11.12 | 48,000 steps & one giant urban design rabbit hole

✉️ letter #82

As is the way with this silly little brain of mine, I spent one night anxiously obsessing over whether I'd fallen into a routine rut. Even in a city as dense and endlessly layered as New York, it's surprisingly easy to get stuck on autopilot.

With a rare free Monday and zero time to book a flight somewhere unfamiliar, I decided to force myself out of my comfort zone right here at home. The rules I set for myself were simple: walk Manhattan tip-to-tip (starting at the Broadway Lift Bridge on the Bronx border all the way down to Battery Park) and stop only at cafes, parks, and landmarks I had never visited before.

🎼 the soundtrack | badlands - kevin morby

Seventeen miles and roughly 48,000 steps later, my feet were officially on strike. But what started as a lighthearted "tourist-in-my-own-backyard" challenge left me spiraling into a weeks-long research rabbit hole, because... really, why is New York virtually the only large American city where you can live daily life comfortably on foot?

We are often sold a convenient story that Americans simply fell in love with open highways and suburban driveways, a sort of artifact of Manifest Destiny, and that walkable streets withered away as a natural consequence of consumer choice. Once you look closely at the streetscape (and the archives) that myth falls apart. Along the walk down Manhattan's West Side, you run straight into the fingerprints of the people and policies that engineered car dominance across the rest of the country.

And so, my poor doing-video-editing-even-though-i-hate-video-editing skills got put into creating a mini-documentary instead of just, you know, vlogging my life:

In this episode, you can look forward to an exploration of the deliberate history behind car-dependent America, some cool underrated gems I discovered along the West Side, and a practical roadmap on how the rest of the country can take back its streets.

🪢related threads

• Americans want walkable hometowns too: Survey data shows roughly 4 in 10 Americans would gladly trade larger homes and yard space for the ability to walk to shops, parks, and daily errands. (Vox)
• If you're ready to push for safer, human-scale infrastructure in your own town, the National Complete Streets Coalition is a great place to plug into ongoing policy and community advocacy.
• I didn't get a chance to dive into these during the video, but I had never heard of the Sisyphus Stones until I stumbled upon them in Riverbank State Park— and they turned out to have a fascinating backstory. (Atlas Obscura)
• Eleanor Roosevelt was such a relentless daily walker that FDR actually had a dedicated trail built for her at their Hyde Park estate. Sounds like a really great potential day-trip! (National Park Service)
• Written shortly after her death twenty years ago, this essay offers a nuanced tribute to the fuller, more complex sides of Jane Jacobs's thinking that often get flattened when she's reduced to a neighborhood-loving soundbite. (In These Times)

✨enjoying: a piece of pop culture fun

Full disclosure: while I do own the book, I mostly skimmed Robert Caro’s monumental – and almost overwhelmingly detailed—biography, The Power Broker. Instead, I followed along with 99% Invisible’s book club breakdown, dipping directly into the chapters that sounded the most compelling.

If you’ve ever been intimidated by the sheer page count of that tome, their companion series is easily the best way in. It not only helps to laugh about it with Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan, it's also great to hear from people like AOC about how structures such as the Bronx Expressway have impacted her life.

🗨️a final quote

By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.
-- Jane Jacobs (from The Death and Life of Great American Cities)

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