The Men Walking Every Block in New York City
Released on 07/29/2015
(light bouncy music)
Walking is the best way to see a city.
Walking a place is kind of your own way
of paying respect to it.
Every single part of your body is being used.
Your legs, your heart, your lungs, your eyes.
If it's hot, you're hot.
If it's cold, you're cold.
And if it's rainy you get wet.
30 miles a week, 120 miles a month.
Maybe 15 to 20 miles each day.
The whole city 6163 miles.
You know what I did?
I walked every block in New York City.
I'm walking every block in the five boroughs.
(light bouncy music)
So all the red stuff's what I walked.
Oh wow! You serious?
The lines kind of get thick when you zoom out
so it looks like I've walked everywhere but
as you zoom in you can see the areas
that are still left to be walked.
This is a map that I use that has every street
enumerated here so that I know where I'm going at all times.
Hi there.
Did you catch anything?
No. (mumbles)
You're going out now?
Well of course if you're gonna go fishing,
you gotta go at night.
I've been a sociological researcher all my career.
What kind of tomato sauce?
Saint Martano.
Saint Martano, that's the best.
Wow look at this.
Look at the fish he caught.
Rather than a statistical survey, you want to get a feeling
of the heart and pulse of the city.
You want Hillary Clinton?
Maybe a little bit.
Okay.
Take care my man.
And that you can only get when you're walking around
and talking to the folks who live here.
People said to me sometimes,
'Why don't you just walk one hour and call it a day?'
I said, 'Because I never know when
I'm gonna see the really interesting thing.'
Which place is this or which saint?
Saint Antonio
Saint Antonio, that's it.
Free sausage!
♫ I like to move it move it ooo
It is the world's greatest outdoor museum.
People here come from more than 150 lands.
And the great thing is that New Yorkers feel like
they're part of a small town
but they're also part of an incredibly big city.
(cars honking and beeping)
Hi guys!
So we just saw some peaches growing.
Here's some ripe mulberries.
I'm doing this walk full time.
I don't have any other substantial source of income.
I don't own an apartment so I stay with different people,
watch people's cats.
Kinda the reason that I quit my job was because
I couldn't just sit at the computer all day anymore.
It's like a whole grocery store vegetable section.
When you're an engineer and you're sitting in a cubicle
all day nobody asks you, 'Don't you ever get bored?'
But when you're walking, people say, 'Oh isn't that boring?'
You can see there's kind of a faded ad up there.
Meet me at
something.
The fun thing about this walk for me is little mysteries
like that, that are kind of almost entirely hidden away
and there's like one little,
kind of visual trigger somewhere
that sometimes is a dead end and
sometimes is some kind of fascinating story.
Presumably it's just a family burial ground.
So here is the bike rack but it used to be a parking meter.
Each pair of these dots denotes that the city's comment
if treated to get rid of West Nile virus.
So this is a monk parakeet nest.
The story is that some shipment of them escaped from JFK.
All these little things altogether kinda add up
to kind of making me feel like I belong in a place.
Because I cared enough about it to look at it
and pay attention to it and find out about it.
How you doing.
It's good to meet you.
Phil? Matt.
Matt?
Yeah, pleasure to meet you.
You don't look like you do on your website.
What are you wearing, timber?
I don't know.
These are urban shoes.
Yeah.
I was very interested to know that someone else
was going to do this.
Yeah likewise.
This was a very interesting story.
I passed by a set of offices for doctors and dentists.
And it was called Decent Medical services.
I took a picture that.
You're kidding
I'll find it.
This is an exceptionally modest sigh.
Hey you got it!
That's hilarious.
Yeah Decent Dental Services.
Do you have a view up there of the whole skyline?
Come take a look.
Awesome.
We call this the eighth wonder of the world.
Oh wow.
Oh my god.
Just to see it for one moment is something
I'm going to carry with me the rest of my life.
Cos I never saw the angle from here.
I feel like everybody
has a unique perspective on New York City.
I mean ours is maybe more geographically complete
but you know, someone who lives in one neighborhood
their whole life has a very unique perspective
on New York too.
I would agree that you have different perspectives
but I would say that when you walk a whole city
block by block,
you have an acute sense of both the differences
and the similarities of each part of the city.
You also get this great sense of like
pretty much all the stereotypes about neighborhoods
or type of people just kind of vanish.
People told me that people are not going to
talk to me in New York.
They're busy, they're running around and they're nasty.
Right.
All that turned out to be false.
Hi guys!
I have a lifelong familiarity with New York
because I taught the course on New York City
for 40 years and because I grew up here
and because my father played that game with me
when I was a kid of taking me to the last stop.
And then taking a walk with me around the neighborhood.
The last stop being the last stop of the subway.
From doing that, I learned to love and know New York.
I'm never gonna understand New York.
That's not the point of this walk, to like know this city.
Which is kind of to me a beautiful idea
that a place can be so infinitely unknowable
that you just can keep walking the same block
if you want a hundred times.
And you'll keep seeing new things.
(light bouncy music)
Music by Chris Zabriskie
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