Exploring every corner, intersection, doorway, garden, and street side oddity, Matt Green has a mission: walk every block of all five boroughs of New York City. This might seem like too hefty a task for even a long-time New Yorker, but Matt comes qualified for the job — in 2010 he completed a cross-country walk from Rockaway Beach, New York to Rockaway Beach, Oregon and catalogued all his small-town discoveries via photos and small blog entries on his website imjustwalkin.com.
So far, Matt has covered a little over 2,000 of his 8,000-mile inter-NYC journey since he started this past New Year’s (his trip across the country was, by contrast, a mere 3,100 miles), and on a Friday night last month, I met up with him on Crosby Street for an interview that took us over bridges, next to on-ramps, through parks, and down alleyways between the borders of Little Italy, Chinatown, Soho, and Tribeca.
So why, after walking across the country, did you decide to walk every block of New York City?
Partially this was a complement to the walk across the country where I saw the entire width of the country, but for like a second in every town, whereas here I’m spending years walking around and around the same place. So it’s just a much more in-depth understanding of one place. The walk across America was a good lesson in how people are the same all across the country, kind of like a breadth way of learning, and this is all about depth, just picking at this one place over and over.
You left your job as a civil engineer to start your walk across the US, and now New York. How did you mentally make that transition?
It feels scary particularly coming from that kind of background, because in no means am I close to starving, but it’s all those little things that I’ve just always had that you never give another thought to — like whatever TV show you like watching every week. It almost sounds silly to say it in hindsight, but at the time you’re like, “Man, I’d hate not to be able to watch this’ like that factors into this big life decision you’re making.”
I can definitely relate to that feeling.
[laughs] So yeah, that was tough. It was kind of a leap of faith, but I was really encouraged on my walk across the country because I spent so little money doing that walk. It’s just this very low-budget vacation, in a sense, and I had this reassuring feeling that if all else went wrong in my life, I could just keep doing this and I would survive. I’m sure it’d get old after a while, but I’d be relatively happy doing that. That made me a lot more secure in the idea that there are all these things that I don’t have that I used to have, but that I don’t need. I like music a lot, but I couldn’t listen to music on my walk — I didn’t want to burn through batteries in my phone listening to music, and I wanted to be able to hear what was around me while I was walking.
For a lot of people, the music thing specifically is a big thing for them. They’re like “I couldn’t go five months without listening to music.” We’ve convinced ourselves that we need all of these routines that we have, and I just didn’t have them. The bottom line is transitioning to this lifestyle where you need very little, and where you rely on the world to provide you with entertainment. Not to say the world’s providing you literally with all your sustenance, but you just free yourself from so many of the costs of life that you think are required.
What have you learned or come to understand from all the miles you’ve walked so far?
The thing that’s most important about it to me is not just the physical act of walking, but walking in an environment where you’re walking because that’s what you’re doing for the day, not because you’re rushing to get somewhere else or trying to get in shape. When you’re walking just for the sake of being out there and moving around and seeing new places, I think that it’s a very interesting and different way to see the city and start to get to know a place as big and as overwhelming as New York. Because for the vast majority of people — myself included — how do you even start with this city, you know? It’s such an enormous, unknowable kind of place. So you buy a tour book or a guide book, or you talk to a friend you know who lives there, or somehow you refer to these other experts to get advice on what’s worth seeing — like what’s historical or cultural, what are the important things that I’d be remiss to not check out. And when you do that, you’re letting these other people tell you what New York is. You’re just kind of following along passively, whereas if you just go on a walk and you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know anything about it, you’re freed from those expectations and start to see what catches your eye. I think about it as a sideways way of learning about the city.
The diversity of the knowledge you start to acquire is pretty phenomenal. I’ve learned about all sorts of plants in this New York walk — like who would have thought — but you constantly see gardens and you start to wonder, “What is that flower that I’ve seen over and over?” Then you look it up, or in my case you call your mom and she tells you what it is. And I’ve learned about all these edible things that are growing in New York; I think I could survive eating plants I’ve run into.
Do you know about the little museum in this alley? This place blew my mind the other day.
Matt then took me down Cortlandt Alley between Franklin and White Streets to show me “The Museum”, a tiny, unmanned display of toothpaste bottles, misspelled food labels, and homemade self-defense weapons that works under the catchphrase “A SMART MAN’S GARBAGE IS A FOOLISH MAN’S FORTUNE & VICE VERSA.” We both took some photos and Matt jotted a few notes in his flip pad.
I bet you’ve run into tons of little surprises like that place.
Yeah definitely. Maybe I’m more interested in this because of my engineering background, but there’s so much fascinating infrastructure in New York, like layers of things under the streets and inside buildings that accomplish all these tasks that we take for granted. For example, there are all these vent towers that come out of the sidewalk, and most of the time you don’t even notice them, they’re just another thing in the city. There’s one in particular that looks like an air raid siren — it kind of sweeps up and there’s a little pyramid thing on top. So I started noticing these, then I finally had seen enough of them and I got really curious and took a photo, and someone on my blog actually knew what it was — it was a regulator vent for a natural gas line. Then I started noticing all these other vent towers of all these different shapes and sizes and designs, so I started learning about them, so it’s this funny journey that starts taking place when you notice something weird for the first time.
Hey have you ever seen this?
Matt leads me across the street to a small fenced-in patch of grass separating the intersection of West Broadway, Varick, and Franklin Streets called Finn Square.
This square is named after this guy they call Battery Dan. For part of his career he was a judge. These two kids got into a fight over this girl and got sent into court, and Battery Dan was the old-timey judge who would give you advice instead of lecturing you… [reads from sign] “Don’t try to compel a girl to love you if she prefers someone else. Get another to take her place. Don’t wreck or sell your body and soul for diamonds and automobiles.” And he was going to court one day in the Bronx and a dog chased after him and he climbed up a lamppost and started yelling for help. [notices a flower by the sign] Also, I just like this flower — it’s called a plumed celosia.
You’ve been exploring Brooklyn recently. What have your experiences been like there?
A lot of people talk about Brooklyn as if there’s something about “Brooklyn” — especially people who talk about Brooklyn hipsters like that’s what Brooklyn is. But man is that the tiniest little proportion to what Brooklyn is! I mean, it’s like two and a half million people or maybe more than that, so it’s essentially one of the largest cities in the country just by itself.
But in that way, that’s a good reminder of how incredibly vast Brooklyn is and how much diversity there is inside of it. I overheard this past summer someone talking about a meal that they had eaten that was prepared by this chef from some restaurant in Brooklyn, and he described it as “so Brooklyn” — “such a Brooklyn meal” — and I had this idea that at the end of this, to take a whole series of photos that I took in Brooklyn and just have “That’s So Brooklyn” on all of them, ranging from the Hasidic guys to the Hispanic guys playing volleyball to the black guy to —
The perfect ad campaign.. So how much do you plan out where you’re going every day?
I don’t plan it out too far ahead of time, mostly because I’m always running behind on the website trying to get my photos up and everything, so generally it’s the last thing I do before I set out. Today I scribbled half the route before I left the house, then I sat in the park and figured out the next segment. If I’m in an area where I haven’t walked much, it’s easier to just pick a street and go. But once you start filling in the streets, you have to be careful about where you’re going so you don’t end up stuck amidst these streets you’ve already walked.
You removed the donation button on your blog because you have enough funds to get you through early 2013. How has the experience of living off donations been?
When I first started the walk, every donation was really exciting. Like before that, when was the last time I was excited about $15, you know? So that was a really cool feeling. Then after the New York Times article came out, a lot of people started making donations, and I got enough to get through the whole year. It almost reached the point where it was routine, so yeah … the risk is that you run low and no one cares anymore, but it’s more exciting this way.
You’ve mentioned in interviews about your cross-country walk that people had these fears you’d get hurt or mugged, but you learned that people are a lot nicer than you’d expect. Would you say the same for New York?
Definitely. The major difference is that when I was walking across the country … [pauses] Oh, do you know what these are?
Matt stops us in the middle of Kenmare Street to show me a white tile embedded onto the road called a Toynbee tile. We cross the street, wait for a red light, then go back to read the tile while Matt tells me more about them. This one says “HOUSE OF HADES / BLACK GLOVES VS / THE MEDIA MACHINE / IN SOCIETY 2009.”
What did you think of the New Yorker/Tourist sidewalk lanes a couple years back?
Well I guess I’d have to walk in the tourist lane. You can look down on the tourist lane or you can look up to it, to people who actually care about what’s around them. And you know what? I think that mentality, like this anti-tourist, “— we’re the real New Yorkers” mentality, is an extremely lazy way to deal with the infinitude of New York. If you were a tourist every day and you were just breathtaken by all this stuff around you, you’d never get anything done. You’d always feel like you were missing out on something else. And the easy solution is to just be like “oh that stuff’s stupid, I’m gonna go to work and make my money like a man,” you know, like there’s this weakness or something about actually being interested in the world. It’s my belief that it is laziness and an unwillingness to experience it.
So out of all your New York walk experiences so far, do you have any favorites?
The great thing about New York City — and the great thing about just walking — is that you don’t really have a favorite part or area. There are certainly areas I’d like to live in more than others, but when you’re just walking through a new place, who cares? You’re just seeing somewhere new — some are more exciting, some are more peaceful, and there are all kinds of goods and bads mixed up, but the bottom line is it’s just exciting for me to be somewhere new, wherever it is.
You can follow Matt’s progress on his website www.imjustwalkin.com.
