Walking The Length of Manhattan — Ridgeline issue 232
Walking The Length of Manhattan
We walked from Tip to Bottom
Ridgeline Transmission 232<br>MANHATTAN
NYC
WALKING
Ridgeline subscribers —
Hi, I’m Craig Mod and this is Ridgeline, a newsletter about walking — mostly in Japan, but this time in NYC.
Elsewhere:
The Things Become Other Things fine art reprint is now in stock.
And I’ve been using Claude to do weird blood sleuthing.
Back in May, my original NYC plan was to do five or six days of huge walks while running a pop-up newsletter — basically go walk bananas in the city. But then I stopped for a second and thought: What if I just … enjoyed NYC? And so I did. I did the thing I have a hard time doing — simply enjoying a place or trip instead of turning it into a project.
Of course I did micro walks, micro projects. I walked the Brooklyn Bridge, I sped-walked the Met, and I walked around some POPS (privately owned public spaces). Naturally, I couldn’t keep the walks entirely tiny. Buddy, and National Geographic photographer extraordinaire Michael George sent me a text: Wanna walk Manhattan top to bottom? Of course I did.
I arrived at Marble Hill–225th St. Station in not shorts. You’re not wearing shorts?! Michael screamed at me from across the street. I am a self-respecting adult male, so no — I wasn’t wearing shorts. He couldn’t believe it. He was convinced I’d die fifteen steps into the walk. I was less interested in my pants and more interested in the world’s worst-rated Starbucks around the corner. The indignation of Starbucks fanatics was off the review charts. Should we go see? I asked. Go see how terrible it could be? I was nibbling an egg-on-English muffin sandwich from a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts, also admirably terrible. When I gave my order it was as if I had defecated directly onto the cash register. The muffin was all but thrown at me. Ahh, America. I loved it.
We did not go to the world’s worst Starbucks because we had a lot of walking to do. In the end: 24.4 kilometers. Not too shabby. Knocked out in six hours. We were fairly militant about keeping the route direct since we wanted to get to Battery Park by sunset.
We began at Marble Hill to make our walk fully official — crossing the Historic Broadway Lift Bridge connecting the island of Manhattan to the wider continent.
I always forget Manhattan is technically an island. For many years I didn’t know. It feels non-islandy in the mind and myth, and given the demure nature of Spuyten Duyvil Creek, I’m shocked nobody has connected the two landmasses issometime in the last 400 years, ending Manhattan’s islandic status.
Step by step, we made our way “down” Manhattan. There were many detours we did not take. I had never been to the utterly beloved Met Cloisters (so beloved, it’s almost as if the Starbucks back across the bridge was the natural antipode to the Cloisters, as if it existed simply to balance out Cloister goodness), and going there would have made me happy, but it was also way too early in the walk for such a big stop. So the Met Cloisters stays on my “To Visit One Day” list.
Instead we strolled Highbridge Park abutting the Harlem River. In it we saw nary another human. The path gained more elevation than you’d expect, and some of the rock formations were downright Paleolithic. We did not walk the namesake High Bridge (the city’s oldest standing bridge (1848)) itself, but we walked near it.
By this point, none of the other people we had seen were white. Michael and I were like two fireflies — extremely white fireflies — dressed like dorks for a hike (one even in — gasp — not shorts), radiating a blinding whiteness, flitting through this working-class part of Manhattan, broadcasting our presence with every step forward. We stood out. Everyone gave us What the hell you guys doing here looks. A few steps later we found ourselves walking past an active meth community. A bearded white man in a trench coat (nude underneath??) nodded ominously in our direction.
We were making a beeline for the Morris-Jumel Mansion. Michael had planned these little stops. I was just along for the ride. The mansion was closed for renovation. Still, it was impressive from the outside — a lovely little garden out back. Built in 1765, it brought a certain bizarre countryside gravitas to the nearby meth community. You could imagine it 200 years ago, surrounded not by billions of tons of concrete but by rolling meadows. A woman was pushing a stroller around the grounds and her daughter, maybe seven or eight, was walking beside her. Nice house, huh! I said, amplifying my whiteness to a hitherto unseen degree. She just frowned and pointed to her AirPods — she was on a call, she wasn’t here for the house. I was a moron. The grounds were just a good place to walk your kid.
Directly across from the mansion was a cute block: Sylvan Terrace. New York City does this — inserts little blocks of goodness like prizes in the Cracker Jack...