Our penultimate walk has the distinction of being the only one to touch all five boroughs. The same can be said of this week's focus: the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. This route visits memorial sites in all five boroughs - some grand and others understated. Note it is the only route to use transit during the course of the walk (the Staten Island ferry) though the walking distance of 26.2 miles is still maintained.
Our last movie-focused walk is also our first in our home stretch of special walks covering multiple boroughs at a time. Here we draw inspiration from the 2002 Spike Lee film "25th Hour" and the Edward Norton monologue contained within called "F*ck New York." In it, Norton's character Montgomery Brogan rails against the people and neighborhoods that make this city what it is. We'll visit as much as we can of the soliloquy, from Chelsea to Wall Street, Bensonhurst, Alphabet City and everything in between.
Our loose end tour of Manhattan harkens back to our walk of Midtown, where we marched up and down the gridded streets to cover every scrap of territory. This time we're on the Upper East Side, where we somehow missed many of the avenues that parallel Central Park. We'll go from 1st to Madison, then head down to the mid-forties to hit some of the cross streets we missed earlier in the year.
Episode two of our movies of NY walks focuses on a single film - the 2001 Wes Anderson comedy The Royal Tenenbaums. Anderson's fanciful version of New York hops all over Manhattan, from Battery Park to the Church of the Intercession to the Waldorf Astoria New York.
New York City is known for its rich literary history, and this week we'll visit the neighborhoods and locations that harbored the greats. Starting in in Williamsburg to visit Betty Smith's 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,' we'll hop the bridge for the remainder of our walk, visiting the birthplace of downtown birthplace of Herman Melville, the poetry scene of the East Village, the home of Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance, and the infamous Chelsea Hotel among many others.
This week we tackle the most famous Green space in the city and possibly the world: Central Park. We'll cover it from tip to top, with detours to the shores of the Upper East and Upper West Side to see the sights and meet our daily mileage quota.