The Walker and the Walk

OCCASIONALLY I think of leaving the city once and for all. Enough of the busyness and ambition, the hothouse summers. But almost as soon as I begin to imagine my pastoral life, I hit a wall. Where would I walk? The woods? Some wind-blasted shore? The sky, the light, yes — but so much of it?

City Walkers

Alex Marshall writes about New Yorkers finding inspiration in the city's streets. Plus, four New Yorkers share their favorite walks and the inspirations behind their daily journeys.

• Robert Clark
• Matthew Stanley
• Karrie Jacobs
• Jonathan Waxman

I like to walk to be alone with the world, not to be alone. In this way, walking is a lot like writing. Both writing and walking (as I know it) are fueled by a desire to put oneself in relation to others. Not in direct contact — some aloneness wishes to be preserved — but contact through the mediation of language or shared atmosphere of a city street.

As far as I know, the most evocative book about walking is “A Walker in the City” by Alfred Kazin. Published in 1951, it’s about an American walking in the world, first the old Jewish neighborhood of Brownsville, Brooklyn, where he grew up, then the whole city of New York, and finally all of America.

The structure of his book is a series of walks that, in Kazin’s words, “serve to recapture the aliveness of the moment described and to describe walking itself as an exercise in human delight.” With each walk the territory expands until it contains everything — past, present, literature, childhood, longing, metaphysics; a lifelong answer to the question Kazin’s mother asks, looking out at the dusk: “Where is the day taking us now?”

My idea of a walk, influenced by Kazin and honed over these last nine years that I’ve lived in New York, involves a freewheeling thoughtfulness powered by the legs but fed by observation, a physical and mental stream of consciousness nudged this way and that by an infinite number of human variables: an old man doing his esoteric exercises, a lone glove dropped in the middle of a snowy sidewalk, an Orthodox Jew in a shtreimel.

A detail — Chinese lantern flowers in the window of a brownstone — leads to an association, and then another; a thought forms, expands, breaks apart into subsidiary thoughts, which in turn briskly scatter with the sudden appearance of a balloon floating down Seventh Avenue. All the while, on another level of the mind, decisions are being made about direction: a right here, now a left, straight until the river.

There is no destination. Ideally, the afternoon is wide open. Time is limitless. The streets taken on the way out are never the ones taken on the way back. The walk unfurls according to mood, physical endurance and visual appetite.

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My first walk must have been along Sutton Place, an avenue born out of a slight widening of Manhattan’s eastern flank at 53rd Street. I would have been no older than 2, but almost certainly my first proper stroll embarked from the lobby of our apartment building.

The walk would have happened seven years after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and two years after Philippe Petit walked on a high wire between the twin towers. I would have been with my mother, and I wouldn’t have gotten far.

A geographical charting of my walks from 1976 to 1998 would ripple outward, first to the woods of Long Island, where my family eventually moved, and then to the foreign cities to which my family traveled, and finally to the foreign cities I visited on my own and sometimes lived in. From 1992 to 1996 the walks would cluster around the California hills, near where I went to college. The year 1997 would show a tangle of repeated loops around Oxford, and 1998 would scribble across the map of London. That year’s chart would also reveal a lone walk into the Sahara.

But in late 1998, the walks would suddenly return to the few square blocks where they began. That summer I moved into a borrowed apartment at the eastern end of 52nd Street, one block south of our old Sutton Place apartment. It would have made more sense to be in the Village or even Chelsea. But by living there I could afford to write full time, and the isolation, which at first seemed a small price to pay, in time took on its own value. Plus, the windows looked onto the same view of the East River that my first bedroom looked onto, the river and the old, red neon Pepsi-Cola sign on the other side, which for me is the view that stands at the beginning and end of everything. And so after a 20-year hiatus, I began walking again where I’d left off.

How many street corners does a New Yorker turn in a lifetime? There is an unspoken affection, possibly unique to New York, for these concrete right angles. When the city began its project to redo every corner with a wheelchair ramp — 97,664 have been finished so far — the cartoonist Ben Katchor drew a strip imagining a warehouse where the old, decommissioned street corners could be visited and even purchased.

The earliest memory I have of the corner of First Avenue and 16th Street, where Beth Israel Medical Center stands, is from 1983, the year my sister was born. I held my father’s hand on the way to see her for the first time. We passed a man at the corner urinating against the wall.

A few feet from the wall on which the man relieved himself in 1983, a taxi I was riding in pulled up to the curb in 2001. In those years I was in a tumultuous relationship with K., and we had just broken up for the umpteenth time, or were about to break up. K., who lived at the other end of 16th Street and was, at that moment, crying, suddenly asked the taxi driver to stop. He got out and walked away. For a long time, I would remember that painful scene whenever I passed the corner.

In January of 2006, my son, Sasha, was born, in a different hospital, 60 blocks north. When he was 4 weeks old, he caught a respiratory virus and his right lung collapsed. We rushed to the emergency room of Beth Israel, and while my husband parked the car, I carried my son, who was struggling to breathe, past the corner where the man urinated and K. got out of the taxi crying, and which my mother must have passed in August 1974 as she left the hospital and took me home for the first time.

We stayed in the intensive care unit with Sasha, taking turns sleeping on the chair in his room. Sometimes I would go outside to bring back food, and whenever I passed that corner, I would think how strange it was that I had ever had any other life but the one in which my son was fighting for air.

After a week he got better, and now he is a feisty little boy who prefers to run everywhere, still too young to ask where the day is taking him.

New York Times 19 August 2007