BOOKSHELF
A Walkers 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 events
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
Manhattans Rim: The Great Saunter.
Adlers book joins some rather illustrious company. Traveling
the city by foot one of the best ways to get to know New York,
as the citys 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. Reznikoffs 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 OHaras
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 OHara 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.
Websters 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 OHaras 1956 poem A Step Away
From Them is one of his so-called lunchtime
poems. Its 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 Merrills 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
streets 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 Cunninghams 1998 New
York City revisit of Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway, Cunningham
evokes Woolfs 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.
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