WALKING NYC -- EVERY LAST INCH
NEW YORK, NEW YEAR’S EVE, 2011 — Another year ending with a whimper. Occupy Wall Street had left Zuccotti Park. The Knicks’ were floundering. Bagels were fresh but life seemed stale. At midnight, the same old ball would drop in same old Times Square. Another year gone.
But that morning — partly cloudy, mid-40’s — Matt Green set out from Staten Island to walk New York City. All five boroughs. Every street. Every park and parkway. Every bridge and pier. He expected to take two years. Eight years and 8,000 miles later, he may still be walking. Of the end, he says: “At that point I will probably drink a beer and sit down for a while.”
Green was no casual walker. In 2010, he walked from Rockaway Beach, Long Island to Rockaway Beach, Oregon. 3,100 miles. Before he left, he was warned. Might be some mean streets out there. Shouldn’t he take a gun?
“I'm happy to report that I was not murdered on my walk,” Green wrote in his blog imjustwalkin.com, “In fact, not only was I not murdered, I also wasn't hurt, stolen from, or threatened even once.” Instead of danger, Green found hospitality.
Each day at dusk he knocked on a stranger’s front door, explained his walk, and asked to camp in the backyard. Three out of four said yes, and half invited him in for dinner, to do his laundry, to tour their town. The walk taught him to “have some faith in this world. Things aren't as bad as they tell us.“
Back home in Manhattan, having left his job as an engineer, Green was restless. He did a 24-hour whirlwind stop at every subway station. He walked every bridge into Manhattan. What next?
“Instead of seeing a million places for just a minute each,” he remembered, “I wanted to spend a million minutes exploring just one place: New York!” Tourists and locals cherished New York’s finest — Central Park or Fifth Avenue, but Green went democratic. Every street, he decided, would be “just as important as every other. So a dead end street in Queens is just as important as Times Square.”
On that first day, Green walked Staten Island, took the ferry to Lower Manhattan, crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, and strolled into Queens. He posted 32 photos, then walked on. By Day 3, he was in the Bronx. Day 10 found him in Midtown, Day 20 in. . .
Everyone asked — Why?
“I don't know why I'm doing this. I've just found myself through my life drawn to people who are doing these crazy things that are equally stupid and amazing. You could call it either and you would be right.”
Each day, in each neighborhood, he shook hands and explained his project. New Yorkers, known as jaded, were amazed. Street rappers gave him fist bumps. Kids marveled. Strangers invited him into shops, gardens, backyards.
He soon noticed New York’s uniqueness, not just neighborhoods and nationalities but memories. He began photo collections. 9/11 Memorials, some 300 of them. Portal of the Day featuring doors and windows of infinite variety. Barber Shopz noting a zillion signs with a ‘z’ slipped in. CUTZ was just the beginning.
Along with why, many asked how? Didn’t he need money? Was he writing a book? No, Green explained. He was just walkin’. A shoestring budget of $15 a day couldn’t cover rent, so Green couch surfed, did pet sitting, depended on the kindness of strangers. They rarely let him down.
“Been mugged yet?”
“I haven’t been mugged,” he assured a Staten Island man. “Unless you’re about to mug me.” As he found across America, folks were eager to share their neighborhoods, their history. And history became Green’s biggest surprise.
Though his blog began with photos, Green was soon digging daily into the past. New York, he discovered, is a multi-layered tablet of time, where every faded street sign, every remodeled building, every forgotten corner tells a story.
Holed up nights in friends’ living rooms, Green researched mysteries from each day’s walk. Imjustwalkin.com became a fascinating tribute to America’s signature city and the magnet it has long been.
And on he walked. When word got out, a filmmaker began trailing Green, step-by-step. In 2018, a delightful documentary, “The World Before Your Feet,” captured the miles, the connections, the wonder of it all.
Though once spotted everywhere in New York, Matt Green is hard to find these days. Lagging behind in his blog, he stopped posting in 2015, resumed in 2020 — “I’m still at it!” — then went silent.
Responding to my e-mail in 2021, Matt reported that the pandemic sidelined the walk for a year. “Now that things are slowly getting back to normal, it's looking like I'll be able to resume the walking soon -- probably in August.”
In February 2022, Green emerged with another post. Just 200 miles remained. No posts since. Done? I prefer to think he will never finish, that he will be out there this morning, every morning, on some busy street in Astoria or Flatbush, Tribeca or Hell’s Kitchen, walking, walking. . .
“Why would you ever want to know a place completely? The excitement of New York, and the whole world for that matter, is that there’s always something else to see, and something else to learn, no matter how long you’ve been around.”