By Sunday midday, the roof of my mouth was scorched from reckless Shakshuka consumption, but that didn’t dull Saturday’s memory: walking Manhattan tip to tip, 17.7 miles, one continuous stretch of kinetic curiosity. I don’t live in New York, but the city’s always had a kind of gravitational pull on me. It distorts my plans, my sense of nighttime, and bends friends into its orbit, tugging at me even when I’m somewhere else entirely.
I started at 11:30am on Saturday, a lazy Uber up from the East Village to 220th and 9th, shorts and Nike Frees, no playlist, just a fully charged phone and the main contours of a plan: go straight down Broadway and take the side quests as they come. After a few blocks, a staircase off the main path caught my eye, Mandela’s words etched across the stone: “After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.” Appropriate, given the day ahead (although not many – only 780 ft of vertical).
By the first farmers market, I’d drained a twelve-ounce bottle, my hydration system, and zig-zagged through quiet streets that felt paused between heartbeats, Manhattan’s mass gathering energy before the fall into motion
In the upper 150s, I passed a few septuagenarians deep in a domino battle and grabbed a Nitro cold brew at Manhattanville Coffee. Beli said I’d like it, and the app was right.
By 110th, I’d reached Milano Market, my old standby, and grabbed a prosciutto-mozzarella sandwich (“the E10”) that I fully intended to stretch across the day. A friend met me there and joined for the next hundred blocks, a welcome addition, since Manhattan’s pull is better felt when shared. Central Park became the nucleus of the whole walk, energy bending inward, collecting us into small orbits of sound and spectacle.
There was a drum circle of old men pounding away like they’d been keeping the same beat since the ’70s, a Spanish music video being filmed ten feet away, and an accordion player perched on a rock in a spot so objectively bad for tips that it had to be intentional. A violinist traced soft lines next to one of the ponds, filling the air with something fleeting and precise. My favorite was the jazz trio next to the reservoir; it was the perfect soundtrack to a Sunday in the park. It felt like a pocket of warped time, the city’s chaos briefly refracted into harmony.
By the southern edge of the park, my sandwich pacing plan had failed; entropy had won. Prosciutto and mozzarella don’t survive an hour in the sun. I tossed the second half into a trash bin, the soft collapse of intention under the heat, and kept moving downtown.
A little further down Fifth, the Louis Vuitton flagship came into view, its skyscraper wrapped to look like luggage. Branding so loud it felt like an artificial singularity, bending every passerby’s gaze. It’s absurd and impressive at once, the kind of architectural flex that belongs to a city constantly auditioning for itself. And I liked it.
One underrated perk of being an Equinox member: access to clean bathrooms anywhere along the island’s spine. I popped into the one at Flatiron, refueled on cold water, and pushed through the final descent. By the time I reached the World Trade Center memorial, the shadows had stretched long, and the gravitational pull of the Battery was impossible to ignore.
6.5 hours later, 5.5 of actual moving time, I reached the southern tip of Manhattan, legs carrying just enough potential energy to cross the final plaza before hitting equilibrium on the subway. The city didn’t feel smaller, exactly, but it felt denser, as if the walk had compressed thousands of tiny interactions, sounds, and street corners into something I could hold all at once.
Next up: San Francisco’s Crosstown Trail. Although a Lime scooter might tempt me more than another seventeen-mile march, cities are easier to love when you traverse them the hard way, one step at a time, pulled along by whatever unseen forces make them impossible to stay away from for long.
You can walk Manhattan tip to tip in six hours, but you’ll never see the whole thing. The city rearranges itself the second you turn away.
unpublished alpha 