Walking the length of Manhattan (Part 3)
From 50th Street to Battery Park
The final third of this walk will perhaps be most familiar to readers — either through having inhabited corporate or touristic spaces packed in the 5 miles below Central Park, or through their representations in popular culture. This is the New York City of Suits, Succession, and Friends.
So writing about this New York feels particularly hard — it has been commodified and commented upon endlessly, and I am not sure I have anything novel to add. But one of my resolutions this year is to see things I start to completion, so please bear with me for a little more.
Hour 4: 50th Street to 21st Street
Like most NYC inhabitants, I consider it fashionable to dislike Times Square. It’s not my go-to spot for an amble and I often find myself condescending towards tourists and associated traps in the area. I find it interesting how a neighborhood that completely corresponds with the “symbol of New York” — neon lights, fast pace, naked cowboys and on-brand chaos — doesn’t figure in many New Yorker’s personal imaginations of the City.1 Maybe because the area is bound by bad transit and planning – traffic from the Lincoln Tunnel, mismanagement at Penn Station, chaos at Port Authority Bus Terminus, suburban crowds at Madison Square Garden. In an essay on living in the neighborhood, Rivka Galchen writes,
“Though there are many, many people here, the neighborhood is not a people place. It is better suited to the picking up and dropping off of large pallets.”
Broadway swerves consistently eastward in Midtown and so I missed Bryant Park but passed by Herald Square. Near Koreatown I picked up a friend (Happy birthday AB!) who graciously served as an emotional and conversational crutch through the last leg of the journey. On average, Manhattan changes every ten blocks, but in these parts it changes every five. Each block is a sedimentary amalgamation of at least ten generations of history. Here is a garments warehouse turned office building turned tofu house. There is a church turned boutique restaurant.2
After Herald Square we cut through Madison Square Park. During the peak of the pandemic, I lived a few blocks away and MSP became a place of comfort and solace. Then, as now, I used to miss my dog a lot and often ambled to the Petco to ponder the (smaller) animal friends there.3 I went to Rizzoli for the high-end book buying experience when I wanted a change from my second hand haunts. On particularly demoralizing days during my stint in corporate America, I went to the Krispy Kreme between daily “check-out” and whatever night shift of work I was tasked with to get a free donut with my vaccine card.
I hadn’t intellectualized my love for Madison Square Park till I read New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson last year. It’s set in a post-climate apocalypse New York where all of lower Manhattan is flooded, but people still inhabit the buildings above — a 22nd century Venice. It’s centered on the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower (not the Building), which looks over MSP, and is one of the most “New York” books I’ve read. Robinson grounds us in a New York that is at once extremely familiar and completely unfathomable. New York 2140 is hardly an “optimistic” book, but I’ve found that deeply imagining uncomfortable futures makes us better equipped to grapple with them. Humans have a tendency to avoid staring into the abyss, to our own detriment. For me, good fiction enables abyss-staring and gives me the courage to imagine more hopeful futures.
Hour 5: 21st Street to Wall Street
Over the past year, 14th Street and Broadway has become a focal point for my city life. I work close by, live on the 6, and have friends in Brooklyn (I too wonder why) so I find myself in Union Square several times a week. I love it. On my work commute I look forward to the left turn off 15th Street to Irving Place, where the sudden view of the Chrysler Building inspires awe every time. After work, I often find myself at the four storey Barnes and Noble.4 As a commercial thoroughfare Union Square is probably disappointing — it’s lined with big box Best Buy’s and Nordstroms. As a public space however, it is one of the most vibrant in the City. I don’t think I have ever walked past the 14th St plaza without encountering a protest or performance, and often both at once.
Further south lies the more famous New York public square — Washington Square Park. While Broadway doesn’t quite cut through it, 5th Avenue almost did.
As part of his “urban renewal” projects, Robert Moses (who we encountered in Part 2) wanted to extend 5th Avenue through the heart of Washington Square Park. In perhaps Moses’ most significant failure to leave his mark on New York, his plan was thwarted by Janes Jacobs and local activists who made Washington Square Park car-free and also helped build human-scale public housing in the West Village Houses.
Today Greenwich Village is home to the highest real estate prices and priciest finance and tech bros in the City. I identify as a transit and preservation oriented YIMBY and am not sure how I feel about this history. Could Jacobs have foreseen the gentrification that would transform her beloved neighborhood? Would it have happened had Moses executed his vision? Would it have happened somewhere else anyway?
Hour 6: Wall Street to Battery Park
The final hour passed uneventfully, albeit in a state of delirium. I don’t quite understand lower Manhattan — the island is continuously squished till Chinatown exists a few blocks from huge federal buildings which exists a few blocks from the cradle of capitalism itself.
In response to the big buildings in the last post, MP shared, “I used to be a fan of supertall skyscrapers; the historical progression of the world's tallest buildings for a while had this metronomic "NYC, NYC, NYC" beat to it ending with the Empire State Building, which led to these crazy artist renditions of future NYC:
When I walk around FiDi I often wonder how people in the 1900s perceived the skyscrapers that still astound me in 2023.
We got to Battery Park just as the sun was setting over Lady Liberty. It was a seasonably mild winter day during an unseasonably warm winter and I didn’t have much to say. I thought of an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote that I rediscovered via John Green:
Toward the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, the narrator is sprawled out on a beach at night when he begins thinking about the moment Dutch sailors first saw what is now called New York. Fitzgerald writes, “For a transitory enchanted moment, man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
Parting thoughts
In my first post, I addressed some of the “Why” behind doing this walk — I like walking, I like cities, the pandemic forced me to make habits out of my likes. This would be sufficient explanation for a first date or job interview, interesting enough but not too interesting to seem threatening.
The deeper “Why” is that one of the most fulfilling discoveries of adulthood for me has been doing things completely non-instrumentally, absolutely completely just for the goddamned sake of doing them. This is an ability I suspect we all have during childhood and lose over time as the demands of school and work and capitalism productize our time and tie our worth to our productivity.
By the time I was about half-way through college, I don’t think I ever did anything for the sake of it. Time was my currency and I diligently portioned it across courses and jobs. If I am being generous to my past self, I’d say my situation necessitated my approach at the time. At the time being an international student continents away from home, out of depth in elite Ivy settings, and financially and immigration-wise insecure, didn’t feel out of the ordinary because all my friends were in the same boat. But as life took its course and the world did not come crashing down on me, it helped me realize in retrospect how much passive stress I was under all the time.
In junior year I began a meditation practice after several false starts and started rediscovering joy in mere being. During the pandemic, after all my post-grad travel plans got canceled and I was stuck at home for several months, I rediscovered the joy of doing things for no reason — no one to talk to them about, no discernable value to my career or life prospects, no reason at all. This has helped me say yes to experiences I would’ve otherwise declined because “what is it for anyway?” and find connections in places I wouldn’t have anticipated.
It’s ironic that I have now written four thousand words about a walk I claim to have done for no reason. My defense is that the joy from writing about the walk is independent from the walk itself, and not writing about it wouldn’t have diminished my pleasure on that day and gratitude for it since.
However, there may also be an instrumental underlying reason — I am FOMO’ing about eventually leaving New York and wanted to savor as much of it as possible on the first free day I had had in a while.
I love traveling. For a long time, this manifested as a tendency to want to leave wherever I was. I can’t say I ever really “missed” a place — I often grew nostalgic and craved the comfort of home, food, or culture, but these felt somewhat independent of city-level geography. New York is the first city I crave returning to. Many places in New York evoke profound feelings and memories for me — memories I often forget I had until I pass the places again. The author of the Times Square essay from earlier concludes with:
I used to wonder about people who were born in New York and who still lived here. Did it not annoy them that any block they walked down, any business they passed, was liable to bring up a ghoulish or irritating memory? Even good memories can be exhausting. Maybe especially good memories. For this reason, I pitied the New York natives. And envied them, naturally. Lately, I find myself awake in the middle of the night in a panic, wondering, Why am I here?
As with most life experiences, causality is unclear — do I crave New York because it’s New York or because it was the first city I lived in as an adult post-college? Because a lot of my friends are there? Because it’s one of the few American cities I can navigate as a car-less individual? Because hasn’t all art and culture ever told us that New York is it so who am I to say it is not?
You will see more paeans to New York in these pages in the future. For now, please send me your walking stories :)
This is especially interesting because the present-day Times Square is a result of decades of “revitalization.” I’d recommend Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue for an account of the area in flux in the 80s and 90s.
A few weeks after this walk I went on a walking tour of the Lower East Side. As our guide pointed out various historically important buildings, a common refrain became “XYZ lived here / ABC happened here, and now it is a bank.” Both humorous and telling. Someone should write an essay on the financialization of historical spaces.
Adopting dogs and cats from shelters feels right on balance but I still haven’t wrapped my head around the ethics of having reptiles, rodents, and fish as pets. When I buy a betta fish from Petco, have I saved the life of that betta fish (who usually live to 5 years but in Petcos can often be seen floating dead in the little plastic cups they are commodified in) or have I signaled demand to Petco?
Which I oddly find more comforting than the other, nicer, more independent four storey bookstore in the vicinity.