this way wandering about the city and returning at dawn, resuming next night at the point where I had left off the night before.

Whoever would know the poetry of New York must walk it in the after-midnight hours, see the red light come out on the Metropolitan tower preliminary to the striking of the hour; one is too pre-occupied and diverted to observe it in the livelier hours; enter the Central station at four a.m. and see it anew, deserted, silent, beautiful as on the morning of Opening Day; see the City Hall at dawn hanging down from on high like the sky’s apron.”

 

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