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.
In New York City, professional sports is as popular a conversation topic as pizza or the weather. Home to some of the greatest dynasties and underdog stories alike, we'll tackle three boroughs this week to visit their home fields. We start at the Barclays Center to visit the Nets and Islanders, then cross the Manhattan bridge to visit "The World's Most Famous Arena," Madison Square Garden, home to the Knicks and Rangers. Next is a long walk to the Bronx to visit the world's most successful professional sports franchise, the New York Yankees. We conclude with a trip to Queens to visit those lovable losers of Citi Field, the New York Mets.
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.
We're back in Manhattan and ready to tackle our first and only interior themed walk: museums of Manhattan! We picked five of of our favorites - the MoMA, the Museum of Natural History, the MET, the Guggenheim and the Cloisters - with plans to visit one each day. Baked into the route is 3 reserved for roaming around the various locations.
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.
In what could most succinctly be described as a walk about nothing, we visit some of the most iconic locations from the iconic NY-set sitcom Seinfeld. Starting at the Nexus of the Universe (East 1st Street and First Avenue), we'll visit Pendant Publishing, determine if a soup and a sandwich counts as a meal, and pick up a marble rye on our way home. We'll also hop over to Frank Costanza's house in Queens to shoot some pool. Here's to feeling good all the time.
The first in our series of musical walks focuses on the odes to Manhattan's streets and neighborhoods. We'll hit everywhere from the Manhattan Detention Complex to the neighborhoods Across 110th Street exploring the inspiration for some of New York's most famous songs. Acts covered include The Jim Carroll Band, Bobby Womack, Joni Mitchell, Bobby Rodriguez y La CompaƱia and many more.
Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted literally shaped the landscape of New York, with an influence that touches millions of lives every day. On this walk we take a day to visit experience nearly all of their local contributions, starting at Morningside Park and hanging a right to take in Riverside. Cutting through the lower half of Central Park, we take the Manhattan Bridge over to Fort Greene Park and head for a ramble through Prospect Park. We come out the other side to take a long stroll down the Olmstead designed Ocean Parkway, then up the Prospect Park again before concluding the day on another Olmstead route, Eastern Parkway. Excluded in this walk due to distance is the previously visited Forest Park in Queens.
Our first look at Midtown pays homage to the grid that defines it. From 23rd to 59th Street, we walk up and down 1st to 11th Avenue until we reach our marathon limit. This includes too many sites to mention, from the Chrysler and Empire State buildings; the Theatre District and Times Square; Grand Central Station; Rockefeller Center and so much more.