

Walking New York - linkmotif
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/22/magazine/new-york-city-walks.html

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bane
New York, especially Manhattan, straddles this weird paradox where it's both
mindbogglingly huge and swallows you up, and intimately navigable. Everything
is simultaneously sized for titans and humans. It manages to provide awesome
vistas while piling in on you. It's organized and chaotic. It can be
astonishingly cheap, and hideously expensive.

There's an infinite, fractal, size and complexity to the city, while being
constrained on all sides. You always know where you are, but there's a near
infinity of places to be. It's both surprisingly old and cutting edge new, and
it generates its own history. It's the only city I know of that looks exactly
like the photos of it.

You can set out at one river, on a journey across the island, and it feels
like a vast quest among the roots of a giant alien steel, stone and glass
forest (with massive iron snakes coursing beneath the earth), and before you
know it, you're at the other side, looking at the view of somewhere else
across a river -- yet entire generations of lives have lived, loved and died
without ever seeing the outside of it.

In that short walk you'll cross betwixt a population greater than most towns,
encounter nearly every method man has devised to cross the earth, meet poor
artists and giants of industry. It can be stunningly hot, or buried in snow
and freezing depending on the weather. Rain storms can start and stop in the
time it takes to read this sentence. In a few moments, you can be beneath the
surface of the earth, or higher than the first aircraft dared to go, without
ever taking off your jacket or adjusting your shoes.

Every building you step into captures a moment in history of good ideas and
bad, a museum of thought, a classroom of fads and fashion, structure and
freedom. It's like a random sample of the whole world was picked up and air
dropped onto a carefully organized vessel, a Rama waiting to lift up and go
forth on its journey elsewhere.

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benten10
I feel dizzy reading this, the same way New York makes me dizzy with its
crowds and noise and what not. I like New York, but only the New York at 4 in
the morning on a weekday. Still surprisingly busy.

I will use this comment of yours (with attribution, obvs), whenever I have to
talk about it. With an extra paragraph at the end:

"I don't like it".

Very poetic though-- made me go to your profile to check if you were an
author, who I should know. :)

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anonymuse
One of my favorite parts of living in this (at-points) expensive, overcrowded,
noisy, competitive, shallow, and brutal metropolis is the extensive walking
culture that we share. My walk/bike commute to work could meander along the
same main and side streets, with every one of the ~251 trips taken being
uniquely constructed.

Furthermore, that ignores the wiggling route I enevitably travel, pushed left
by a honking cab and similarly colored stoplight, or nudged right by the
inevitable crowded side street filled with movie sets or construction
vehicles.

Putting aside the health benefits of human-powered-travel, it's both a
refreshing and invigorating way to spool up my mind on the way into the
office, and also a way to decompress and release the day's aspirational steam
that's best not blown out all at once, just inside your apartment.

~~~
colinbartlett
The walkability of New York -- or rather the non-walkability of every other
city in America -- is what keeps me here. So many other cities with nicer
weather, more beautiful landscapes, but all of them depend on vehicles to
varying degrees.

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sk5t
Philadelphia and Boston, to pick only two examples, are equally or more
walkable than NYC. However, NYC has more comprehensive public transit.

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vijayr
Even during brutal weather, the subway was active - it has never let me down.
Sure it is crowded, you'll have to deal with rudeness etc. But the public
transit here is comprehensive and reliable. Can't say the same about other big
cities in the U.S. It is also awesome to walk, especially during summer (only
prob is too many tourists taking pictures all over the place blocking your
way)

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dbettin
I live in Portland, OR. My city has great walk-ability, and I walk here.. a
lot.

Last week, I made my first trip to NYC and, wow, did I walk. In fact, I broke
a personal record by walking 14 miles within a 5 hr period around Manhattan.

When I got back to PDX, I gave my shoes a couple days of rest.

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smegel
This is great.

Reminds me of my first (and only) trip to NY. I somehow ended up lost walking
through Brooklyn and came across a little bookstore. In there I found a book
called "N walks in New York" (or similar). It was organized around a single
stroll through each neighborhood in each borough, touching on elements of
history, food, and typical tourist destinations. The walks would sometimes be
point to point, other times a loop, but always took me through interesting
streets I would never have thought of going through myself. I ended up doing
these walks through every part of Manhattan, and some more in Queens. Was well
worth the $15 or so I paid for it!

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LukeWalsh
How can I view this on oculus keeping the text for each location?

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Buge
It won't be 3D. 3D requires the pictures to be taken from 2 different
locations (one for each eye). But the panoramas were each taken from a single
location.

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hypertexthero
What a great project!

Recommended (short) book describing NYC: Here Is New York by E.B. White.

Shameless plug: I've been here since January walking and taking photographs on
the street almost every day. You can see my work so far in the Notebook
section of my site at
[http://simongriffee.com/notebook/](http://simongriffee.com/notebook/)

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lighthawk
Someone should do this for Boston.

~~~
benten10
Yeahhh, after this Winter... fat chance.

I ~looved~ Boston before this Winter. Now I'd rather be in Atlanta.

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joshkpeterson
Really wish you could draw a route, rather than just drop a pin.

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vidoc
Great, a New York Times article about New York, one of the most pretentious
cities of the northern hemisphere.

~~~
copsarebastards
What are New Yorkers pretending?

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vidoc
They don't pretend anything really. I'm just observing that new york is not
the center of the universe

~~~
copsarebastards
You thought that was an insightful observation? Perhaps you should also share
your observations about the color of the sky (people may not know it's blue).

And if you wanted to say it's not the center of the universe, maybe you could
have said that instead of calling an entire major city pretentious.

