4:37 a.m. – My third time checking the alarm clock. I planned to wake up at half-past five, then leave at six, but now I can’t sleep. Anticipation, she has my heart. In the dark I rummage through the closet, looking for a shirt, jeans, and underwear, then go out to the living room to avoid waking up my wife. In the dark, I stare outside while getting dressed. Across the street, in the light of a blinking-arrow neon sign a limo driver stares precisely back at me, somehow able to see in the dark.

Today’s plan is to walk the entire length of Manhattan, or the distance from the southernmost subway stop to the northernmost (because no way am I walking back down). I’ve given myself 12 hours, but I’m hoping it takes less. Though I do have a few pieces of gear (cell phone, notebook) I decide at the last minute to leave the map behind; in a city that’s almost entirely paved and open to everyone, I shouldn’t need directions if I’m only going north.


5:10 a.m. – New York’s early mornings belong to the workers, the drunks, and the lunatics. On the 9 train heading downtown, I sit next to a woman who’s obviously crazy: talking to herself, hair wrapped in a bun with vegetation protruding, she keeps both of us occupied by picking the scabs off her legs.


5:40 a.m. – Everyone gets out at South Ferry, the last stop on this line and the last station in southern Manhattan. Outside it’s a black, starless sky with a mostly-full moon. Assuming I go due-north with no variation, I now have a 13.4-mile walk ahead of me.

A builder cuts me in line at the breakfast truck then gives me a dirty look. Obviously, at this hour, I’m treading on his ground. Small coffee, milk, no sugar. Donuts? No donuts, not yet. Behind me lurks the Staten Island Ferry, recent transport of dread.

The woman I sat next to on the train stops by, plucks a flower from her bun and drops it in the tip jar.

‘Hey hey fellas!’ she shouts out, ‘Brought a flower for you! Now y’all have yourselves a good day, you hear me?!’ The cooks inside the truck shout back through the thin metal wall and she leaves, straight-backed, going god knows where.


5:50 a.m. – Ground Zero is an empty stadium under big lights erected on its borders. For more than two years it’s been everything to everyone, now before the sun’s up the site is empty, cleaned out, napping under lights. There’s a beauty about the emptiness similar to Richard Serra’s steel curling sculptures, seeming industrial, gigantic, lifeless until you walk inside, between the tall walls and see how, miraculously, they stand up on their own, and for some reason you feel proud for them as though they were people.


6:04 a.m. – For the first time in my life I’m the only visible person on Canal Street. Chinatown’s neon signs hum in the darkness. Then a tall hunchback and two old women, all linking arms, walk up to me at the stoplight as a shuffling unit, stop, then head back south.

Sunlight on the east side has the color and smooth face of an orange tomato.

Another revelation: I realize the donut carts selling coffee and a danish for a dollar around the city do not live on their corners. They are, in fact, delivered there each morning, dragged into place. I passed many in the financial district, each attendant arranging identical rows of muffins. So why only kebab stands and hot dogs? Why only crullers (though God loves a cruller and so do I)? Why not portable carts selling fresh-made juice? Italian subs? Nachos?


6:09 a.m. – First iPod spotted. In the whole day I’ll see about 15 pairs of the iPod’s recognizable white headphones, but this is nothing compared to the number of people carrying portable CD players, boomboxes, or even Walkmans. I pass hundreds of people, maybe thousands, wearing headphones, the bag man to the executive, children to grandparents. New Yorkers would rather listen to music than to each other, though only slightly less than they would like to listen to themselves.

Note: I will also catch myself talking to myself about a dozen times today.


6:11 a.m. – I’m blowing through Soho and Little Italy. Chinatown, Lower East Side, NoLiTa, check. Grimaldi’s, check. Celi-Cela, check. Mare Chiaro, check. No one’s up except the Latino day-laborers waiting for their ride on the corner, the black DJs with their record bags after a long night’s party, a few earnest white people sweating through their jogging clothes. Downtown’s almost finished, midtown here I come.


6:24 a.m. – First sight of the Empire State Building from Broadway and 10th Street. At this point I’ve only walked two miles but my legs are cramping up, and my hands are too cold to write effectively. But spirits are high: New York City belongs to all of us, but walking through it quickly when no one’s up, the light’s first blooming and the streets are empty (for a while I walked uncontested up the center of Lafayette Street on the yellow lines) makes it seem, somehow, only mine.


6:30 a.m. – Union Square. My small coffee has become a big problem. Starbucks is open (they let you use the bathroom if you buy something) but I’m all out of cash. The farmers market is only just being set up, and I definitely don’t have the time to hollow out a pumpkin.


If a man masturbates on a trail in Central Park, with commuters and dog-walkers passing within a few inches of the action, will he be distracted?


6:37 a.m. – Unexplained: the air above Fifth Avenue is full of seagulls. They swoop down from the salty black roofs, and alone or in groups they fly straight down the street around the third-floor level. Where do they come from? Where are they going? I could wonder the same about the few people on the street, but the birds look less like me.


6:40 a.m. – A fruit-seller unpacking his stand on 23rd Street sells me the best apple I’ve ever tasted. It’s good enough to shout about – I do – not that there’s anyone to hear me. The core, seeds and all, gets chucked into a construction site on 33rd Street. I wish it the best of luck.


6:43 a.m. – Sign outside the Marble Collegiate Church on 29th: ‘Learn the Artistry of Pace & Patience.’


6:55 a.m. – I have unfortunately signed over the ownership of any children I may sire to the Starbucks Corporation in exchange for a toilet on 33rd Street.


7:10 a.m. – The longer you live here, the easier it is to engage with the city. Memories make things familiar; familiarity makes the streets comfortable; comfort makes for passive citizens who don’t look up.

Walking through an empty Times Square I remember going to plays as a kid, back when the area was seedy and frightening. Now, as a well-documented safe harbor for safe commerce, it looks like a theme park with no rides, only high-tech marketing, bad restaurants, and the chance to join the military. I feel lucky to have my memories and realize how dizzying it must be for tourists, but what’s it like for the stars? We’re all familiar with celebrities’ faces. Their lives (or what we know of them) are our portable Times Squares, glitzy, larger than life, constantly changing under bright lights, dictated by distant marketing firms. Not that I could pay a quarter to peep under Demi Moore’s skirt, but would I?

So in seeing stars – or, at least, the crew of Good Morning America – in Times Square, one Russian Doll of acquaintance within another, I confound the laws of physics and do like any New Yorker and yawn. Diane Sawyer – is she still alive? Didn’t she used to do journalism?


7:19 a.m. – A troop of Girl Scouts, men hauling marble slabs, a line of young guys in silk raincoats going into Lehman Brothers, I pass them all. At 52nd Street I get my first ‘Good Morning’ for no good reason and I am thankful.


7:27 a.m. – At the top of 6th Avenue I can see all the way to the bottom of Manhattan. It feels like a long way. The sun from the east is blinding. Shafts of yellow light stream across the island so at every intersection, one side of my body heats up. Central Park South is lined with fancy hotels – the Essex House, the Ritz Carlton, the Plaza, the Pierre around the corner – and they keep their doormen warm with heat lamps under the entryways. Moving swiftly between hotels, I find I’m able to linger for a second by the doormen, shuffle through the paper with mock frustration, pretending I’m a guest who just needs to get warm.


7:40 a.m. – If a seal screams in the zoo, and there’s no one there to hear him, will he leap out of the pool and rip the head off a passerby stretching his legs on the fence? Scientific proof: he will not.


7:41 a.m. – If a man masturbates on a trail in Central Park, with commuters and dog-walkers passing within a few inches of the action, will he be distracted? Will they say anything? Will he finish? Scientific proof: No, no, and yes.


7:59 a.m. – I take a break on the front steps of the Metropolitan Museum. Years ago, in seventh grade, I broke away from our social studies class while entering the museum for a fieldtrip and bought a coffee and a donut from a cart parked near the front steps. Classmates were jealous, Mrs. Bird disapproved. But something, for me, was very right, happening practically at the same time of day as right now.


8:00 a.m. – First Hummer sighted, yellow.


Many blocks, I’m the only white person on the street. As though I’m not conspicuous enough, town cars frequently pull up beside me on the street and honk to see if I want a ride.


8:16 a.m. – Four women on horseback ride by the top of the reservoir at Central Park. As a non-rider, I will always find riders’ prim thrusting-hips motion hilarious. Reminds me of a joke: Why don’t WASPs have orgies? Too many thank-you notes.


8:44 a.m. – A ten-minute break for reflection and stretching inside St. John the Divine, the largest cathedral in the world. Then coffee across the street at Columbia’s favorite Hungarian Pastry Shop. Aging Trotskyists occupy the corner table, talking about Michelangelo. Actually, I have no idea if they’re Trotskyists, but if you had to do a lineup with these guys and then ask someone to pick out the Trotskyist, five bucks says they can’t choose just one.


9:30 a.m. – Broadway and 120th Street. I am officially out of my element. This is my first time on the Columbia Campus and I’ve been to Harlem only a handful of times. I cut for Riverside Park and think to myself, ‘Some alone time would be good.’ It doesn’t occur for a few more minutes that this, somehow, is the first time I’ve felt alone all morning.


10:20 a.m. – I walk above the West Side Highway and Hudson River for an hour, an unbroken view of Jersey’s hills, as though the state was bordered by a single long speed bump. New Yorkers! Slow down before heading west! Morale is low. Legs are tired, requiring frequent stretching.


10:25 a.m. – At 165th Street I guess I’m two-thirds of the way there. I climb back up to Broadway, civilization, and a bakery (the Carrot Top Café) that my friend Julie promised has the best carrot cake in the city. She grew up in the neighborhood so I trust her, and though it isn’t bad, I only eat half of my slice, worried that a longer stop will kill my momentum.


10:48 a.m. – Many blocks, I’m the only white person on the street. As though I’m not conspicuous enough, town cars frequently pull up beside me on the street and honk to see if I want a ride. The message is pretty obvious, and unfortunately it repeats itself about once every four minutes for the rest of the trip.


11:22 a.m. – The Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights is now one of my favorite strips in New York. The street life is throbbing. St. Nicholas Boulevard is the spine of Manhattan this high on the island, and its low buildings offer good views. Stores are busy, produce is everywhere. Multiple times I spot a guy selling fresh juice out of a grocery cart (but still, no nachos!).

I get lost twice, helped both times by friendly people. I’m tempted to finish early at the third-to-last subway stop (Dyckman Street) when I discover a restaurant, built cave-like under the bridge selling a lunch of arepas and beer for $4.50, but I continue. At this point streets blend together, I get lost again, I call my wife for directions, my calves are killing me, but there’s elation too.


11:38 a.m. – The southbound 9 train pulls into the stop at 215th Street just as I walk onto the platform. I collapse in a seat and take off my jacket. Just after noting the time, I try the Times crossword I’ve been saving all morning and pass out before I’ve hit the vertical clues.

Including side streets, horizontal travel, getting lost, and about a half-hour spent exploring Columbia’s buildings for a bathroom, I later determine I walked three extra miles. So, total walking time: 6 hours, 28 minutes. Total distance, somewhere around 16.5 miles. Expecting to be finished by dinner, I’m done before lunch and unexplainably disappointed.

Sometime in the early morning, just before Central Park, I called my wife because I was simply too happy to contain myself. I had to tell her something, but I couldn’t put it into words. Perhaps I had never been so alive. New York can be like that – once in a while the city slows down and becomes ours, we look up, we see ourselves as a part of something very fine and rare, green and black, slowly growing. Not I am, but there it is. That New York exists is a miracle, and for its citizens, the city offers as good a shot at transcendence as any forest or cathedral. The awareness of being part of something more sublime – this crumbling, singing city, and all our lives crumbling and singing too – somehow walking the island’s body before people are on the streets makes the chance to have that feeling much greater. It’s a fleeting moment, only two seconds long, but it’s there.





is the founding editor of The Morning News. He writes and edits in Brooklyn, currently working on the second draft of his first novel. Now that cold weather’s back, he’s devoted to his crockpot slow-cooker.