In a car you are confined to roads, your pace too quick to experience a place. Bikes bring you closer and allow you to stop a bit more, but you are still encumbered with gear. Walking is entirely different; you are fully immersed in what is around you.

The most walked part of New York City is the High Line park, which doesn’t immerse you at all, but elevates you. It doesn’t just physically remove you from the city by surrounding you with selected works of art – it also removes you from the randomness, diversity and fluidity that make New York City so, well, New Yorkish.

The first time I walked on it, I was overtaken by a loud pack of marching flutists in absurd costumes. It was a manufactured eccentricity, unnecessary given how genuinely eccentric the city already is.



‘Mostly, though, walking the city it is about meeting the people who live here.’ Photograph: Chris Arnade/The Guardian

To really see New York City, you need to dive in it. Treated that way, the city is the best place in the world to walk, partly because it has every part of the world in it. Go down the alphabet, every country is represented: there are Afghans living in Brooklyn and Zambians living in the Bronx. There is street art everywhere, not just in fancy galleries.

Mostly though, walking the city it is about meeting the people who live here. When you walk without a set agenda, you engage with people on their terms in their environment, allowing you a small window into how they live.



With that in mind, here is my favorite New York City walk. It is a suggested direction only. Use it as a rough guide to explore further.

Roosevelt Avenue, Queens

Start: 52nd street and Roosevelt Avenue, Woodside (52nd street stop, 7 train)

End: Main Street and Roosevelt Avenue, Flushing (Main Street stop, 7 train)

Length: 4.5 miles

‘Residents speak 138 languages in Queens homes; many of them are represented in the shops and restaurants that line Roosevelt Avenue.’ Photograph: Chris Arnade/The Guardian

Roosevelt Avenue runs through the middle of Queens, New York’s most diverse borough and perhaps the most diverse place in the entire world. Residents speak 138 languages in Queens homes; many of them are represented in the shops and restaurants that line Roosevelt Avenue.

The overhead subway (the 7 train) provides the rhythm, filling Roosevelt Avenue with its sounds and spilling out people. The street is never empty. The surrounding neighborhoods are home to people who work long and odd hours: cab drivers, custodians in Manhattan towers, the dishwashers and cooks in expensive Manhattans restaurants and bars. At 4am it is still busy, with some people coming home from the late shift and others going to the early shift.

Walking it is to see New York as it has been for over 300 years, a polyglot city united in commerce. Near the beginning, at the 52nd street/Lincoln Avenue subway entrance, is an older Irish enclave. As you walk east, farther from Manhattan, the surrounding neighborhood changes quickly: Korean, Filipino, Thai, Tibetan, Indian, Ecuadorian, Colombian, Mexican. It keeps going, a cathartic sequence of different languages and alphabets.



‘Most of the shops you pass are family-run, not the chain stores that saturate and dull most of America.’ Photograph: Chris Arnade/The Guardian

Most of the shops you pass are family-run, not the chain stores that saturate and dull most of America. They sell saris from India, low-cut jeans from Venezuela, hijabs from Indonesia.

Barbershops come in every variety; you can get your hair styled to be cool in Islamabad or Manila. Street vendors sell tacos, hot dogs, empanadas and cholados (a Colombian iced drink). Branching off from Roosevelt are long blocks of apartment buildings, punctuated by commercial streets filled with more shops and bars and restaurants offering food, drink and music from almost every country.



The overlapping neighborhoods create cultural mashups, a reminder that appropriation drives so much of America. An old tiki bar is repurposed as a Colombian family restaurant, Lista El Pollo, with the waitresses wearing traditional outfits as imagined by Hooters. An old Irish bar, Sean Og’s, hosts a party celebrating Ecuadorian independence beneath a mural of President John F Kennedy.

A woman with a cholado, a Colombian iced drink. Photograph: Chris Arnade/The Guardian

Most of the bars are there to accommodate the loneliness of men, laborers from Latin America far away from their families. There are gay bars; the largest even brings customers from Manhattan (Club Evolution, 76-19 Roosevelt Ave). There are “chica bars” where men pay $3 to dance with a woman to mariachi music, a modern version of the taxi bars that served New York’s lonely European immigrants in the 1930s.



There are bikini bars on almost every block, where bartenders serve in salacious outfits. I chose one of the bars to be my regular when walking, attracted by the bright outside sign and the dim inside. The Scorpion Bar’s sign (75-16 Roosevelt Ave) claims it is a “Café with Tapas”, but it only has beer, various hard liquors and fluorescent shots – although food can be brought in from any of the trucks and stands outside, or you can eat across the street at a 24-hour Mexican restaurant (Taqueria Coatzingo, 76-05 Roosevelt Ave). The regulars come to watch soccer and to find someone to listen to them, hopefully the bartender or someone else who understands their past.



‘There are “chica bars” where men pay $3 to dance with a woman to mariachi music, a modern version of the taxi bars that served New York’s lonely European immigrants in the 1930s.’

In the small parks and squares that line Roosevelt, people collect to argue politics or discuss news from back home. Tibetans, one of the largest of the new groups to settle in Queens, cluster in a pedestrian mall off 74th Street. They gather around a table listening to a man talk quietly. I ask them who he is. “He used to be a politician back home, an opposition leader, until he had to flee.”

The religion is equally diverse: you pass mosques, Catholic churches, Hindu temples and countless smaller Pentecostal churches fashioned out of basement apartments. Four blocks away is a Thai Wat (76-16 46th Ave), its bright yellow and orange facade perfectly comfortable next to simple row house. The monks inside are happy to guide you through the Wat, and may offer you a free meal if you look hungry.

‘In the small parks and squares that line Roosevelt, people collect to argue politics or discuss news from back home.’ Photograph: Chris Arnade/The Guardian

If you walk the entire length of Roosevelt, after passing through a quiet stretch that takes you past Citi Field and Arthur Ashe stadium (home of US Open tennis), you emerge in the very non-quiet Flushing, the largest of New York City’s three Chinatowns.

The alphabet used and languages spoken changes again, but the energy doesn’t. You can end the trip with any Asian food you want: most of the restaurants are great. Although the neighborhood is primarily Taiwanese, most visitors eat the Sichuan food at Spicy and Tasty (39-07 Prince St). After eating, I stop at one of the bars that pop up and then close every few months. Their names are often blunt, like the Black Out Lounge at 133-16 39th Ave, perhaps a product of translation.

‘My favorite was the Fun Lounge; it had a long mirror where I could watch the reflections of karaoke.’ Photograph: Chris Arnade/The Guardian

My favorite was the Fun Lounge; it had a long mirror where I could watch the reflections of karaoke. If I got there early enough, the bartender, a Korean woman named Ann, continually refilled my glass without my asking. “Here in the US we have something called happy hours. It is when everyone gets cheap beer. That is happy, right?”

Flushing is the final stop on the 7 train (Main Street station), so getting back to Manhattan is easy. Although after a day walking Queens, you may wonder why you would want to go back there.

