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BOOKSHELF
A Walker’s City
28 Apr 2003

The New York City Marathon brings thirty thousand runners from around the world, and draws more than two million spectators to line the 26.2 mile route. Next Saturday, in a more modest affair, at a slower pace, a few hundred walkers will travel a longer distance -- 32 miles – around the entire edge of Manhattan in the 18th annual Great Saunter.

“See Manhattan at 3 miles per hour,” the event’s promotional materials proclaim. Great Saunter founder Cy Adler champions the joy of walking along the shoreline of New York City, and has written a walkers guide about his saunters, called “Walking Manhattan’s Rim: The Great Saunter.”

Adler’s book joins some rather illustrious company. Traveling the city by foot –one of the best ways to get to know New York, as the city’s countless themed walking tours (see sidebar) attest -- has led to some of the greatest literature about New York City, often called the most walkable city in America.

During the Great Depression, the poet Charles Reznikoff would set out from his job in Brooklyn and walk much of the way home to Riverdale. He often logged twenty miles a day, and the people he saw and eavesdropped on during his jaunts later appeared in his poems. “It seems that, from his boyhood, Reznikoff was obsessed with walking,” wrote Joel Lewis in the Forward. Reznikoff’s widow told Lewis that when Reznikoff would say, "I did not walk today,” he always conveyed an air of “tragic loss.” The poet had a dream -- never fulfilled -- of walking across the entire country.

Although considerably less ambitious, Frank O’Hara’s 1950s lunchtime strolls in Manhattan were also fodder for poems, which detail both what he watched as he wandered, and the wanderings inside his own head.

Inspired by writers like O’Hara and Reznikoff, New Yorker Lawrence Levi founded an online literary magazine about the art of walking through a city and writing about it, called Flaneur. “It was both simply a passion for good writing and for the city itself, the pleasure of walking around,” said Levi, who launched the website three years ago. “It was also the fact that at the time I had a very dull day job.”

Webster’s Dictionary defines a flaneur as an “idle man-about-town,” and Flaneur, according to its “flanifesto,” is dedicated to “the celebration of urban life, the sanctification of the stroll.”

In the flaneur spirit, here is a literary anthology of poems and excerpts (in order of publication) about walking in New York City. Click on “MORE” to read lengthy excerpts.


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….” MORE

Alfred Kazin, in his 1951 memoir A Walker in the City, describes his boyhood walks in Brownsville, Brooklyn, then a Jewish immigrant neighborhood. “We were of the city, but somehow not in it….” MORE

A walk across the Brooklyn Bridge became a turning point for Kazin, as he began to leave Brownsville and become a part of the larger city. “For all those first summer walks into the city, all daily walks across the bridge for years afterward, when I came to leave Brownsville at last, were efforts to understand one single half-hour at dusk, on a dark winter day, the year I was fourteen….” MORE

Joseph Mitchell begins his 1952 New Yorker essay Up in the Old Hotel with a description of his heartening walks through the Fulton Fish Market. “Every now and then, seeking to rid my mind of thoughts of death and doom, I get up early and go down to Fulton Fish Market….” MORE

Frank O’Hara’s 1956 poem “A Step Away From Them” is one of his so-called “lunchtime” poems. “It’s my lunch hour, so I go/ for a walk among the hum-colored/ cabs….” MORE

In “Moving Out,” a 1960 article for Esquire, John Cheever writes about his last walks through the city before leaving for the suburbs. “After the party I walked around the city, beginning my farewells….” MORE

In James Merrill’s 1962 poem, “An Urban Convalescence,” a walk brings the unpleasant but familiar discovery that a neighborhood building has been torn down. “Out for a walk, after a week in bed,/ I find them tearing up part of my block….” MORE

In his long 1969 poem By the Well of Living and Seeing, the “peregrinating poet” Charles Reznikoff writes about an overheard conversation. “I was walking along Forty-Second Street as night was falling./ On the other side of the street was Bryant Park….” MORE

Allen Ginsburg writes of a walk gone bad in his 1974 “Mugging.” “Tonite I walked out of my red apartment door on East tenth street’s dusk—/ Walked out of my home ten years, walked out in my honking neighborhood….” MORE

In his 1981 memoir Sketches from Life, Lewis Mumford, like Kazin in A Walker in the City, writes of a seminal moment walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, “Yes: I loved the great bridges and walked back and forth over them, year after year. But as often happens with repeated experiences, one memory stands out above all others….” MORE

Vivian Gornick writes about the connection between her own state of mind and the strangers she encounters on a walk across Manhattan in her 1996 essay “On the Street, Nobody Watches, Everybody Performs.” “There are mornings I awake and, somehow, I have more of myself…. What I want is to take this self I how have more of down into those noisy, dirty, dangerous streets and make my way from one end of Manhattan to the other….” MORE

In The Hours, Michael Cunningham’s 1998 New York City revisit of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Cunningham evokes Woolf’s descriptions and musings of a walk through London. Instead of St. James Park, his Clarissa walks through the West Village. “Clarissa crosses Eighth Street. She loves, helplessly, the dead television set abandoned on the curb alongside a single white patent leather pump….” MORE


Tell us about your favorite descriptions of walking in New York.

 

Walking Tours in
New York City

Radical Walking Tours

Municipal Arts Society Walking Tours

New York Times Suggested Walking Tours

Time Out New York Walking Tours

New York Jazz Walks

Alliance for Downtown New York’s Walking Tour

Savory Sojourns

N.Y.C. Cultural Walks
212-979-2388

Big Onion Walking Tours
212-439-1090

Crypt Keeper Tours
212-679-9777

Hasidic Walking Tours

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