Transcript

(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.

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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.

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