Grid Walking With My Girl

For almost a year now, I have been working my way through walking all the streets (& avenues) of Manhattan with my daughter. We try to walk once a week for a couple of hours at each clip, and our only guiding methodology is to walk streets we have not recorded before.  This little project has an official name - Grid Walking - and it has an official definition: A methodical practice of walking through a city by dividing it into a grid and traversing every street, path, and alley within that grid, usually for exploration, documentation, fitness, or personal challenge.

For us, it’s time spent together, exercise, and experiencing every corner of the city we love. I first got this idea when watching a segment on CBS Sunday Mornings. It told the story of Bill Helmreich, a sociologist who had walked the streets of all five boroughs. As Bill once said, “When you walk every block in New York, you stumble upon things you have never stumbled upon before.” Bill then wrote a book about his adventures called The New York Nobody Knows.

I had subsequently seen a documentary (“The World Before Your Feet”) about another grid walker named Matt Green. As he ambled, Matt wrote a blog (“I’m Just Walkin’) which I found fascinating in that he would research the history of many buildings.  Sometimes he discovered unassuming structures with no plaques that had once had famous people or events take place in them. History lost, history found.

Grid Walking as a hobby has only been around for 15 years or so. And thankfully, some smart persons created apps to help us in the tracking of it all.  We use the Map My Walk app to track the day’s journey.  That automatically feeds into a website called City Strides which shows all our efforts cumulatively. I have to say it’s very gratifying to see the purple ink slowly grow on the grid.

Since I know you are wondering, I will tell you that the streets of Manhattan total approximately 255 miles! Of that, we have walked over 70 miles. So we are off to a good start. Our rules are casual – if we get distracted by an interesting shop or a beckoning restaurant, we go for it.  One time, we spotted a young Broadway actor and for a moment, I thought we were going to do a 180 and follow him for a bit. We have ventured into a perfumery store, a sample sale, an FIT fashion exhibit, art galleries, and a pottery studio. We have played with give away kittens, watched the antics of a pups in a doggie daycare, sipped milkshakes in the shadow of the 59^th Street bridge, and gobbled up warm Irish soda bread in the East Village. We even decided to knock Mulberry Street off the list during the Feast of San Gennaro.

A handful of times, we have allowed other friends or family to join us. I truly enjoy that, but what I appreciate most is being able to walk and talk and walk and talk with my girl!

----------

Thanks for reading!

Eve