A Long Walk
June 15, 2023
After flying from Victoria to New York and arriving at my room in Queens late in the afternoon the day before, I decided that I would spend my first full day in the city on a long walk.
In the morning, I took the F train from Flushing all the way to Coney Island, which took over an hour and was very boring, but I was excited to start my walk there. Any time I’m in New York City, I try to visit Coney Island to wander around the boardwalk and think about the Godspeed You! Black Emperor song “Sleep”, which starts with a monologue from a street interview where an old man says “When I was very small, I even got lost at Coney Island, but they found me on the beach. And we used to sleep on the beach here, sleep overnight. They don’t do that anymore. Things changed, you see. They don’t sleep anymore on the beach…”
I had been planning this walk for a while, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to try and walk back to Flushing, or cross the bridge into Manhattan and go somewhere there. On the train, I passed a big cemetery and I decided that I would go back there to look at it. After wandering around Coney Island, I began my walk all the way back to Washington Cemetery. When I arrived, I saw a sign indicating that it would be closing for the day pretty soon. Looking at Google Maps on my phone, I saw that if I walked north for another hour I would arrive at Greenwood Cemetery, which was much larger and open to the public until 5pm.
When I got there, I walked around for a long time taking photos of the statues, and I even found the tombstone of Jean Michel Basquiat. Eventually, I passed a large old catacomb which was temporarily open because they were filming a horror movie inside of it! They were on a break, and someone from the crew let me walk through it with them, and then they gave me a bottle of water which I was very grateful for because it was hot and I didn’t bring any water with me. I left the cemetery and walked a bit longer until I found a Starbucks, where I knew I could sit for a while and rest while I charged my phone. With all the options New York held for my lunch meal, I decided for some reason that I would eat a pre-made tuna sandwich from a global coffee corporation. It wasn’t very good, but the rest and the meal was all I needed to keep going.
Afterwards, I walked the rest of the way through Brooklyn until I got to the Manhattan Bridge. The bridge was way longer than I imagined, but while crossing I saw some tags from my homie Moody NTW! I knew him from Victoria, but he had moved to New York a while ago and I was stoked to see some of his tags in the city during my walk. On the other side of the bridge, I walked to the Lower East Side skate park to check out my homie Lei’s curated display and write-up about Clayton Patterson’s photo documentation of the neighborhood’s residents and graffiti since the 80’s. Continuing through the LES, I saw some fill-ins on roll down gates from Monet and Tiko, who I also knew from back home.
Walking through the trendy micro-neighborhood known as “Dimes Square”, I stopped to place some stickers and a man wearing a luchador wrestling mask and all-over print pants and jacket reading “FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCK” yelled at me. He wanted me to give him some of my stickers, and asked me to put one of them on his motorbike.
After talking to him for a bit, I walked to Madison Square Park to meet up with my friend Teresa from Victoria, who was currently living in New York with her husband. We chatted as her little dog Rigatoni ran around the fenced-off section of the park, and then she let me come up into her apartment in the Flatiron District to have some more water and charge my phone. I met her husband and talked with both of them for a while. It was around 10pm at this point and I had been walking for about 9 hours, so I had become incredibly tired. I decided I would probably end my walk there, and take the train back to Queens. When I got to the station closest to their place, I decided that I would rather keep going. If I walked a bit longer, I could make it all the way to Grand Central Station instead. After almost 10 hours, and 30 kilometers of New York City covered in one day, I got on the train at Grand Central and went home.
