The Lost Art of Walking

6. A Man Walks Into a Bar

If anyone can claim to be ‘America’s most famous pedestrian’ it is probably Edward Payson Weston (1839–1929), always accepting that fame can be both local and transitory. He began his career in 1861 as the result of losing a bet, though no money was involved. The wager was that if Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election, Weston would walk the five hundred or so miles from Boston to Washington in ten days to get there in time for the inauguration. Lincoln won the election and Weston started walking, though he didn’t quite manage to do the walk in ten days. He was a couple of hours late and missed the inauguration ceremony, though he arrived in time to attend the ball that evening.

Weston’s walk was a grueling one. Walking fifty miles a day is no easy ride for anyone. He walked through rain and snow, was chased by dogs, was arrested once, fell down several times, and on one occasion sprained his ankle. There were compensations, however. Along the way he became a celebrity, cheered on by crowds, kissed by local girls, given free food and lodging, and he also had a sponsorship deal from the Grover & Baker Sewing Machine Company. At the inauguration ball the new president was happy to shake his hand.

Before long Weston turned pro. In 1867 he walked 1,300 miles from Portland, Maine, to Chicago in twenty-six days and won $10,000. In 1869 he walked 5,000 miles for $25,000. In 1871, in St. Louis, he walked backward for 200 miles. He spent eight years in Europe, competing against the best walkers there, and in England in 1879 he challenged ‘Blower’ Brown to walk over 500 miles, and won by covering the distance in a little under 142 hours.

Weston was a public figure and a showman. Postcards from the time show him to have been a flamboyant, barrel-chested dandy. He wore kid gloves, black velvet knee britches, and a cap with a plume. Sometimes he would deliver lectures along the way: ‘Tea Versus Beer’ was one.

Weston seemed only to get better as he got older. When he was seventy years old he planned to walk from New York to San Francisco in 100 days, but got delayed (he had to crawl through parts of the Rockies on his hands and knees), and it took him 104 days. This is the kind of failure most of us could live with, but Weston was bitterly disappointed, and to make amends he walked the return route (starting in Santa Monica) in 76 days.

Ultimately, New York was not kind to Weston. In his lectures he encouraged people to walk rather than drive, and in 1927, at age eighty-eight, he was run down by a New York taxicab — the automobile’s revenge. He was seriously injured, and had to spend the last two years of his life in a wheelchair.

It’s to be assumed that Weston was sober when he was run down. In 1884 in England he’d undertaken something called the Great Temperance Tour: 5,000 miles in one hundred days, with Sundays off, and the occasional performance of a temperance lecture titled ‘Struggling’. On the other hand, we do know that in 1871 he wagered $2,500 that he could walk a hundred miles in twenty-two hours with champagne as his only sustenance: a bet he won. Certainly after the accident he managed to find some patronage, and one can only hope it was enough to keep him in champagne, if that was what he wanted, since the pleasure of walking was no longer available to him.

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In Paul Auster’s novel City of Glass a detective named Quinn follows a character named Stillman as he wanders around New York’s Upper West Side. Eventually Quinn realizes that these wanderings, when plotted on a map, have a shape to them and are spelling out the phrase ‘Tower of Babel’. In fact he never does spell out the last two letters, EL, which Auster explains for the benefit of Gentiles is ‘the ancient Hebrew for God’.

Stillman’s wanderings make for a fine literary conceit, but even as you read the book, and look at Auster’s doodles that illustrate the walks, you realize that on the ground things wouldn’t be nearly so clear. Walking the shape of an O for instance is exceptionally difficult on a grid: Auster’s badly drawn O could be a badly drawn D, and the W in tower is so shapeless it might have been a V or a U, or a roller coaster, or as Quinn himself says, ‘a bird of prey perhaps, with its wings spread, hovering aloft in the air’. This is a big perhaps.

The walking of a shape, symbol, or word is one of the basic practices of psychogeography, what is called a ‘constrained walk’, exploring a city on foot while following a restrictive or perverse logic, which might include tossing a coin at each street corner to determine the route, walking so as to avoid all security cameras, walking in a dead straight line without regard to actual geography, and so on.

Psychogeography was a subject that had been exercising me, because I was about to go to New York for something called the Conflux psychogeography festival. With this in mind I’d been spending a lot of time staring at maps of the city, looking for patterns, hoping that the layout of streets might reveal some symbol or logo that could form the basis of my own constrained walk: a nuclear disarmament symbol, a Volkswagen trademark, a muted post horn. The only two I could make out on New York’s grid pattern were the cross and the swastika, and I didn’t feel much like walking either of those.

I was grateful to Auster’s book because it told me about the Roeblings, father and son, the men who built the Brooklyn Bridge. After Roebling Senior’s death, the son, Washington Augustus Roebling, took over the job and spent long periods working underwater supervising the building of the bridge’s caissons. He was down there so long he developed decompression sickness, the bends, and eventually became so disabled that he couldn’t walk and was confined to his home and had to watch the construction of the bridge from his window.

The psychogeography festival, it turned out, was to be based in Roebling Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at the McCaig-Welles art gallery. The event was, and I’m quoting now;

‘the annual New York City festival where visual and sound artists, writers, urban adventurers, researchers and the public gather for four days to explore the physical and psychological landscape of the city. Say hello to Brooklyn!’

In truth I wasn’t only going to New York for the festival. I was going because I love the city, because I love walking there, and I intended to do plenty of walking under my own steam outside the festival. New York is a city where you end up doing a great deal of walking even when you don’t consciously decide to go walking at all. When I arrived I had no specific walking project in mind, but I hoped something would present itself.

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There are plenty of people who will tell you that walking in New York is a universally difficult and painful business. They cite the lack of flow and rhythm, the stopping and starting as each block presents you with a traffic signal and the instruction to walk or not walk. Of course, New York pedestrians try their damnedest not to obey instructions, to walk when they’re told not to, but self-preservation demands that once in a while you need to stop and let the traffic have its way. Walking in New York involves a lot of waiting to walk.

I lived in New York between 1996 and 2003, an interesting time, not least because it involved the removal of the Walk / Don’t Walk signs from crossings, and the arrival of signs featuring images of a pedestrian (white) and a hand (red). The change must have cost millions, and like any good, cynical New Yorker I thought I detected a scam, a pay-off. Precisely for whose benefit did the city abandon the English language in favor of the signifier? Who in New York is so illiterate or so foreign as not to be able to recognize the words ‘Walk’ and ‘Don’t’?

The city fathers who designed the grid pattern of Manhattan’s streets claimed it would bring ‘beauty, order and convenience’ to the city, and to some practical extent that’s obviously true. The pattern does exert control, on both drivers and walkers, and the numerical arrangement means it’s hard to get thoroughly lost in Manhattan. However, within that structure people’s eccentricity, waywardness, hostility, and madness are free to manifest themselves and run wild. Perhaps a more random or ‘organic’ structure would create, indeed necessitate, more self-control. I know that’s another big perhaps.

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I first visited New York in the late 1970^s, when the city’s reputation for Darwinian, perhaps Malthusian, selection was part of its dangerous charm. You had to be ‘fit’ in certain specific ways. If you couldn’t take it, you didn’t belong there. If you failed to survive, you didn’t deserve to. The locals I knew offered a lot of wisdom on how you should walk the streets in order to remain unmolested. You should stride along, head down, showing you were aware of what was going on around you but weren’t too interested because there was somewhere really important you had to get to in a hurry. The other part of the equation was that you should never look like the most vulnerable person on the street. The bad guys were cowards: they only went after stragglers. As long as there was somebody nearby who looked more like a victim than you did, you were OK, comparatively.

It made for a particular and peculiar walking style, alert yet cocooned, and always hoping there was some wimpy college student or feeble old person within striking distance to divert attention from you. It was easy to get this wrong. I did my best but even so I got hassled: not mugged, not robbed, not attacked, not raped, but messed with. Maybe I was trying too hard, or maybe my attempt to look like a tough guy in a hurry was so unconvincing that it became the very thing that marked me out. In those days I stayed clean and sober as I walked the streets of New York. I’d have no more wandered drunkenly through Manhattan than I’d have worn a sign saying ‘Please Kill Me’.

When I started going back to New York in the mid-1990^s, and eventually living there, things were different. For one thing I was older, a little tougher, more substantial. I looked less like prey. But the city had changed, too. It was no longer bankrupt, for example, and there weren’t hookers in hot pants on every street corner. And many things about the culture had also changed. If you wanted drugs or pornography you didn’t have to make the trek to Times Square to get them — they were available in any and every neighborhood. People, of course, complained about the Disneyfication of Times Square, bemoaning the fact that the mean spirit and the dark heart of New York had become soft. Any fool could now walk safely in New York, and that just didn’t seem right.

A case can still be made, however, using accident statistics, that walking in New York is a thrillingly dangerous activity, as risky and reckless as playing Russian roulette. Of the 70,000 or so pedestrians who are injured by cars in America every year, 15,000 of them are New Yorkers, a staggering proportion. With 2.7 percent of the nation’s population the city has 21 percent of the injuries. Nearly three-quarters of these occur on crosswalks, and quite a few of them occur while the pedestrian is actually on the sidewalk. That makes for some edgy walking, surely.

In recent years, the figures have improved a little, and although this may owe something to better road design and increased public-safety awareness, it’s also because people are simply walking less, because they’re scared of being run over.

Alcohol plays a surprising part in those statistics. It’s not usually the driver who’s been drinking. Drunken driving accounts for just a few percent of pedestrian deaths, but in 1998 one-third of pedestrians killed by a motor vehicle were legally drunk. Over the years 1998–2001 the proportion had increased to 40 percent. It will surprise nobody to learn that considerably more drunken pedestrian deaths occur at night than in the daytime. Careening around New York City at night with a snootful of booze is such a high-risk activity, it’s a surprise that anybody survives at all.

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You could be forgiven for not knowing what a psychogeog-raphy festival in Brooklyn might be like. I had little idea myself.

Indeed, you could be forgiven for not knowing what psychogeography is, period, but with that I can help. Psychogeography is described rather elegantly by the author Merlin Coverley as ‘what happens when psychology meets geography’. It’s a French invention, the brainchild of Guy Debord (1931-94), a Lettrist, then a Situationist, who defined it, in 1955, in a paper called ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’ as ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’. This is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far, and Debord himself didn’t go very much further.

The chief, glaring objection to Debord’s definition is that it’s hard to see that there are any ‘laws’ whatsoever about the way we experience environments as we walk. Rather, there is a cluster of imprecise and frequently conflicting personal impressions and preferences. There is a general consensus that walking in the Tivoli Gardens is preferable to wandering along a street filled with dangerous crackheads, but it wouldn’t be hard to find some urban explorer who took the opposite view. You and I walk down the street together and come to the opening of a dark alleyway — I think it’s intriguing, you think it’s scary. Some people think that Disneyland’s Main Street, U.S.A. is a walkway of charm and winsome nostalgia — others don’t.

These different reactions obviously say something about individual psychologies, preferences, and previous experiences in dark alleyways or main streets, but surely nobody is experiencing the effect of anything as hard and fast as a ‘law’. In which case psychogeography seems to be concerned with a minor statute like the prohibition of jaywalking rather than a universal law like gravity.

Walking was, and remains, psychogeography’s main mode of operation — specifically, in French, the ‘derive’, in English the ‘drift’, which Debord defined as ‘locomotion without a goal’, abandoning your usual walking habits and letting the environment draw you in, letting your feet take you where they will and where the city dictates. By drifting, he believes, we detect the ‘ambiance’ of different parts of the city, their special feeling and psychic atmospheres. If we let ourselves drift we are drawn by the ‘unities of ambiance’. Naturally he accepts that these ambiances may not be unified at all, and may change abruptly from one street to the next. All this strikes me as perfectly, unarguably true, but also patently obvious to anyone who’s walked though a city, and not quite worth the effort of whipping up into a theory.

Where Debord becomes insufferable is in his insistence that the drift should be a group activity. Yes, he says, you could drift by yourself, but ‘all the indications are that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have reached the same awakening of consciousness, since the cross-checking of these groups’ impressions makes it possible to arrive at objective conclusions’. This is obviously twaddle. If they’ve all reached the same level of consciousness, then what kind of cross-checking can possibly go on, let alone objectivity? But the real objection is to that very phrase ‘awakening of consciousness’. It sounds, at best, doctrinaire, at worst Stalinist, with a broad hint of the clique and the school playground. ‘You can’t come walking with us because you haven’t reached the required level of awakened consciousness’.

But perhaps I am taking Debord too seriously. Other members of the Situationist International mockingly referred to him as ‘The Bore’, although coming from a member of the Situationist International this is a bit rich. Then again, the group remained small, because of Debord’s practice, as David Bellos puts it in his biography of Georges Perec, of ‘excommunicating members one by one, until he was in fact the only one left’.

Debord did insist that ‘the derive entails playfully constructive behavior’, and the idea that the city can be a place of elaborate fun and games is an appealing one, and it sounded as though there would be plenty of that sort of thing on offer at the Conflux festival. For instance, there was ‘The World Is My Studio’, in which an artist named Sitka was giving ‘a narrated tour in which she talks about everyday objects and spaces as if they were her work, contextualizing things like moving cars, people’s pets and social gestures as the products of her artistic practice’.

There was Paul Harley’s ‘Pansy Project’, in which he revisited ‘city streets planting pansies where he has received verbal homophobic abuse. These self-seeding pansies act as a living memorial to this abuse and operate as an antidote to it — each pansy’s location is named after the abuse received then posted on his website’.

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Things were scheduled to start at ten o’clock on Thursday morning at Conflux headquarters in the art gallery on Roebling Street. I got up in good time to discover that New York was caught in the fierce tail of a hurricane. It had never crossed my mind that it might rain in New York in September, and I had no idea what effect it would have on the festivities. I’d thought I might get to the gallery by walking over the Williamsburg Bridge, but that now seemed unnecessarily challenging. I told myself that walking in the rain had a long, respectable, and bittersweet history — even so, I took the subway from Manhattan to Williamsburg.

When I got to the gallery, just a little before ten, it was closed, and two hassled young women were struggling hopelessly with the lock on the front door. It looked like they had enough on their plates without answering questions from me. There was a café next door where a few would-be psychogeographers were sheltering from the rain and waiting for something to happen. I joined them.

Only very gradually did it become apparent that the start had been delayed, not because of some organizational glitch, but because of sabotage. The gallery wasn’t simply locked, it was sealed. Someone, a disgruntled artist it was assumed, had come along in the night with a caulking gun, glued the gallery door shut, and squirted more of the caulk into the lock. Then, on the concrete in front of the gallery, he (it was surely a he) had painted the sentences ‘Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’

The gallery walls were not torn down, but a locksmith duly arrived and opened the door so that the group of us, twenty-five or so by now, who’d gathered in the café were belatedly able to get into the gallery. Eventually some opening remarks were made by Christina Ray, the curator of the festival. This was the fourth Conflux, she said, and over the years the festival’s events had become more technologically based and less ‘analog’. A lot was now happening online, a lot of the psychogeography was now virtual. I found this disappointing. There are few activities more analog than walking. And she said that whereas in previous years Conflux had often featured maps to help you find your way around, this year there would be maps to help you get lost.

I looked out the window and saw that in front of the gallery, in the rain, there was a young woman sweeping the street. This, I knew, was a walking art project entitled ‘Sweeping (Sidewalk Performances #1)’ by an artist named D. Jean Hester. By her own account, ‘I will sweep the sidewalks near the gallery. Based on a daily activity of shop owners and residents in my urban LA neighborhood, sweeping the public sidewalk is an expression of pride in one’s place, as well as a gift given to others who use the area. While sweeping and engaged in a ‘helpful’ activity for the neighborhood, I may greet people who pass by with a ‘Good morning!’ Will the activity of sweeping make me more approachable, allowing people to interact with me in a less guarded fashion?’

I didn’t have an absolute answer for her question. True, I did approach her, but the interaction was guarded on both sides. By the time I got out to the street she’d stopped sweeping. She’d been at it for all of ten minutes, and that was another disappointment. I’d imagined she’d be sweeping throughout the festival, for the whole four days, for a hundred hours or so of continuous endurance sweeping and walking. I liked the sound of that. But no.

She told me it was really hard to sweep in the rain, what with holding her umbrella and all. I asked her how large an area she was planning to cover, and she said that given the rain, she was just going to do the small stretch in front of the gallery, but maybe when the rain stopped she’d do the whole block. Again, I had been overambitious on her behalf. I’d thought she might try to sweep the whole zip code.

Then I asked whether she was sweeping the road as well as the sidewalk, since I could see there was a lot of garbage lying there in the street. No, she said, just the sidewalk. We agreed it was good to set yourself limits.

The first event in the gallery was a ‘discussion session’ with an artist named Sue Huang, about her ongoing project ‘Street Cut Ups’. It involved walking the streets of wherever she happened to be, looking for bits of text on signs, posters, ads, and so on, which she would cut out, take away, and then stick together to reveal other, more subversive meanings. It came as no surprise that she claimed to be influenced by the ‘cut up’ method, and by the ‘literary play’ of Oulipo. It was more surprising, and disappointing, that her press release referred to someone by the name of William S. Borroughs (sic).

The discussion session consisted of the artist sitting at a table in the gallery with a laptop in front of her, like a nervous vendor at a trade show, as people milled around her, and occasionally someone would stop and ask, metaphorically at least, ‘What are you selling?’ Again I had unreasonable expectations. I’d thought the artist might lead a tour, and we’d walk through the streets of Brooklyn, slashing at posters, snatching words, liberating them, performing a specialized form of anti-logorrhea, sucking words in rather than squirting them out. But we looked out through the window at the rain, and it became all too clear that nobody was going anywhere. Except me. This session was due to last an hour to be followed by a session with a different artist, which I suspected might be all too similar. I couldn’t face that. I left the gallery, went back to Manhattan, and kept my powder dry.

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The next day I was signed up for something called ‘Public Parking’, a walking tour of certain Brooklyn parking lots, organized by the Temporary Travel Office, the brainchild of one Ryan Griffis.

I’m a big fan of walking in parking lots, partly because it’s simply a perverse thing to do, but also because it’s a small act of reclamation and defiance. Taking a walk, even just a shortcut, through a parking lot is a way of saying that this open space, and sometimes it can be the only open space for miles around, isn’t the sole province of cars and drivers. And if there’s a chance of being run down by cars maneuvering into or out of parking bays, then so be it.

I felt there had to be some ironies in a walking tour of parking lots, but I wasn’t sure that the Temporary Travel Office’s ironic fault line was in the same place as my own. Certainly the professed purpose of the walk was po-faced enough, which didn’t mean that it was easy to take it entirely seriously.

‘Public Parking’, said the Temporary Tourist Office, ‘is an investigation into the realities of Utopian thought as materialized in the mundane and pragmatic spaces of parking lots. Parking lots, one of the most visible, yet overlooked, artifacts of American mobility reveal the concrete space required to store the supposed tools of Utopian ideals’. There was quite a bit more of this stuff, including a reference to ‘participatory mapping of personal Utopias upon the topography of property development’. I tried to remain optimistic.

The tour started at four in the afternoon. It was still raining hard. A dozen or so of us packed into the Temporary Travel Office’s rented van, dripping and steaming, and for forty-five minutes Ryan Griffis, a pleasant, friendly, nervous, enthusiastic man, drove us through Friday afternoon rush-hour traffic, heading eastward for the first of the parking lots.

As we drove through a Brooklyn of factories, workshops, warehouses, and self-storage units, we heard a recorded commentary, interspersed with music, telling us facts and figures about parking. This was perfectly unironic as far as I could tell, and it sounded like urban studies research rather than art, but this suited many of the people in the van, since it appeared there were some genuine parking lot scholars and enthusiasts onboard.

The traffic was impenetrable, the drive was slow, and the recorded commentary had ended long before we arrived at the first lot. This was the Grant Avenue Municipal Parking Lot adjacent to the Grant Avenue subway stop on the A line in deepest eastern Brooklyn. It had been chosen precisely because it was so far from anywhere.

It was a nice enough parking lot in its way, spacious, not full, a place you could leave your car without fearing it would be stolen or stripped down, and it had a surface that was smoother and better maintained than anything we’d driven over on the way there. There were signs telling you how to park: at 90 degrees to the retaining wall, and inside the parking bay, and to reverse into the spot so that leaving was made easier. Our van pulled in and parked.

Rain was sluicing down, hard as ever, but some of us, though by no means all, felt a duty to get out of the van and set foot on the lot. But none of us walked very far. We huddled under umbrellas, walked maybe a hundred yards from one corner of the lot to another, making the kind of conversation you might make on a tour of parking lots with people you didn’t know.

Then we all returned to the van and drove a very long way back west to see two other lots, one private rather than municipal, and one that was no longer a parking lot at all but was now ‘developed’ into the construction site for a theater designed by Frank Gehry. Nobody left the van at these sites — in fact the van didn’t even stop. As a professed walking tour it was a bust, and we were running late because of the traffic. By now we were a van full of restless, fidgety, full-bladdered tourists.

As we drove back to the art gallery, we lost the traffic and eventually passed through an amazing landscape of gorgeous industrial ruin. I had, and still have, only a sketchy idea of exactly where we were, somewhere near the water and in sight of the Williamsburg Bridge, an area of big, blank, formidable buildings interspersed with empty and ruined lots. There was nobody visible on the streets, certainly nobody walking, and you couldn’t have said there was any activity as such, and yet there was evidence of inscrutable things going on: anonymous trucks parked in front of loading bays, Dumpsters full of intriguing waste, barred and bolted doors and windows suggesting something precious or forbidden on the other side. I’d have been happy to walk around there on my own, and the next day I tried.

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The rain had finally stopped by then and I returned to Conflux, this time for a lecture by Denis Wood called ‘Lynch Debord! About Two Psychogeographies’, but I gave myself a couple of hours to take a walk before it started. Denis Wood is the author of a fine and light-footed book called The Power of Maps, which discusses the ways in which maps serve all sorts of purposes, very few of them having much to do with getting from A to B. Every map, he says, is made in somebody’s interest, and that interest is very unlikely to coincide with yours. I was hoping he’d say a few droll and irreverent things about Debord and psychogeography.

In truth I never got back to the exact streets we’d driven through the previous day, and I told myself it didn’t matter much. A walk was still a walk even if it didn’t take you exactly where you wanted it to. The area I found myself walking in wasn’t quite as rough or blighted as the one I’d seen through the van windows, but it was rough and blighted nevertheless. And at one moment I found myself under the roaring expressway, quite alone, standing on the forecourt of a garage next to a wrecked, rusted, and very beautiful 1950^s Cadillac, which I think always gives class to a neighborhood.

But the best thing I saw, by far, was a huge factory built of red brick, a manufacturer of rubber goods, with a sign outside that said ‘If it’s made of Rubber we have it’. This was good in itself, but then I saw the name of the company (and I would still have some trouble believing it if I hadn’t taken a photograph): it was called the Auster Rubber Co. Inc. I walked all the way around the block that contained it, aware that I was tracing a rectangle that couldn’t seriously be mistaken for any letter, however misshapen.

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The Conflux lectures were being held in the back room of a nearby bar, the Lucky Cat. I got there five minutes before the Denis Wood lecture was due to start and I just about managed to get in the door. The crowd was spilling out of the back room into the front. There was standing room only and not much of that, and although I could see someone far away in the back, standing beside a screen and talking, I couldn’t hear anything he said.

This lecturer, it turned out, wasn’t Denis Wood, but the guy delivering the preceding lecture. There was no sign that this event was about to end, and even when it did, it seemed unlikely that the crowd would clear out and free up any seats. Denis Wood was going to be a hot ticket — if you were in possession of a chair down at the front you weren’t going to give it up.

The Lucky Cat was as hot, humid, and packed as a New York subway platform in highest summer. Sweat dripped off me and off everyone else. There was a dense, cloying smell of fried food and ketchup in the air. Maybe if I could have got to the bar and bought myself a drink it would have been different, but there was no way I could get through. I thought I might fall down or throw up. Suddenly I realized there was no way in the world I could bear to be in that space for another second, much less to stand there for the amount of time it would take to watch someone deliver a lecture on Debord and psychogeography.

I staggered out to the street. The evening was a warm one, but compared to the bar it offered a blast of cool, bracing air. I stood for a minute or two watching as more people arrived for the lecture — at first I thought I should join them, go back in, and tough it out. Then I thought, no, I don’t have to do that. I don’t have to do that at all. There was no duty, no obligation, nobody checking up on me. I was perfectly free to miss the lecture, to abandon my plan, to walk away — and that’s exactly what I did.

And as I went, I realized that walking away is one of life’s greatest pleasures, whether it’s walking away from a bad job, a bad relationship, a bad educational course, or a bad psychogeography festival. There was an extraordinary sunset over Williamsburg that night. The clouds looked like orange lizard skin and there were people on the street photographing it. The sky was putting on a show to celebrate my decision. I felt fantastic: I’d escaped. I was giddy with relief.

I had no complaints with anyone at Conflux. They were what they were. They did what they did. My needs and expectations weren’t their responsibility. I blamed myself. I was too cynical, too unhip, too much of a sourpuss, a loner, a solitary walker. And perhaps it’s absurd to call yourself a loner and a solitary walker when your chief walking pleasure involves exploring the streets of major metropolitan cities, but that was how I felt about New York, that it was a city crammed with solitary walkers, just like me. I didn’t need a guide or a map. I’d find my own damned way of walking this city. I would find my own version of a ‘constrained walk’.

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By then, it seemed to me that all walks are constrained walks one way or another. They’re inevitably constrained by time, by our imagination, by our physical limitations, and by the special character of the terrain we’re walking. One way to deal with the whole notion of constraint is simply to walk down every street in a given area or zone. This is certainly programmatic, but it does create a kind of pedestrian democracy, and makes all streets, all routes, equal. It also certainly avoids all the unities of ambiance.

The annals of pedestrianism are littered with people who have walked down every street of major cities. The queen is Phyllis Pearsall, the creator of the London A-Z. Starting in 1935, she walked 3,000 miles, mapping 23,000 streets, and working (though not necessarily walking) for eighteen hours a day. As far as I’m aware, nobody has attempted the same thing in the five boroughs of New York, but I know of three people who have systematically walked down every street in Manhattan, and there are surely more.

Thomas J. Keane, a naval officer, did it in the early fifties, and according to the New York Times, finished on December 15, 1954. Caleb Smith, a librarian at Columbia University, did it between 2002 and 2004, and on his website says he ‘walked over 700 miles’, which is very different from the mileage claimed by another Manhattan completist, Joseph D. Terwilliger, also connected to Columbia University, as an associate professor of neuroscience. He claims to have covered 1,279 miles, and he is certainly willing to enter into a debate about what constitutes a street, and indeed what constitutes Manhattan. He first did it in 2002, but it took him the whole year. And then he did it again in eighty days, between October 28, 2004, and January 14, 2005.

Terwilliger said his least favorite neighborhoods were SoHo and the Upper East Side because there were ‘too many tourists, ‘suits’, and folks who would be scared to death by the thought of walking around Mott Haven or Crotona Park East after dark’. Terwilliger also claimed that the most dangerous zip code was ‘10039 (South of the Polo Grounds Projects around the 150^s and Frederick Douglass)’. Even he didn’t walk there at night. He writes:

‘When walking here at 3 PM a group of men hanging out on the corner turned to me and said ‘Good afternoon, Officer’.…Nice to know I looked like an undercover cop — being a big tall guy with short hair is a good thing sometimes.’

But only sometimes, I think.

Clearly, on this brief New York trip of mine I wasn’t going to be able to complete anything of any great substance. Nevertheless I was still keen, edging toward desperate, to undertake a walk that would mean something and have some psychogeographic resonance to me, if nobody else.

♦

When I lived in New York in the 1990^s I learned to drink martinis, and I also learned that sometimes it was better not to drink martinis. I often thought the Manhattan cocktail would have been more appropriate, given its name, but for me it never addressed the pleasure and pain receptors in quite the way a martini did. A martini felt more like a drug than a drink. It had my name on it. It hit hard: it wasn’t for wimps.

After a martini or two I would walk the dark streets of Manhattan feeling a little ‘bagged’, a bit ‘lit up’, with a new sense of power and possibility, and as I found out later, risk being run down. I wouldn’t have cared. Certain edges were taken off and certain others (the ones to do with feelings of invulnerability and inflated self-esteem) were sharpened up in their place. It wasn’t quite sensory derangement à la De Quincey, but it was definitely an altered state, and that was good enough. Sometimes it felt like flying as much as walking.

I was two martinis to the good when I first proposed to the woman who’s now my wife, but who was then more or less a complete stranger. We were walking down Crosby Street, an access street parallel to lower Broadway, and I had spent a total of one hour in her company. She didn’t say no.

Later, once we were an item, there were many nights when we walked through Terwilliger’s hated SoHo, where her office was, heading north up Thompson or Sullivan Street, and ahead of us was the illuminated Empire State Building and behind us the illuminated Twin Towers, and we said that one of these days we’d have to go up to Windows on the World, the swank bar and restaurant in the north tower, and have a martini or two. It never happened. We didn’t know there was any reason to rush.

♦

I wasn’t in New York on September 11, 2001. I was three thousand miles away in England. My wife was two and a half thousand miles away in the opposite direction visiting her sister in Washington State. After the event I spent some time wondering whether we should consider ourselves lucky, or if we should regret having been absent at such a crucial and calamitous moment in history. There was some guilt, too, because by then I felt like a New Yorker and it seemed only right that I should have to go through what other New Yorkers had gone through.

As soon as I could, I got on a plane and went back to New York. Once there I walked the streets, and saw that dust and shreds of paper were still falling all over the city, and there was a strange smell in the air that was reported to be horrifying, a combination of jet fuel and incinerated human flesh, they said, but it really wasn’t so bad.

And I did what everybody else was doing. I walked to Ground Zero, to see what there was to be seen. I joined the procession of people a mile or more from the zone, on lower Broadway, a long stream of walkers that got broader and flowed less freely as it neared its destination. It was a solemn crowd but not a quiet one. This was New York. There was some yelling, some bad temper, and at least half the crowd was shooting stills or video, though I don’t know what they were seeing.

We were kept at bay, behind barriers. The viewpoint we were allowed was a distant one, and even the most powerful telephoto lens wouldn’t have got you in very close. We could see rubble, a spout of water being hosed from a great height, and we could just about make out the famous twisted, perforated façade, but it wasn’t nearly so clear or so dramatic as the pictures we’d seen in newspapers and on TV.

In the end there was very little to see. As a place of pilgrimage, Ground Zero seemed inadequate. It was a walk without a goal, though not a psychogeographical drift. I had a sense of frustration and deflation. I wanted more from this walk. I noticed that all around me people were crying, and that seemed incomprehensible at first. There was nothing there to cry about, no relics, no triggers, nothing. I found myself unmoved.

And then, up against a barrier that was blocking our way, I saw a member of the National Guard, an older man, fat-faced, densely built, not looking much like a soldier. A stream of people kept walking up to him, and he handed something to each of them, a paper tissue that they could cry into. He did it quietly, undramatically, and the gentleness and dignity of the gesture moved me more than anything else I saw that day. It was as much comfort as anyone could offer, or had any right to receive. The tears started rolling down my own cheeks and I didn’t try to stop them.

I walked down to Ground Zero again a little less than a year later, a week before the one-year anniversary. There were very few people there at that time, and the site had the windswept feel of a tourist attraction out of season. There was even less to see than there had been on that first visit, but now you could get right up to the wire fence and peer down into the vast excavated pit, six stories deep. It had all gone. The evidence had all been taken away. You had to be impressed by the sheer industry and determination that had been required to clear away all that horror and debris and chaos.

I went there again a week later, on the anniversary itself, when the crowds had returned, and only families and VIPs were allowed anywhere near the pit. The rest of us just milled about in the surrounding streets. The front page of the New York Post ran a photograph of the standing Twin Towers with the headline ‘Lest We Forget’. I found myself infuriated, spitting with rage. What kind of attention-deficient rubes did they take us for? We were being entreated to remember something none of us could possibly have forgotten. Did they think it might somehow have slipped our minds?

And I walked to Ground Zero again the day after I abandoned my psychogeography festival, more or less five years after 9/11. As ever there was nothing much to see, although some work had been done to make the place more tourist-friendly: walkways, notice boards, signage. Still, there was a sense of lost purpose. The crowd was thin. The pilgrimage element had disappeared. You didn’t need to join any stream of walkers. Tour buses were pulling up very close — you could hop off, take a quick stroll, take a few photographs, get back on the bus. And in order that the visitors might have something to look at, a series of large, iconic photographs had been mounted on the chain-link fences surrounding the site. In the absence of anything more tangible, people were taking photographs of the photographs.

♦

I headed a little ways uptown. I needed a martini. I found myself on University Place, near Washington Square, an area where a man might reasonably find a bar to serve him what he needed. It was a busy night, everywhere was crowded, and when I saw a restaurant with a bar that opened onto the street and a couple of empty stools, I went in and sat down. I now saw that I was in an Indian fusion restaurant, not the obvious home for great cocktail making, but I tried to be positive. I asked the girl behind the bar for a martini and a look of panic flashed across her face. This was her first day, she told me. She’d never made a martini before. She turned to one of the waitresses for help and her friend talked her through the process. For a first try it really wasn’t bad.

I’d picked up a free magazine on the way in, so that I’d have something to read as I drank, and now I saw there was an ad on the back page showing a map of Manhattan. I looked at it with a certain desperation. I was feeling more than ever the need to do a ‘good’, ‘proper’, ‘constrained’ New York walk. I hoped that some walking route would leap up off the map and demand to be done.

And then — OK, I’d sunk most of a martini by then — as I stared at the pattern of streets near to where I was, I quite clearly saw the shape of a martini glass. Really. A stretch of University Place formed the base of the glass. Eighth and 9th streets heading west formed the uprights of the stem, while Christopher Street and Greenwich Avenue diverged at equal angles to form the two sides of the conical bowl. The triangle was completed by Hudson Street, not an absolutely straight line across the top since it contained a slight kink or rise about halfway along, but that was OK, and could be thought to resemble the meniscus of liquid that rises above the rim of a truly full martini glass.

I drew on the map, emphasizing the outline. What else was there to do but walk the streets that represented the shape of the glass, and at certain strategic points around the route find a bar and have another martini? There was something a bit dumb about it, but it didn’t seem a whole lot dumber than some of the things the Conflux crowd had come up with. It featured walking, martinis, exploring the city, imposing a shape on the environment. What more could a psychogeographer want?

As a route for a walk, and a bar crawl, it had its attractions. It took me past and/or into some famous watering holes: the Cedar Tavern, home of the fighting abstract expressionists, and from where Jack Kerouac was supposedly ejected for peeing in an ashtray — the White Horse, where Bob Dylan went to hear the Clancy Brothers — the Stonewall, scene of gay resistance, though closed and available for rent when I walked by. And on Greenwich Avenue I saw, painted on a wall, the outline of a muted post horn — if you’re in the right frame of mind a post horn can look a lot like a martini glass.

But you know what, all in all it was another bust. The overriding problem was that walking the streets gave no sense of following the shape of a martini glass. Even though I had it clearly enough in my head, it still didn’t compute. You’d have had to be a bird or a tracking satellite or a god to see what I was doing down here. As Denis Wood says, ‘The map is not the territory’.

It occurred to me, not exactly for the first time, that psychogeography didn’t have much to do with the actual experience of walking. It was a nice idea, a clever idea, an art project, a conceit, but it had very little to do with any real walking, with any real experience of walking. And it confirmed for me what I’d really known all along, that walking isn’t much good as a theoretical experience. You can dress it up any way you like, but walking remains resolutely simple, basic, analog. That’s why I love it and love doing it. And in that respect — stay with me on this — it’s not entirely unlike a martini. Sure you can add things to martinis, like chocolate or an olive stuffed with blue cheese or, God forbid, cotton candy, and similarly you can add things to your walks — constraints, shapes, notions of the mapping of Utopian spaces — but you don’t need to. And really, why would you? Why spoil a good drink? Why spoil a good walk?

I abandoned my own constrained walk with as much enthusiasm as I’d abandoned the psychogeography festival. I walked the city feeling remarkably free, a spring in my step and several much-needed martinis in my bloodstream.

♦

Guy Debord was a serious drinker who enjoyed the derangement of the senses. He drank as he drifted, and had no shame about it. In his memoir Panegyric he writes:

‘I never for a moment dreamed of concealing this perhaps questionable side of my personality, and it was clearly evident for all those who met me more than once or twice…

‘At first, like everyone, I appreciated the effect of mild drunkenness, then very soon I grew to like what lies beyond violent drunkenness, once that stage is past: a terrible magnificent peace…Although in the first decades I may have allowed only slight indications to appear once or twice a week, I was in fact continuously drunk for periods of several months.’

He was undoubtedly drunk while conducting some of his psychogeographic drifts. He was probably drunk when he formulated some of the tenets of psychogeography. He adds, ‘I have wandered extensively in several great European cities, and I appreciated everything that deserved appreciation. The catalog on this subject could be vast……’ He then proceeds to catalog not great sights, much less unities of ambiance, but rather the joys of alcohol: first, beer — English, Irish, German, Czech, and Belgian — then he goes on to celebrate wines, spirits, cocktails, punches et al.

Debord ended his life as a scholarly recluse, living in his cottage in Champot, in the Upper Loire, with his second wife, Alice Becker-Ho. The photographs taken of him in the early 1990^s show a plump, happy man, usually with a drink and a pipe in his hand. He doesn’t look much like a walker, but we know that walkers come in all shapes and sizes. In any event, as he got older he did far more drinking than walking, and eventually he developed a form of polyneuritis brought on by alcohol. The pain was so intolerable that he committed suicide in 1994 by shooting himself in the heart.

Debord never visited New York, but in his article ‘Theory of the Derive’ he writes:

‘Within architecture itself, the taste for deriving tends to promote all sorts of new forms of labyrinths made possible by modern techniques of construction.’

— and quotes from an uncited newspaper article describing a proposed New York apartment block.

‘The apartments of the helicoidal building will be shaped like slices of cake. One will be able to enlarge or reduce them by shifting movable partitions. The half-floor gradations avoid limiting the number of rooms, since the tenant can request the use of the adjacent section on either upper or lower levels. With this setup three four-room apartments can be transformed into one twelve-room apartment in less than six hours.’

Debord concludes that here;

‘One can see the first signs of an opportunity to derive inside an apartment’.

He was wrong about this, too. If he had ever been in one of the minute apartments where most New Yorkers actually live, he’d have seen just how limited the prospects are for the at-home drift. In fact, it’s always seemed to me that one of the reasons New Yorkers spend so much time walking the streets is precisely because their apartments are so small. They need to get out and walk, to experience the city’s ‘beauty, order and convenience’ so that they don’t go completely mad. This may also be why they need to walk to their nearest bar for a dry martini.