Walking to the Cinema (A Slideshow)

I saw several movies at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, and most every day, I walked from my apartment in the Village up Broadway and then east on E. 12th or E. 13th (by mistake, overshooting where I needed to turn) to the screenings at the Village East Cinema at E. 12th and 2nd Av. Then I would walk back west and north to a reception or an event near Union Square. I took this route, I think, ten times, and the images here don't even account for the stretch walking home.

These photos seem pedestrian to me, on many levels, but in their totality they represent the "shoe leather" transitions between the dramatic sequences in my own personal New York movie. What I think about most when I look at these walking pictures is how I use the occasion of walking to process what I've just experienced and how I need to think about it.

See my blog, Shoe Leather, at Reframe, for more on the films at the Tribeca Film Festival.

E. 13th Street, While Walking a Film Festival (Small Slideshow)

This week I'll be thinking and writing a lot about film, and as previously mentioned on this site, please visit Reframe and learn about that what exciting things they are up to. On Walking Off the Big Apple, I'm hoping to share what I learn as a pedestrian walking by the venues as well as to keep you informed of some fun public events.

E. 13th Street is still find of funky/pretty Village in spirit, even when near to Fifth Ave. Today, I walked from the Tribeca hub-hub filmmaker and press offices to see a screening at the Village East Cinemas and then back again. The opulent theater at the corner of 2nd Ave. at 12th St. opened in 1926, in the heyday of Jewish Rialto District, and it still maintains a lot of its early aura. The last time I was in the theatre was to see Brand Upon the Brain, a mind-blowing experiment in contemporary silent cinema by filmmaker Guy Madden. His new film, My Winnipeg, showing at the festival, is a part-fictional homage to his hometown, mixing different types of documentary and narrative genres.

Walking back west along 13th Street, I stopped to see what others were looking in one particular window. A nice doggie day spa, it was, with the cutest best friends you have ever seen. Also along that stretch - intriguing restaurants, macrobiotic, Italian, and others, all open to the fresh air. It's 80 degrees today.

Walking Off the Big Apple's List of Self-Guided Walks (Updated)

Below, please find a freshly updated list of all the themed New York walks I've compiled over the last year. All are Manhattan walks, with many in the lower part of the island. I'm not Manhattan-centric; it's just where I live.

I promise to get out to other boroughs in the coming year. I often visit Brooklyn just because I like walking over the bridge, and I hope to be visiting the Bronx Bombers sometime soon to wave goodbye to Yankee Stadium.

A met a sprightly 85-year old man the other day who said he walks all day long, and as part of his rotating itinerary, he regularly hops on the ferry to walk around Staten Island. I want to do that, too. Also, now that the weather is so nice, I want to visit the Queens Botanical Garden, with its new state-of-the-art visitor's center.

• Ashcan Artists Walk to McSorley's
• Bowery 2007
• British Invasion Walk
• Chelsea and West Village
• Classic New York: A Walk, and a Map
• Cloisters Walk
• Diane Arbus & the Hotel Chelsea
• Downtown Chocolate Walk
• East 1st St. and Red Velvet Cupcakes (on E. 4th)
• Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge, Georgia O'Keeffe, and New York City
• EuroCondo: 40 Bond to 40 Mercer
• Garbo Walks
• Museums: Met to MoMA
• Gramercy/Flatiron
• New York of Raymond Hood, Architect
• A Walk in NoLita
• Julian Schnabel Walk
• SoHo Shopping
• Not Like Dubya: Texas Independence Day
• Walking Off Tribeca
• Turtle Bay: Beekman Place, UN, Tudor City
• Two-Mile Walks, Mostly in Manhattan
• Walking Off the Wall Street Bears

A Walk in NoLita, Sometimes Speaking French

To get to the New Museum of Contemporary Art on the Bowery from where I live in the Village I walk through the precious neighborhood of NoLita. I say "precious," because this neighborhood North of Little Italy is home to many attractive small boutiques and stylish bistros, and it feels like it could be bottled and sold for a large price. In fact, that's happening. The prices for several new condos in the neighborhood's attractive renovated Victorian-era buildings start in the six- and seven-million dollar range. And the proximity of the New Museum solidifies NoLita's stature as a hot neighborhood, with galleries, shoe boutiques and other art-friendly places popping up here and there.

Walking along Prince or Spring toward the museum, I have several old and new, ecclesiastical and secular, places to note along the way:

Buildings: The St. Patrick's Old Cathedral at Mott and Prince, served as the Roman Catholic Cathedral until the big St. Patrick's was built on Fifth Avenue; and The Fourteenth Ward Industrial School, a Victorian building designed in 1888 by Calvert Vaux and George Radford, on Mott, built by the Astors for the children of neighborhood immigrants;

Food: Chibi's Bar (devoted to sake) and Cafe Gitane on Mott, Ceci-Cela on Spring.

Edification: McNally Robinson Booksellers on Prince. I could name many more places I like.

View Larger Map
While walking in NoLita yesterday, it seemed like 83% of the people were speaking French. Places like Cafe Gitane and Ceci-Cela attract French visitors, or possibly, local Francophiles practicing their language skills.

NoLita is not gentrified on every square inch. Along another street it's possible to see long-time residents playing board games in a concrete fenced park and children playing ball. Not everyone there is an attractive young French-speaking person, although it often seems that way.

Image and Map of NoLita by Walking Off the Big Apple.

Classic New York: A Walk, and a Map

The walk described here is based on a series of posts relating to the New York of Auntie Mame (see related posts following). I took the walk myself over several days, rather than all at once. I consider the walk as a series of experiences. Trying to enjoy Macy's, Times Square, the Algonquin, stores along Fifth Avenue, the Plaza Hotel and the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis in the same day would be too daunting and exhausting. And expensive.

I'm already thinking about returning to the St. Regis.

This walk serves as a companion to the Walk in Turtle Bay that includes 3 Beekman Place, the fictional home of Mame Dennis. The walk also intersects with other themed walks such as the New York of Raymond Hood, Architect and Fifth Avenue and the High Road to Taos: Mabel Dodge, Georgia O'Keeffe, and New York City.



View Larger Map

The walk is approximately 1.6 miles. What I consider Classic New York is more vast than this walk. It would include Tiffany's, for example, but I'm saving a visit there for when I write about You Know Who. Also, MY Classic New York includes free things and cheap things and just the sheer joy of strolling.

See related posts:
Classic New York: 59th and Fifth: A Slideshow
Classic New York: The Algonquin
Classic New York: Times Square
Classic New York: A Visit to Macy's, in April
Classic New York: Henri Bendel
Classic New York: The King Cole Bar at the St. Regis
The Classic New York of Mame Dennis
A Walk in Turtle Bay: Beekman Place, the U.N., Tudor City, and E. 42nd St.
The Liberation Theology of Mame Dennis
Grand Central Theatre, and A New Walk Begins

Image: at 59th and Fifth Ave. Walking Off the Big Apple. April 2008.

University Place: Pedestrian, Yes, But in a Good Way (Slideshow)

University Place, a relatively short street in lower Manhattan, links Washington Square Park to the south with Union Square to the north. A thoroughfare frequented by NYU students, neighborhood residents, and office workers, the street enjoys a democratic mix of bars, coffee shops, diners, restaurants, boutiques, laundries, shoe repair shops, florists, and even a bowling alley. A few haunts of old New York can be found along in here - the Knickerbocker Bar & Grill, a favorite of the late Brooke Astor, and Patsy's, one of Frank Sinatra's preferred stops for pizza pie. Residents try to keep straight three similarly-sounding places - Café Spice, Space Market, and Spice.

University Place is pedestrian in both senses - it's an ordinary street, nothing to write home about, but it's also a good place for walking. I frequently walk up University Place to shop at the green market on Union Square, but sometimes I like to just stroll up the street for no good reason at all. Many of the eateries provide seats at the counter facing the street, the perfect place to sit and watch everyone walk by.

A few changes are afoot, as they say. At the intersection of University Place and 8th Street, Joyce Leslie, an inexpensive popular clothing store for women with bodies and tastes unlike like my own, is relocating to Broadway. Across the street, on the east side, the bbq restaurant, where I often enjoyed watching people drink gigantic frozen margaritas in the summertime, has left the building and will now be the home of a bank. No fun. I hope the rest of the street stays its sweet pedestrian self.

Photos by Walking Off the Big Apple. March 5, 2008

Walking Off the Big Apple's Lenten Gelato Diet

While walking on Bleecker Street yesterday and looking at all the food in the windows of the street's foodie blocks, and stopping for awhile to watch the firemen put out a fire above Indian Taj (all of which I'll show you soon), I held in my hand the item you see before you until it disappeared. Gelato, I thought, would be my answer to the Grapefruit, though I greatly enjoy the grapefruit in its ruby red variety, in much the same way as that of my fellow countryman, President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Waking up on this Wednesday and noting it was to time to count all the sins of omission and sins of commission for the next forty days, as I was well trained by the priests of the Episcopal Church, I have set upon a diet plan based on gelato. As the Ice Cream Diet seems to be resurrected every decade, I think it's time to move on to the softer, more artisanal version of frozen wonderland. I am sort of over frozen yogurt. Gelato incorporates less air in its making than ice cream and should be lighter in fat.

For the Gelato Diet I will incorporate a twice-weekly indulgence with the 10,000 steps-a-day program, for, indeed, that's the 4.5 to 5 mile walking range that should allow me to walk off most of it. I also plan to cut back on portion size at every meal.

Twice a week for the next forty days, I will also order the gelato on a cone, as the cone provides practical and aesthetic pleasures while walking. Walking down the street with a cone of gelato frees the other hand to wave at friends and admirers.

Image: Stratchiatella and dark chocolate nutella gelato. L'Arte del Gelato, 75 Seventh Avenue, NY, NY.

Walking Art Video: Mesmerizing Animated Wall Painting by the Artist Blu

I enjoy this animated wall painting from the artist Blu. I also like Blu's website, not only for its clever design but for the sketchbooks.
I haven't sketched in a long time. I usually sketch outside, but it's too cold, and I'm getting cabin fever. I get vicarious pleasure from watching Blu's walking/sketching on the walls, something I know I can't get away with at home.

Weekend Frivolities: Cupcakes, Buildings, Obama, Comments Now Open

• After finishing that last self-guided walk, Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos, I felt like I had walked from Fifth Avenue to Santa Fe and back. That was a big walk! I'm still putting together the interactive map of Fifth Avenue, but the rest of the walk is now fully assembled on new blue and beige pages HERE. From analyzing the site feed, I see that a lot of people liked that walk.
• For blogger-types who like to write long posts like myself, I highly recommend using Google Pages, a feature still in the Google Labs. That's how I'm putting together the complete versions of the walks.
• The cold weather makes me hungry, so yesterday I decided to visit Sugar Sweet Sunshine on Rivington and drink some coffee and eat a red velvet cupcake (or rvc, as I like to call them). They have two kinds, one with white icing and another with chocolate icing. I don't advocate walking to a bakery as a destination if weight loss is a goal, but I decided that if you walk far enough, you can walk it off and it's OK.
• I like the building on Avenue A with the BURGER KLEIN and Gracefully signs, so I took a picture of it. The other picture here is of the RV cupcakes.
• I have a hard time remembering the name of the place I got the cupcakes, and I think they should change their name to Rivington Bakery. Another place I like is Connecticut Muffin on Prince Street near the New Museum, but last time I was there they had taken the sign down. With the New Museum, the name didn't sound cool enough and so they plan on just going by 10 Prince Street. I have to agree that Connecticut Muffin sounds too uncool.
• When I was walking back home along E. 4th Street, I saw the color red everywhere, and I plan to go back to take photographs of all the red things.
• I lost a lot of pretend money in CNN's Political Market last night. It's a site for trading shares in a prediction market about the presidential campaign. I thought Obama was going to beat Clinton in the South Carolina Democratic Party primary by around 10 points, but he won by a much much wider margin with 55% to her 27%.
• I've been writing Walking Off the Big Apple for over six months now, and it's time I turned on the Comments section. Everyone's welcome to play.

"Walks Singing": The Selma to Montgomery March, March 21-25, 1965

The distance from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery, the state capital, is about 54 miles. When marchers assembled for the third attempt to make the walk in support of voting rights with the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in March of 1965 - the first had met with state-supported violence at the Pettus Bridge and the second stopped by court order, several participants were not fully prepared for four days of walking 12 miles per day and sleeping in tents on the roadside at night. But conviction will overcome these kind of obstacles.

Thousands of people flew into Selma and Montgomery to assist with the march and to give whatever aid they could. The march itself had been limited to three hundred participants at any time. Among the entertainers who attended a rally on the fourth night of the march were Shelley Winters, Tony Perkins, Tony Bennett, Nina Simone, Dick Gregory, Sammy Davis, Jr., Mike Nichols and Elaine May. On this last full night of the march, the last before the final miles into Montgomery the following day, many of the marchers started falling ill from exhaustion.

Journalist Renata Adler, in her enthralling account of the march, "Letter From Selma," for April 10, 1965 issue of The New Yorker, described the scene:

On its fourth night, the march began to look first like a football rally, then like a carnival and a hootenanny, and finally like something dangerously close to a hysterical mob...Word got out that the doctors on the march had treated several cases of strep throat, two of pneumonia, one of advanced pulmonary tuberculosis, and one of epilepsy, and because of the number and variety of sick and handicapped who had made the march a macabre new joke began to go the rounds: "What has five hundred and ninety-nine legs, five hundred and ninety-eight eyes, an indeterminate number of germs, and walks singing? The march from Selma."

According to Adler, at the staged camp entertainment on Wednesday night, "A number of girls in the crowd collapsed and, because there was no other lighted space, had to be carried onstage, where Miss Winters did her best to minister them."

The march from Selma to Montgomery in support of voting rights laid the foundation for the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In the current presidential debate on this issue, I believe that credit for advancing this particular piece of legislation needs to shared with hundreds of exhausted walkers, the thousands that traveled to Alabama to lend their support and a handful of gutsy entertainers.

Image: Photograph by Peter Pettus. Modern gelatin silver reprint from 1965 negative. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (30)

See the website for the Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights Trail in Alabama.

"Opium-Eating is Not Congenial to Walking," Says Virginia Woolf's Father

Thumbing through my vintage walking books and reading descriptions of the routine perambulations of the most famous writers in literature, I hang my head in shame over how little I walk. Essays about walking published prior to our own era make note of standard daily walks in the twenty-to-thirty mile range, far longer than the 10,000 steps or five miles recommended these days.

Leslie Stephen, the father of Virginia Woolf and a walking enthusiast, wrote an essay "In Praise of Walking" describing the relationship of walking to the development of English literature. He writes, "The literary movement at the end of the eighteenth century was obviously due in great part, if not mainly to the renewed practice of walking." He cites William Wordsworth's walks in the Lakes and the Alps and Thomas De Quincey's daily ten miles. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, though consumed by bad habits, could walk farther than most avid walkers today:

"Opium-eating is not congenial to walking, yet even Coleridge, after beginning the habit, speaks of walking forty miles a day in Scotland, and as well all know, the great manifesto of the new school of poetry, the "Lyrical Ballads," was suggested by the famous walk with Wordsworth, when the first stanzas of the 'Ancient Mariner' were composed."

Stephen argues that all the great writers, with some exception, were "enthusiastic walkers." The greater the distance the more capable the writer, Stephen asserts, comparing the accomplishments of the lame Sir Walter Scott, who walked twenty and thirty miles a day, to the morbid obsessions of Lord Byron, a couch potato.

The Violence of Walking, According to Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Walking, then, is a perpetual falling with a perpetual self-recovery. It is a most complex, violent, and perilous operation, which we divest of its extreme danger only by continual practice from a very early period in life. We find how complex it is when we attempt to analyze it, and we see that we never understood it thoroughly until the time of the instantaneous photograph. We learn how violent it is, when we walk against a post or a door in the dark. We discover how dangerous it is, when we slip or trip and come down, perhaps breaking or dislocating our limbs, or overlook the last flight of stairs, and discover with what headlong violence we have been hurling ourselves forward."

- Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Physiology of Walking," from Pages From an Old Volume of Life: A Collection of Essays, 1857-1881. Seventh Edition. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1887

"Toes Are Really Short Fingers:" More from A Manual of Walking

(Click to enlarge image: from Elon Jessup's A Manual of Walking from 1936)

My copy of Elon Jessup's A Manual of Walking from 1936 once belonged to a couple named Jeanne and Bill Taylor. I acquired the book as a gift, and I don't know them. I would have liked them, I think, because they took great care of the book. The Taylors affixed a book owner's label to the endpapers, that's why I know their names, and I surmise from the slips of papers stuck into the book that they were members of the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club. A review of the book is pasted onto the back endpapers. According to this clipping, the reviewer liked the book but thought that the title was too prosaic for such witty writing. He suggested that it should have been titled "Feet First."

The writer, Elon Jessup, sure loves to wax poetic about feet, and he was particular about the proper fit of shoes. I have heard that it's best to shop for shoes in the afternoon, when the feet are given time to swell, and Jessup recommends this as well. He also criticizes the emphasis of style over comfort, and I would agree with him here also. I have worn stylish and painful shoes that made me hate everything in my path. Here's what Jessup recommends for the proper fit:

"First and foremost, let it be sufficiently long and sufficiently wide to permit toes to stretch forward and while doing so remain separated each from the next. Avoid any pressure from leather, both against the inner side of the big toe and outer side of the small toe. Even the apparently fool-proof Greek sandal can sometimes do mischief in the latter respect, in that the pressure of a leather strap against the side of the small toe may curl this toe under and wrench it out of shape."

"A Person of Movement:" Elon Jessup's A Manual of Walking, 1936

In the previous post, I quoted an essay from an anthology of walking essays published in the 1930s. I'm enjoying my little collection of vintage walking books so much that I wish to continue sharing their contents in the days ahead.

Please see before you Elon Jessup's A Manual of Walking published in 1936. A charming writer, Jessup was an authority on scouting and wrote several books on the subject. A Manual of Walking features practical advice for putting one foot in front of the other. His topics include the relative merits of fast and slow walks, the under-appreciated role of the big toe, and a lengthy discussion on taking care of the feet. I particularly enjoy the following paragraph from Ch. 2, "How Fast and How Far?" Here, Jessup explains that brisk walking is most useful for the boring parts of the walking journey:

"....There are those who take on walking as systematic daily exercise for the sole purpose of keeping physically fit, and very good gravy it is–the best all-around type of exercise that exists. Being systematic about it is distinctly more beneficial than being spasmodic, as with any other form of physical exertion. Here, none the less, is a circumstance in which a hearty brisk pace can usually come into its own. Surroundings, such between home and office, may be too well known to arouse any special interest, so one might as well become exclusively a person of movement. Nor even during rambles afield is it irrational to speed up the pace whenever surroundings become uninterestingly drab. A mixed grill of slow and fast walking may make for a palatable menu."

Not only does Jessup presage our current era's concept of interval training, the "mixed grill" of the last sentence goes very nice with the "good gravy" mentioned at the beginning of the paragraph. Genius.

Walking Through A Recession

News on Wall Street this week was grim. After a few dramatic sessions on the stock exchange, talk of a looming recession grew louder in the mass media and on the campaign trail. In New York, luxury retailers like Tiffany reported soft holiday sales, and Starbucks is losing the coffee market to fast food giants. I'm concerned that the city will see a noticeable decline in visitors from the domestic US market, and it's clear that the New York tourist industry has shifted its marketing already to visitors from other countries. Many businesses will suffer from the ripple effect of a recession, even in New York.

What ever shall we do? What types of businesses and activities are recession-proof? Historically, the liquor business and movie theaters have been known to fare well during economic downturns. Money is tight, so a beer at a bar and a movie ticket ($6 + $12 = $18) would be more affordable than a prix fixe dinner and a Broadway show ($75 + $80 = $155), for example. Looks like the culture of the 1930s to me.

Personally, I would like to recommend walking as a way to get through a recession. It's free and fun (when you get the hang of it) and much cheaper than gasoline. For many, walking may become a necessity. In my recent attempts to pace out 10,000 steps a day, I find walking also to be time-consuming, a fact that shouldn't bother the unemployed.

Thanks to the colonel, who presented me with several vintage walking books for Christmas, I have learned that during the Great Depression, many Americans, through no choice of their own, reconnected with the pleasures of walking. Here's the Introduction of The Pleasures of Walking, edited by Edwin Valentine Mitchell, from 1934 (illustration here is also from the book) :

"When I remarked to a friend that I was engaged in compiling an anthology on the subject of walking, he said, 'I suppose the depressed state of the world has made walkers of a great many people who a few years ago were almost in danger of losing use of their legs. It's odd, when you stop to think of it, that because of the harshness of the times and the fact that shoe leather is cheaper than gasoline a lot of people have been driven to the discovery that walking is among the most rewarding pleasures of life.'

See? I see a great age of walking ahead of us.

For commentary on the recent Wall Street worries see the special walk, Walking Off the Wall Street Bears.

10,000 Steps: The New York City Version

When I bought a new pedometer last Saturday I decided to try out the 10,000 step daily walking regime. The premise is that most people do not walk enough - mostly from the couch to the kitchen and from the front door to the car, a distance far short of the recommended daily amount of exercise. Seriously, many people will find that they walk 3,000 or so steps just in the course of a daily routine, but a greater effort is required for optimal health.

Carrying around a pedometer, I'm finding that more exertion is needed than just my usual 30 minute walk and the cumulative pacing around the house. I need to take an additional walk to make up the deficit. Websites that discuss the 10,000 steps typically offer what they term as "creative" ideas to add these extra steps in the day, recommendations such as "use the stairs, walk your dog, or park the car far away from the store." These ideas don't work for me - I walk the dogs plenty enough, I don't have a car, and my pedometer doesn't read vertical distances. I've come up with the New York version.

The 10,000 Daily Steps in New York
• Realize that you've left your cell phone at the restaurant and then walk back to get it.
• Meet a friend for drinks far away from a subway stop, perhaps around Avenue C and E. 8th Street.
• On a whim, decide to walk the 10,000 steps from 8th Street and 108th Street.
• Give up that you'll ever get on the 4, 5, or 6 trains at rush hour and walk home.
• Wait until the subway floods again and walk to your appointment across the Brooklyn Bridge.
• Take a visiting friend to the Empire State Building and decide to take the stairs to the observation booth, because the wait for the elevator is too long.
• Go find a restaurant in the West Village on a Friday night without a dinner reservation.
• Take two continuing education classes, one at NYU and one at Columbia, and walk from classroom to classroom.
• Walk back and forth on Museum Mile five times and see every exhibition.
• Organize a march in support of congestion pricing.

Image: Walking Wall Street, a distance far short of 10,000 steps. Speaking of, I'll discuss the global recession on Saturday. I see a golden age of walking ahead of us.

The Long Bright Shadows Along Broadway

I walked south on Broadway this afternoon, enjoying the bright, almost blinding afternoon light on an unseasonably warm January day. I stopped at J & R on Park Row to buy a pedometer, and then I went to a coffee shop to drink a skinny latte and read the directions. Afterwards I decided to continue walking south along Broadway, stopping for a minute on Wall Street to check today's markets. It wasn't a bad day for trading. I proceeded down to Bowling Green, sat for a minute or two on a bench to bask in these long shadows, and then I took the subway home. Weather like this is a rare treat, and I was heartened to see so many New Yorkers out enjoying themselves. Tomorrow promises more of the same warm weather.

Measuring Miles in Manhattan

View Larger Map

Walking 20 blocks uptown or downtown in Manhattan is equivalent to one mile. An example then would be that a walk up 5th Ave. from 8th Street to 28th St. would be a mile and from 8th St. to 48th Street would be two miles. This comes in handy when assessing distances. A fast walk is a 15-minute mile, so if every single crosswalk light is in one's favor, then a walk from 8th St. to 48th. should take 30 minutes. It usually takes me closer to 40-45 minutes.

Rational measurement does not work for most of lower Manhattan. This is especially true for the West Village, a bohemian labyrinth. I have seen visitors, drunk on sugary cupcake frosting, walking the wrong direction on Bleecker Street. I just let them walk off their cupcakes.

Museums As Gyms: A New Art & Exercise Series From Walking Off the Big Apple

Readers of Walking Off the Big Apple know I like to combine walking and looking at art. They also know I don't like going to the gym and staring at myself in the mirror while walking absolutely nowhere. When I compiled the list of forthcoming museum exhibitions the other day, I began to think of the physical effort that seeing these exhibitions would require. Visiting the Met alone, I thought to myself, involves walking through miles of galleries and courtyards and ascending and descending stairs. When I walked around the New Museum last month, I immediately noticed the potential value of the museum's narrow staircase as a stairmaster. All the museums, in fact, afford excellent opportunities for exercise. The Guggenheim has that lovely circular ramp, and MoMA's stairs are preferable to the department store escalators.

I have decided, accordingly, to introduce the WOTBA Museum As Gym series. In this series I will evaluate New York's major museums (including the American Museum of Natural History) for their potential as exercise venues. I will not run through the museums, but I will walk purposely around and through the rooms and up and down the stairs. Many years ago, humorist Art Buchwald popularized the Six-Minute Louvre, the story of one American's achievement in visiting the three major attractions of the Paris museum - the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory, and the Mona Lisa, in record time. This New York version won't be anything like that. Well, it may be, sort of, but without the anti-cultural implications, I hope.

While exercising my right to look at art, so to speak, I intend to stop regularly, look at artwork, and take my pulse. I don't have a locker at any of these places, and I don't need one. I intend to wear regular clothes. I am a member of four of the major museums, so I expect this project to provide an economical alternative to real gym membership.

I'd like to get started with this series right away. I want to see the new galleries devoted to 19th century art at the Met, so I intend to start there. I will report back later with my evaluation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Fitness.

Image: Any exercise program starts with just a few steps. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, as seen behind the snowcones. 2006. New York, New York.

Two-Mile Walks, Mostly in Manhattan

• THE HARBOR: I often walk south on Broadway to Battery Park, passing by City Hall Park, the Woolworth Building, Trinity Church, and the Customs House (Museum of the American Indian). Sometimes I'll stop for a minute in the small Bowling Green Park. From the intersection of Broadway and Bleecker, Battery Park is about two miles away, and the walk takes thirty-forty minutes, depending on traffic. I catch the subway back.

• THE BRIDGE: One inter-boro walk I recommend: From City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan, walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to Cadman Plaza, visit Brooklyn's World War II memorial and then walk over to Henry St. Wander around Brooklyn Heights for the second mile. Or start in Brooklyn Heights and walk over to Manhattan. The walk feels like it has a solid beginning, middle, and end, and the views are spectacular. Henry Street has several nice small cafés, but if I've got some weight loss goals on my mind, I try to avoid cafés as a destination.

• THE VILLAGE: From the Arch in Washington Square Park, walk north along Fifth Avenue and turn west on 11th St., cross Sixth and Seventh Avenues, keep on W. 11 to the Hudson River. Return to the park via Barrow Street (a few blocks south) and Washington Place. A couple of things along W. 11th St. worth contemplating - the townhouse at 18 W. 11th St. that the Weather Underground blew up (there's a reference to the "bomb factory" in Across the Universe, Julie Taymor's transatlantic Beatles movie) and Julian S.'s pink palace at the far west end (more an electric rose color that I've come to love and cherish. JS can't help it. He was raised in Brownsville, Texas. He makes good movies. We should leave him alone).

• THE CATHEDRAL: Begin at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Riverside Park and walk north through the park. Turn at 116th St. and walk east through Columbia University and back south on Amsterdam to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

• THE MUSEUM: On hot days, cold days, or any other day, walking through the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a thrilling experience. One of the high points of 2007 was the opening of the new Roman and Greek galleries.

• THE PARK: From the American Museum of Natural History walk east through Central Park to Belvedere Castle. Walk through the Ramble and south along the western paths of the park until Strawberry Fields. Then walk east to the Bethesda Terrace. Walk south along the Mall to 59th Street and then back west to Columbus Circle. Walking along the Mall in Central Park is one of the great urban experiences. It's not at all like walking other malls.

• THE LIBRARY: My most straight-forward walk. From the Arch at Washington Square Park, walk north on Fifth Avenue past the Flatiron (@23rd St.), the Empire State Building (@34th St.) and then to Bryant Park and the New York Public Library. Walk around Bryant Park and find some place to sit.

When I hear someone say, "New York is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there," I'm tempted to reply, "Tell me about your parks, museums, libraries, cathedrals, neighborhoods, harbor, rivers and bridges."

Image: A little woozy sketch of Raymond Hood's Radiator Building from Bryant Park.