- There are a lot of parts of New York
where you hear a lot of birds,
which you might not think would be the case,
and a lot of times you don't hear them
just cause you're not listening for them.
- So she said she forgot.
- How you doing?
- Oh hi, what are you doing?
- I'm doing this big walking project.
I'm walking every block of the five boroughs.
- Okay.
- Over like a few years.
That's kind of my progress map.
- Okay, you walked a lot.
- I got a lot of Staten Island left.
- Was you always slim, or you was bigger than that?
I was always about the same.
- You were the same?
'Cause you never know.
People lose weight after all that walking.
- I know.
I never lost any weight.
Still just little gut here,
never goes away.
- You got it?
Need a hand?
- Yeah, I got it.
Okay.
- Thank you.
- Nice garden.
How long has it been open?
- Oh man, we've been here for 22 years.
- Oh yeah?
I'm Matt.
I see a lot of community gardens, but this is a nice one.
- We've been here 12 years.
Oh yeah, there you are.
Back when I was young.
Still look young to me.
- Okay, yeah.
♪ And you know just what I wanna do ♪
But you guys got the fuck out.
- So I don't have an apartment,
which is a big part of how I can afford to do this walk
by not having to pay rent.
The place where I'm staying today
is a friend of mine's apartment.
He has two kids, including a 9 year old daughter
whose room this is,
although it's pretty much my style too.
I would probably decorate a place just like this,
so it feels like home.
I have probably stayed at somewhere
around 50 different places.
I've stayed in a very wide variety of places.
You know, from someone who has roommates,
like the couch in their kind of common room,
to my own bedroom in like really nice apartments.
Sometimes I'll just stay with someone for a couple days.
Sometimes I'll be at a place
for two weeks or more, house sitting,
and sometimes I'll just be at a place for a day or two.
A lot of the places are just friends of mine.
Some of them, I'll just say,
hey, can I come over for a couple days?
And there are a few people I've met
who just found my blog and emailed me
and invited me to come over.
Ow.
Cat sitting is one way that I find a lot of places to stay.
I've probably taken care of maybe two dozen different cats,
so this one here is Mufasa,
and let's see.
I've also watched Remy,
Ed and Huck,
Misha and Nico,
Mishi and Shimi,
Greta, Nanya,
Miss Kitty and Ralph,
Frosty, Dizzy and Miles,
Quippy,
Henry,
and then a few dogs.
Milo, Sugar, another little guy,
I can't even remember his name right now.
I think if I were really kind of organized about it,
I could just cat sit for the rest of my life
and like never have an apartment.
I mean, I kind of estimate that I spend on average probably
about $15 a day on basically,
pretty much transportation and food are the only real costs.
Some people, I think, are so used to a life of spending
that my lifestyle seems miserable to live or something,
that I'm like depriving myself of the basics of life.
I mean, every once in a while I'm like,
oh, I'd like to get a sandwich,
but that'll cost 6 bucks,
and I can go home and eat rice and beans for 75 cents.
So it's just kind of helped me find more satisfaction
in the basic stuff of life that's free
or that's really cheap,
but yeah, pretty much everything else,
I don't really miss it.
This is Bowling Green.
Transfer is available to the Staten Island Ferry.
- Something people have said a lot in regards
to what I'm doing,
that I could be doing something much more useful
for the world,
so that's definitely criticism that I've heard a lot of.
I mean, they just kind of consider me to be some kid
who graduated from college
and never did anything with his life.
When I tell them I'm doing this walk,
they assume there's some plan to turn this
into some kind of revenue stream when I'm done,
whether that's writing a book or becoming a tour guide
or whatever it is you could do with this kind of knowledge,
and I don't think there's a whole lot
of commercial use for it.
The people in the world who captivate me the most
are people who do something just because they want to do it.
They're not making any money off of,
maybe that other people think is stupid.
So I'm of two minds about it.
I have no problem with people thinking
that I'm just being a worthless bum,
but I'm also fully engaged in this thing
that I really care about
and that I think is important in some kind
of intangible way that I can't really describe,
well, anyway.
The point of it all,
I mean, I don't entirely know what the point is.
I'm kind of learning that as I go along too.
- Matt and I have been friends
since I joined him for his walk across every bridge
that touches Manhattan.
It was a 35 mile walk.
We started in New Jersey,
walked over the George Washington Bridge,
and then made our way down the East River,
finishing at the Brooklyn Bridge.
So when Matt was starting to prepare
for his New York walk,
I volunteered to make a website for him.
The original idea was that he would post one photo a day,
and then as he got on his walk,
he started posting more and more photos.
Also, Matt sort of ended up using the website
a lot differently.
Matt started doing a ton of research.
He found a thing.
He got curious about it.
He'd stay up all night reading newspapers from the 1800s,
and write a really perfect description
of what this bridge was
and why it's interesting and important.
I haven't looked at stats in a long time.
I don't think Matt looks at stats.
It's not like a ton of people are coming to his website.
I would guess he probably has a dozen or so people
looking a day, coming to visit a day.
I suspect it's pretty low, frankly.
- This is Mount Olivet Baptist Church.
It's one of New York's many churgagogues,
former synagogues in neighborhoods
where most of the Jewish population moved out,
and they've since become churches.
In areas that used to
have big Jewish populations that don't,
there's not but so much you can do
with a big old kind of sanctuary building,
so often times they become churches.
Sometimes you can kind of get a sense from the architecture
that it used to be a synagogue or something,
but sometimes there's more explicit symbols,
like here you can see below the windows
there are little Stars of David.
So they kind of run the gamut.
Some of them are very obviously former synagogues,
and others, just after you've seen enough of them,
you kind of can recognize the architecture.
Parts of Harlem had big Jewish communities.
Harlem, South Bronx, East New York, and Brownsville,
those are places that used to have a lot of Jews,
so a lot of synagogues that aren't synagogues anymore.
You can see the Ten Commandment tablets in Hebrew
up above the name of the church there.
Mikey.
I'm doing a big project where I'm walking
every block in the whole city, in the five boroughs.
- That sucks.
- Yo, can I shake your hand, please?
It sucks?
- I need to shake your hand.
You want to shake my hand?
- Oh, I want to shake your hand please.
- Are you really walking all of them?
- Hey, can you shake my hand please?
I am.
- Can I do that with you?
I have a bike.
- Alright.
Oh, I'm doing this big walking project.
I'm trying to walk every block in all five boroughs.
- That's cool.
- Thanks man.
- Cool.
- Yeah.
- When do you assume it's gonna be finished?
- At least another year,
but I also take a lot of photos and kind of research stuff.
- So how long have you been doing this?
- Over three years now.
- Three years?
- I thought it was gonna take maybe two
to two and a half years,
but that was almost five years ago now.
- So how much did you do so far?
Like 6,800 miles.
- What?
- Dang.
- I've got like 1,500 left.
- Are you serious?
- Yeah.
- Must be in good shape too.
- Right?
- Hell yeah.
- I hope I'd be in better shape than I am but.
I used to be an engineer.
- Yeah.
- And I had a kind of desk job, and I quit that job in 2009.
- So how do you support yourself?
- I don't have an apartment.
- Good.
- I stay with people and watch people's cats,
stuff like that.
So you just walking along, huh?
- Yeah, walking along, taking photos,
just seeing what I see, yeah.
- Sorry, I'm so sorry.
- Yeah, yeah.
- You just wander through New York City streets?
- Morning.
- You guys shooting a movie?
- Yeah, yeah, I'm doing this big project,
walking every block of the five boroughs.
- Oh, you walking every block in the five boroughs?
- Every block of the five boroughs, yeah.
- Hey yo, come over here though.
- Aren't you tired?
- I'm a little tired.
Everything's tough though, right?
- Yeah, you know, that's what life is about.
- That's true.
It's about suffering.
Yeah.
- It's the only thing keeping us going, the suffering.
So this is my progress map.
All the red stuff is things I've walked.
- I wanna see.
I wanna see.
- Okay.
- So you can see that part Brooklyn is basically done.
- Done, wow.
- I've been all over New York,
but there's not even,
there's no way you could even cover a portion
'cause I'm always in the same neighborhoods.
- It's funny too.
Even the neighborhoods you're in,
there's like streets a block over you've never been on
'cause you just never have any reason to go there.
You're always going this way or that way.
- When I'm on those streets, I'm like,
oh, I'm on this street for the first time.
- Yeah, isn't that a cool feeling?
You fix the trains?
- Nah, the buses.
- Oh, the buses, nice.
What garage you work out of?
- QV, Queens Village.
- Oh yeah, I walked by there.
I already walked by that one.
I remember that.
You live around here?
- Yeah, I live right here.
- Nice, you live here a long time?
- Yeah, I'm watching the football games right now.
- Who's on?
- Carolina.
- What's the score?
- 14, seven.
- Alright.
Is this tucked back?
- Yes.
- So it would be really long if you pulled it.
I mean this part, would this be longer
if you pulled it down?
- It's all here, yeah?
- Oh, it's pulled back.
This is beard hair?
- Yeah, in the ponytail.
Only in New York, man.
- Alright man, good to talk to you.
Thanks for all the info.
Well, it's good to talk to you.
- Nice to meet you.
- Yeah.
Thank you.
Good to meet you, man.
Matt.
- Papo.
- Papo, Freddy.
- I'm Naomi.
- Naomi, Matt.
Nice to meet you too.
Hey, I'm Matt.
Good to meet you all.
- I'm Shaquana.
- Matt, Matt.
Matt.
Good, Matt.
Matt, Matt, Matt.
- Matt?
- Yeah, what's your name?
- Matt.
- Matt, really?
- Okay, Matt.
- Alright, good to meet you.
- One day come in, come in.
One day come, I like you.
- Am I about to embarrass myself?
- And there's no brakes, I'm just letting you know.
- Alright, so use your foot?
- Yeah, just wiggle back and forth.
- Like this?
- The hips, it's in the hips.
Aw, yeah, okay.
Wiggle, yeah.
♪ It's wrong how every day another nigga getting shot ♪
♪ In the hood by another minority or a cop ♪
♪ It's wrong so many dudes that ain't seen 25 ♪
♪ All because their friend died ♪
♪ And they felt they had to ride ♪
♪ It's wrong cause you living
♪ Don't mean you living your life ♪
♪ 'Cause it could be taken from you ♪
♪ If you ain't living it right
- That's it, man.
That's it.
What's your name, man?
What's your name?
- My name's Cyrus.
- Cyrus.
- Cyrus, the one and only.
I take pictures of interesting things,
so I saw the car with the Pen license plate,
that one over there, that one over there.
- Oh, okay, 'cause you are taking pictures
of my license plate,
so, you know, what is this for?
- Just a personal project.
It's just a personal project that I'm doing,
walking every block in the whole city.
Walking every block?
- Uh huh.
And you don't work for anybody?
I don't work for anybody.
I'm walking every block in New York City.
Oh, okay.
- Hey, turn that off.
Don't take pictures of me.
What you doing?
You can't take pictures of the property.
- Yeah, you can take pictures of property.
Yeah, as long as you're standing in a public,
like in a public sidewalk.
- Says who?
- That's the law.
- No, you can't just take pictures of people's property.
- Yeah, you can, yeah.
- No, you can't.
- Yeah.
- You don't just come to people's neighborhood and--
- You can't walk onto people's property.
- But still, that's not cool.
What you taking pictures for?
- I'm taking a picture of this sign, Canal Avenue.
You know why it's called that?
- You tell me.
- Because there used to be,
well, you know there's Coney Island Creek up there.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- They made it into a canal--
- So you doing a journalism or something?
- Yeah, kind of.
I'm doing this walk.
I'm walking every block--
- Good, man.
Good, man.
What's your name?
- Matt.
- Okay, now you can take pictures.
- Alright, alright, man.
So it's like a mission?
- Yeah, it's a mission, a personal quest.
- Mission impossible.
- Mission possible, just difficult.
- That's cool.
- Just here this morning,
kind of a usual morning for me,
reading my copy of 29 Post,
the official newspaper of P.S. 29 in Cobble Hill,
the John M. Harrigan School.
"Meet Matt Green, The Walking Man.
"Matt Green is walking every street in New York City.
"If you add it up block by block,
"it would be 8,500 miles in total.
"Before he started walking every street in New York City,
"he used to work as a civil engineer,
"and did not like being at a desk all the time.
"Green quit his job and came up with an idea
"to walk across the United States of America,
"which is approximately 3,100 miles.
"After walking the U.S., Green wanted to walk even more."
Okay, I think we're ready maybe.
Ah, okay, here we go.
So I actually, the first big walk that I did,
before I started this walk in New York,
I did a walk across the United States.
Wow.
- Have you guys been to Rockaway Beach, in Queens?
Yes.
- I started there,
and I found out there's a town in Oregon
called Rockaway Beach,
so I walked from one side of the country to the other,
from Rockaway Beach to Rockaway Beach.
So I did that back in 2010,
and it took about five months to do.
- Imagine what it would be like to walk across America.
Well, that's what one New York man is doing.
29 year old Matt Green left Rockaway Beach, New York,
on March 27th.
He has a cart full of essentials,
and he sets up camp along the roads that he travels.
He says he has no cause,
just got tired of cubicle life as a civil engineer
and wanted to live simply.
- Instead of using a backpack to carry all my stuff
'cause it was so much weight,
I pushed everything in this baby stroller.
This is kind of what I looked like when I was walking,
except actually usually looked a little crazier than that
because I had this big hat to keep the sun off my face,
and when the wind would blow,
it would just lift up off my head,
just like a weird mushroom head person.
My name's Matt Green.
I walked from Rockaway Beach, New York,
to Rockaway Beach, Oregon,
and that was a trip of about 3,100 miles.
- So how did you choose your route,
and talk a little bit about the logistics and rules--
- Sure, okay, sure.
I chose my route just using Google walking directions,
just kind of asking for basically the shortest distance
between New York and Chicago,
where my brother lived, to visit him,
and then Rockaway Beach, Oregon.
So just Googled directions,
with the idea of taking away
the decision making aspect from me,
but it turned out to be an important part
of my walk because it basically changed
the way I was traveling from the way
I had always traveled before that,
which was to try to come up with a list of cool things
to see and go from one to the other,
and so, by just taking these directions blindly,
whatever was around me at any moment
was all that I had to enjoy in the world.
Green says so far his walk
has gone better than expected.
- Just so many great people I've met,
and I mean nothing bad has happened to me.
I've just had so many people take me into their houses
and feed me and let me stay there
or take a shower or do laundry.
Just all kinds of generosity pouring out of people.
- Why do you like to walk?
That's a hard question to answer.
I don't know.
I mean, it's a cool way to kind of really be in a place
but also be moving,
and you're moving at a slow enough speed
that you can still kind of take in what's around you,
so I feel like it's just the perfect way
to explore the world.
Most of what I saw was just kind of stuff like this,
just kind of simple things in the middle of the country,
and I was really able to appreciate them
'cause I was just kind of moving very slowly.
You know, when you're going in a car,
this just looks like one field,
and it's just flat and boring,
and when you're walking you see individual plants,
and you can hear birds chirping,
and you can kind of look at things in a lot more detail.
So again, especially in the middle of the country,
this was just kind of a lot of what I was seeing.
This is just a swamp somewhere,
but when you stop and look at it,
and just take the time to look at it,
it becomes really pretty.
Whoa.
- Same thing here.
This is just kind of out in eastern Montana,
just kind of a little deserty kind of area,
but it's really pretty in its own way too.
Whoa.
- And this is maybe the best example
because you can probably kind of try to imagine
what it would be like to just stand in the middle
of this field with bright yellow flowers around
as far as you can see.
So it's the kind of thing that,
as beautiful and as powerful it is
to stand there and look at it,
it's also kind of invisible in a lot of ways
to people who aren't walking
because you wouldn't take the time to go out here
just to see it,
but the thing about walking
is you can stop anywhere you are.
You can just stop and look around,
and you can take in what's around you.
Every step was just kind of something new to look at,
and all the way across the country
it was just one more step and one more thing to look at,
and it really opened up my eyes to all the things
around me that I wouldn't normally pay attention to.
So this is Staten Island.
It's kind of northwest corner of Staten Island.
That's the toll plaza for the Goethals Bridge.
That's the Staten Island Expressway,
and all of this area used to be tank farms,
natural gas, and oil,
and now it's just this huge tract of vacant land,
just kind of otherworldly.
There was this famous disaster that happened back
in here at one of the liquified natural gas tanks.
Something like it was supposed to be empty,
and there were workers in there cleaning the tank,
and there was some kind of explosion,
and this giant roof just collapsed and killed,
I think, essentially all of them.
I think that's where the NASCAR stadium was gonna be.
There was a proposal for that five, 10 years ago
that didn't work out.
Oh, we got a little tree house up here.
Whoa, this is pretty cool.
This is like the penthouse view.
Oh, so there's something going on here.
Looks like there's some kind of work going on.
Maybe this is the early stages of some development plan.
What you got going on here?
- I'm walking every block in the five boroughs,
every block of every street,
plus like parks and beaches and stuff.
You got a job or--
- No, that's all I do.
Are you like independently wealthy or something?
- No, I'm independently homeless.
I stay with people, watch their cats and stuff.
I do this walk, take photos, write about it.
How many hours in a day do you do?
- Depends.
Are you a writer?
You going to write book on all this stuff?
- I don't know.
I don't know.
There's no particular goal other
than just to see the whole city,
and then we'll see what happens.
You get mugged and shit?
- No, never.
Ever get beat up?
- Never got beat up, never got mugged.
Unless you're about to mug me,
that would be the first time.
We're actually going back that way
and then coming back through here a little bit later.
I just wanted to get a picture
while there's still some good light of this puddle.
It's a cool reflection.
- That puddle's like that--
- All year?
All year.
- That's cool.
You gotta mark that,
The Puddle That Never Goes Away.
- Ah, looks good.
This is just somebody's bike.
Tires are full.
I think this is a ridable bike.
Don't ever show anyone this footage of me not walking.
See you, losers.
I mean, it works perfectly.
I gotta go drop it off where I picked it up.
Somewhere,
somewhere out near the edge of Queens
on Linden Boulevard,
there was a really good one.
Ah, here we go.
Penny's Handz of Godz.
Yeah, we were just kind of walking under the awning here,
and the barbershop caught my eye,
and just realized I needed to step back
and check the awning,
and in fact it did have a Z in the title,
so I will take a photo of it.
If anything kind of started me on this,
it was back in, I think, 2009.
I was in Coney Island,
and I passed by a barbershop,
and it was called Faderz, Kutz Wit Skillz,
and it had three Zs in it,
and that was kind of the one that got me thinking
of all the Zs that barbershops use.
Oh, ho, ho.
Got a good barbershop up here.
How you doing man?
Designz and Lignz, a new barbershop.
I like the Lignz, L, I, G, N, Z.
Oh, we've got not only a Z barbershop,
but one that is ripping off the Brooklyn Nets' logo.
Pretty good, Brooklyn Cutz.
I was hoping to hit 200 by the end of the walk.
I think that's a little ambitious,
but I think I'll definitely be over 150.
C, U, T, Z is one of the most common ways
to throw a Z in,
or its sibling, K, U, T, Z.
You know, people have theories about everything.
People can tell you why this is this way,
why this is this way.
Of course you can look at this
and say it has something to do with hip hop culture
and how it's rooted and how it's spreading,
and you can look at the different ethnic neighborhoods
where the Zs are and kind of come up with some theories,
and it could all make sense,
but what does that say?
Does it say anything?
Probably not.
So I think if it says anything,
it's not anything about barbershops.
It's just about the value of paying attention to something.
I like the sign.
It's a new sign.
- I'm Betty, and P is for Pedro.
Oh, B.P. over there, Betty and Pedro.
Yes.
- I'm walking every block in all of New York City,
all five boroughs.
I walk all over the city,
and I take pictures of a bunch of stuff,
but I take a lot of pictures of barbershop signs,
especially ones with the Zs.
I like the ones with the Z on the name.
Alright.
- I seen a million barber shops.
This is the only one with that name.
- There's only one A List Cutz.
- Yep, yep, and it's good.
You'll be up there in the phone book starting with A.
- Exactly, so the next one will be A List Cutz Two.
- Oh, you gonna franchise it?
Yeah, of course.
- And Z is, instead of like Cuts, it's Cuts.
- It's got attitude, right?
Yes.
- Some people throw a K in there too.
- With the Kutz, yeah.
- I like the purity of the C.
- Yeah, me too.
- You just change the end, you know?
It's like normal and then at the end,.
Oh yeah, right over there, right over there.
Oh, get that, okay.
What's your name again?
Matt.
Matt, I'm Betty.
- I walk because there's nothing
that gives you the texture of a place,
the texture of its people,
and even your own texture of yourself, like walking,
that walking puts me in touch with my own humanity
and other people's humanity in a way that nothing else does.
As I began walking around New York City,
I've been here almost a decade.
I moved from Jamaica,
and the first thing I did was decided
to get to know the city
by walking and exploring it on foot,
and so various friends and acquaintances
and colleagues said, "Oh, do you know Matt Green?
"You have to know Matt Green.
"You have to go walking with Matt Green."
- I just Googled walk every block in Manhattan,
and up came his website,
so I reached out to him to just basically
get some logistics of how he's mapping his route,
and then I had some random questions
about where does he find water and bathrooms.
- So yeah, so it's not necessarily
by neighborhood or anything.
I try to walk wherever I can that's kind of close
to where I'm staying,
but like today I was able to just walk out of the door,
the apartment I was in in downtown Brooklyn,
and just walk here and mostly cover new ground.
- I'm Bill Helmreich.
I'm a professor of sociology at City College,
and with the exception of Matt Green,
I believe I am the only one
to have systematically walked New York City.
I started that walk in 2008.
I completed it four years later in 2012.
Walked it in rain, sun, evenings,
mornings, afternoons, weekends.
Matt has identified the city as being about 8,000 miles,
whereas I say 6,000,
but that's because Matt is walking all the parks
and all the paths and all the piers,
and I have generally restricted myself
to the inhabited streets of the city.
Yeah, it's kind of overwhelming
as I'm going through it.
- Are you from here?
- No, I'm from Virginia.
- Okay.
- My dad grew up here,
and I have cousins here,
so we're kind of rooted in New York,
but I didn't spend much time here growing up.
- Matt's approach to doing this is not focused
on organizing what he sees.
It's focused on describing what he sees.
His approach appears to me to be more random,
to expose people and let them see what the heart,
soul, and pulse of this city is,
and this is a case where the parts
are actually greater than the whole.
- The great thing about New York City
is that every street feels like a fossil record,
that you just peel and peel and peel,
and there are stories buried beneath stories.
No street becomes the simple picture
of what you see before your eyes,
that suddenly it's rich with history,
and it's rich with adventure,
and it's a whole panoply of stories waiting
for you to uncover them.
- People grow up in neighborhoods in New York.
They'll say, "Oh, I grew up on the West Side.
"I know the West Side."
It often is not true that you even know
the neighborhood you grew up in.
The block you walked on because the subway was there
becomes more important than the block
that nothing is there on.
The block where you bought your candy
or where you did your shopping becomes important,
but the block where you didn't shop becomes irrelevant,
so that when people say they know a neighborhood,
they really don't.
- A lot of this area, I walked really early on,
and I found that,
I feel like I was almost blind when I started.
Like I'll go back places now, and I'll see things.
It's funny how long it takes you to see stuff,
to get in the right frame of mind, you know,
like all, yeah, these little--
So great.
A little family.
- One of the wonderful things about walking with Matt
also is that we get to compare notes,
so for instance, I have a whole costume, as I call it.
I go through a whole pantomime
to avoid the appearance of criminality.
Time and again, because of my race,
because I am black, people are fearful of me,
and that in itself induces a certain fear in me.
I try to dress in a certain way
that makes me appear safe and non-threatening.
I'll have reading glasses on the bridge of my nose
and a book.
I try to move in ways that appear non-threatening,
no quick or sudden movements.
I avoid hoodies or dark clothes,
and so in walking with Matt,
it was refreshing just to hear him telling me just ways
in which he doesn't have to think
about some of the things that I have to think about.
- We're about to go through
this really weird kind of vacant part
where there used to be beach houses there,
little bungalows,
and the city tore them down
as kind of like an urban renewal effort,
and then never built anything there.
So it's this kind of part of Edgemere,
the southern part of Edgemere,
basically these streets that kind of go toward the beach,
and then it's just all abandoned
until you get to the boardwalk.
This is pretty rare to just have
a totally wiped out grid of streets.
I don't think there's anywhere else like this in the city.
- My name is Nicky Rodriguez.
I met Matt probably going on four years now.
I read about him in The New York Times,
and at the time, I was working in a kitchen basement.
I was really unhappy,
and then I read about this guy who's out
seeing the world, exploring.
It was an interesting contrast
to what I was experiencing at the time.
I was like, I gotta meet this guy.
So we probably dated for about two years.
I don't know.
I think I probably fell in love with him
from the first day, and he would probably debate that,
but I know how I feel.
- Matt and I met when we were in college.
We were together for three or four years
before we got engaged.
He and I moved in together in New York City.
We got engaged and broke up six,
seven weeks before our wedding,
so never ended up getting married.
We had already mailed out our wedding invitations
and had started receiving RSVPs
and were sorting the yes's and the no's
and figuring out how many people would be there.
I used to say to him when he and I were together,
oh, we're gonna turn 35.
We're gonna have kids.
It'll be fine,
and the closer and closer we got to getting married,
it became clear that we wanted very different things.
I wanted to get married, have kids,
do the whole settling down thing,
and I think Matt wanted to go wander the country
or the city.
- I sometimes questioned whether it was healthy,
all that isolation that he would do with his walk.
There were a lot of times where I felt
like I was vying for attention.
Yeah, we fought a lot about things
that I didn't even realize were a big deal,
like going to the movies,
and he doesn't really care for that stuff, and,
so his project,
although it was the thing that drew me to him,
was also the thing that separated us.
I kind of badgered him a little bit
at wanting to know when the project would end.
He would give me two years out.
Then he would give me three years out,
then four years out,
so I kind of decided to just accept
that there is no known time when this project is gonna end.
- He doesn't go to what's next,
and when you ask him about what's next,
he gets vague and uninterested.
He's mostly interested in what's happening today,
what he saw today, and what he's planning for tomorrow.
- So yeah, I guess it seems trivial.
Oh, you complain about going to the movies,
but that kind of was a big deal for us.
He didn't really get enjoyment from those types
of things that I did,
like going to a nice restaurant and--
- It's our first big snow of the season.
There were lots of blizzard warnings and stuff today.
It's not too, too bad yet,
but it's supposed to keep snowing all day
and through the night.
The city is kind of a whole different place
when it's covered in snow,
like the same kind of skeleton of the city,
but the experience of being out
in it's completely different.
We'll see how far we go today.
I'm hoping to get in maybe,
like eight miles or something would be good.
We'll see.
Woo.
I just got a message on my phone saying
that all non-emergency vehicles have
to be off the streets of New York City by 2:30 p.m.,
so a little later in the day,
we'll have the streets all to ourselves.
Oh, there's a football game going on in the street.
Who's winning?
- It's four to three.
Four, three, close game.
What's your name?
- Matt Green.
- Matt, nice to meet you.
- Yeah, nice to meet you too.
Go go, get in.
Hold on.
Yo, this guy's in.
Hut.
He got it.
Let's go.
Get him.
Touchdown.
- We are in Brighton Beach now,
in this little kind of sub-neighborhood
with these little pedestrian alleys crisscrossing it.
It used to be a kind of bungalow colony.
A lot of the bungalows are gone now,
and then sometime,
I think in the late '90s, early 2000s,
there was a big kind of wave of development
where a lot of the bungalows were knocked down
and replaced with these big multi-unit developments,
but it was all just done kind of thoughtlessly,
and then the economy crashed,
and now you just have all these half built vacant buildings
just kind of looming over the landscape.
Some of them have just been half built
for like five years or more.
- I threw my kid away.
That's my daughter.
She's 6 years old.
She wanted to be buried like in the beach.
Yeah, it's like the winter version
of going to the beach.
I had too many kids.
I had to throw one away.
- So this is Ashland, Virginia, my hometown.
This is the house that I grew up in.
My parents still live here.
So Ashland is a little town of, I think,
maybe 7,000 people now, something like that.
It's kind of got a small town feel
and a little downtown area.
The railroad tracks run right through,
so there's a old fashioned kind of feel.
I never thought that I would ever want
to live in a big city,
New York least of all of them,
so yeah, I mean, I kind of thought I was just a small town,
I thought that was kind of the place for me.
So this is the backyard.
This is the old, we'll call it a tree house
though there's no tree involved.
I was, quote, unquote, helping my dad build this
when I was in third grade or something,
which is where this scar came from,
by smashing my hand with a hammer.
Wow, what do you call this, Matthew?
I like this thing your dad built.
What do you call it?
Is it a tree house or what is it?
- It's a playhouse.
Playhouse, did you help him build it a little bit?
- Yeah.
Great.
- I don't know.
I feel really lucky in general, you know,
my parents and where I was raised and everything.
We were really fortunate
to always have everything we needed,
but we also, I had a sense instilled in me
and my parents that stuff's
not what makes you happy either though,
so it was like, if you can just walk around
in the woods and be happy,
then you're kind of set for life, you know?
- When people ask us what he's doing,
I normally tell them that he's very well educated,
that he was a licensed engineer,
but he didn't like it.
I guess maybe in the very beginning it was a little odd
because their kids were all going off and finding jobs,
but to me he really is accomplishing something.
- It might not have not been our choice
for what our son would have done,
but he is happy doing what he's doing.
It's his decision and his life.
I would like for him to make money doing it,
so he'd have a way to live.
I mean, admittedly, he doesn't make any money at his walk,
but he is able to live on very little.
He doesn't ask us for anything.
He saved up his money when he was working,
and he manages to get by very well,
but we've had a couple of instances,
one with him, one with his brother,
where there was some life threatening situations.
So Matthew was riding his bike in Brooklyn.
There was an older driver,
and the driver apparently became distracted,
and he hit Matthew.
He hit his head on the curb,
and he was knocked out.
Of course, if he didn't have that helmet,
he wouldn't be here,
and then his brother Jonathan,
who is five years younger than Matthew,
two and a half years ago had a fairly major brain bleed.
He had something that he was born with.
He had no symptoms whatsoever until it blew.
- In the fall of 2012, I had a stroke,
and I was in the hospital and rehab.
That was after Matt had already started his walk,
but he came out to Chicago
and lived there for several months.
I think that people have experiences
that sort of reminds them of the value of life
and of living,
so yeah, when he had his bike accident in New York,
I don't know if that was the thing
that set him off on this trip,
but I think his bike accident and my stroke
remind us all that we're not promised
any time on this earth.
- I would say that maybe isn't the reason
that he goes out walking,
but I think at this point in time he realizes
that stuff can happen.
I mean, it almost happened to him.
It almost happened to his brother.
I think it really opens you up to life
and to the fact that either you live it,
or you put it off for the future,
and you don't know that the future is gonna be there.
- Hey, look at that.
Fig tree.
You can see the figs hanging off it.
Oh look, it's a whole little patch of garden here even.
Oh, look at that,
a little broccoli or broccoli rabe or something.
Oh yeah, some tomatoes over here too.
This is an edible plant called lamb's quarter,
or some people call it wild spinach.
Pretty tasty too,
I'm only not eating that 'cause it's at prime
like dog piss level.
Ah, here's a good example of a squash trellis.
I mean, there's no dirt.
There's no soil here.
It's just a paved area,
but with a little ingenuity,
you put down a few containers of soil.
You put up this trellis.
Let the vines climb up,
and all of a sudden you have this giant canopy of green,
and you can see all the squashes just dangling from it.
You could see moving into this house saying,
"Ah, I just got this driveway.
"It's all paved, nothing I can do about it,"
but a little ingenuity and you could have this.
I'm a professional now.
It's pretty surprising to me
how much I've learned about plants,
about flowers and trees, on this walk,
given that I'm in New York,
which is not a place you associate with greenery
or any kind of natural life really,
kind of concrete and hard surfaces.
Ah, there's some butterfly weed,
that cool orange flower.
I saw that in Marine Park a couple years ago.
This giant tree right here on Houston Street
is actually a redwood tree.
It's a type of redwood called a dawn redwood
that was thought to be extinct,
and in the 1940s,
some were discovered in central China,
and the seeds were taken and spread out
around the world,
and now it's actually a popular street tree
in New York City.
The first one I saw was this giant one in Brooklyn,
and I figured out what kind of tree it was
and was shocked to realize
that there are these redwoods growing all around New York.
That is a good looking tree.
There's a grape vine down there, delicious.
There's a little mint here.
Can you smell it through the camera?
One of my favorite examples is figs
because I didn't really,
I mean, I guess I had a vague sense
of what a fig looks like when you eat it,
but I had no idea what they look like
growing on trees or anything,
and I started noticing.
A few months into my walk,
I started noticing these trees
with these little kind of nodules growing off of them.
Actually, there's a fig tree in a garbage bucket
right over there as I'm saying this.
So this is a relatively small fig tree.
The fig, we think of it as a fruit,
but it's actually an inside out inflorescence,
which means that it has hundreds of flowers
growing inside of it.
You want a half a fig?
Here, I'll eat it if you eat it.
- Ew, I don't know what this is.
- It's good.
It's good.
It's a fruit.
Try it.
- Ew, what's it good for?
- It's a fruit,
like it's sweet.
People eat it for desserts.
- Ew.
- It's good.
Try it.
I just ate it.
I like that.
You're adventurous.
- Oh, it does taste good.
- It's not bad, right?
- Yeah, it does taste good.
I like it.
- Here we have the mighty cornfields of Queens.
Geographically, I knew what to expect
with the walk in terms of the amount of time
it would take to walk that distance,
but I didn't expect that I would be spending
this much time digging into things
that I saw after the fact.
That's ended up taking up more time
than the walking itself,
which was a big surprise to me.
All these pock marks in the facade
of the building are almost 100 years old.
They're from this bombing that happened here in 1920.
These Italian anarchists set off a bomb.
It was the deadliest terror attack in U.S. history
at that point.
I think close to 40 people died.
The bank intentionally left all the marks here
as a reminder of that.
This is Trinity Churchyard,
so it's a little bit of a incongruous scene,
seeing all these graves in the middle
of all these skyscrapers.
There's Alexander Hamilton.
Lower Manhattan looks different
than the rest of the city.
It's where the original settlement of New Amsterdam was,
and as a result of that,
streets are curving around.
Streets are narrower,
just this swirl of history and so many layers of history,
and it makes it impossible to take in even a small percent.
Well, just half a block up there,
on Wall Street between Pearl and Water,
that's apparently where New York's municipal
slave market was from 1711 to 1762,
and if it weren't for this sign here,
I don't think I would have any clue about it.
This is a particularly poignant reminder
of a hidden story in New York,
but these hidden stories are all over the city,
and I'm missing things every single day.
I was just reading recently about how garbage
has become such big problem in Lower Manhattan.
Before 9/11, it was just a business district.
Not that many people lived down here.
Apparently now the population's shot up,
the sidewalks are narrow down here,
and so there's all these problems with walls of trash.
I was surprised to learn there
was a big Vietnam memorial,
and I had never heard of it.
"We are all afraid to die,
"and all we do is count the days till we go home.
"I want to hold my head between my hands
"and run screaming away from here."
You know, I'll come back from this walk today,
and I'll have a lot more photos to add
into the pile of thousands of photos
that I still have to go through.
Right now, I'm a year and a half behind on my blog.
When I go out and walk,
I'm done with those blocks when I'm done walking them,
and the photos, they lag behind me,
and they're just creating this giant weight
that I'm pulling behind me all the time,
but I've never thought about quitting,
about cutting back on anything,
about spending less time doing research.
It's an integral part of my personality
that I'll never quit something once I've started,
which is not necessarily always the greatest trait
in the real world,
to be so obsessed with details
and to lose sight of the larger point of something
because you want to finish it the exact way
that you want to finish it.
I was driving by on the BQE,
that elevated roadway up there,
and I saw really quick what looked like a 9/11 mural,
a new 9/11 mural, painted up on a building,
and I'm not trying to constantly keep up
with every single new 9/11 memorial that sprouts up,
but since I saw it I figured I should,
when I'm in the neighborhood, get out and walk by it
and check it out.
Standing down here by the firehouse,
I can just look down the street,
and you get a clear view
of the new One World Trade Center building.
People standing on this spot on 9/11
would have seen the Twin Towers crumbling down.
I think this is a 9/11 memorial.
"We will never forget," fireman kneeling.
Oh, that's the ruins of the old World Trade Center.
When I first started this walk,
I had seen a number of 9/11 memorials beforehand,
and I had this idea that I would just keep my eye out
for them as I walked.
I assumed they would all be like the ones I had noticed,
which were classical granite monument
with names on it maybe,
but I've been blown away by the diversity of them.
I've seen so many murals like this one.
I've seen homemade things in people's front yards,
photos of victims with flowers around them.
There's one that struck me the hardest, I think.
It was an old fire call box mounted on the wall
of a firehouse,
and inside, a silhouette of the Twin Towers
and just a flame burning inside it.
9/11 memorial.
How you doing?
That's a new thing.
I've never seen the Statue of Liberty crying before.
Also, Captain America pops in.
By the time I'm done walking,
I think I'll probably have at least 300 memorials
that I've photographed,
which is, you know, a stunning number to think of.
Rolling.
- A wedding.
So I've walked through dozens of cemeteries already,
and to me they're kind of,
I walk them for the same reason that I walk a park,
which is that it's just a big outdoor public area.
To me that's just as important as walking as a street,
and on top of that, so many cemeteries in New York
are just gorgeous.
Some of the landscaping is amazing.
The terrain's amazing.
There's just a lot of beautiful statuary in cemeteries,
a lot of beautiful graves.
It's a great kind of look at other people's lives,
little windows onto who they were.
You see sometimes really, really touching epitaphs,
just really unusual way to kind of look
into a lot of people's lives, just a little bit.
This little area here is called the Soldiers' Lot,
and it's full of Civil War veterans,
most of whom were killed during the war,
and up at the top here is this statue
that says Our Drummer Boy.
Clarence D. MacKenzie,
he was the first soldier from Brooklyn killed
in the Civil War,
and he was 12 years old at the time,
and he was killed just during a training exercise
by accident.
This symbol you see a lot on stones
in Jewish cemeteries.
It's kind of hands like this.
When the Kohanim, which are the priestly class of Jews,
bless the congregation,
they hold their hands in this shape
while they're saying the blessing,
and this is what inspired the Vulcan salute in Star Trek
because Leonard Nimoy remembered being
in synagogue as a kid,
and then many years later he just pulled this
out of his memory banks.
Here is the tombstone of the great Jackie Robinson.
My dad grew up in Brooklyn,
so in addition to his kind of iconic symbolism
for all of baseball,
he also was a great local player for my dad's team.
Celia Cruz, the Queen of Salsa.
Yeah, it is funny to see this kind of row
of modest little headstones
and then to come across a big, famous artist
who tragically died.
In fact, when I visited his grave for the first time,
this family was here, the Russos.
I think her sister was here,
and she was saying they didn't know who this was,
but then they saw all these things left here,
and then they read about him,
and just a funny crossing of cultures
between this older Italian-American family
and this young, kind of punk artist,
and now they'll spend eternity right next to each other.
This is the grave of Emma Lazarus,
who wrote a well known poem called The New Colossus
that can be found on the Statue of Liberty.
"Give me your tired, your poor,
"your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
"the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
"Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed to me.
"I lift my lamp beside the golden door."
Harry Houdini.
I wish I knew some kind of magic trick to do.
Seems like the appropriate place.
I see playing cards over there, a lock and key.
Maybe I'll be inspired by Houdini.
You might think that walking around a cemetery
is a very morbid thing to do,
that it's a very sad place to be,
but when you spend enough time there,
what you realize is that all these stones
that you're seeing, of course,
represent somebody who died,
but what they are is a reminder of that person's life.
You know, they had to die to be in the cemetery,
but they had to live a life to be here too.
Charles Mile a Minute Murphy.
The Mile a Minute part of his nickname,
he came up with this idea in like the 1880s
that it would be possible,
if he rode behind a train,
to ride in the slipstream of the train,
that he could ride a mile in less than a minute,
and in his view,
he felt like the whole world was laughing at him,
mocking him.
This could never be done.
He was a fool for thinking this,
and so he convinced the Long Island Rail Road to build,
I think it was like a two mile section of track,
and he failed the first time
or first two times or something,
and they had like one shot left,
and then he finally was able to do it the third time.
The idea of someone just having this weird dream
and just making it happen is really appealing story to me.
There are some people out there
who just do things for reasons they don't understand,
that other people don't quite understand.
I mean, I don't know anybody like that.
When you have this many miles ahead of you,
you can't really just think about how much is left.
Anyone who has taken some kind of long journey
like that I guess kind of knows that lesson,
that you just have to take it one day at a time,
and if all you're focused on is finishing,
then it's that much easier to get overwhelmed
by how much is left,
but the goal of this walk is not really to finish it.
The goal is to do everything that happens
along the way to finishing it.
There are lots of coconuts
in various odd parts of New York
you find washed up on the shore,
and I was always kind of baffled by this,
but then I read that coconuts are often part
of this Hindu tradition that,
like back in India people would be making
these offerings into the Ganges River.
So then people immigrate to New York,
and they gotta find some kind of approximation,
so it makes sense that if coconuts are thrown
into the water over here
that they'd get washed in over here.
This rusty little piece of metal
is a bristle from the brush of a street cleaning truck.
They have hundreds of these that rotate around,
and that's what kind of sweeps stuff up off the streets.
If you were just to look at my blog
and see the things I've been taking photos
and writing about,
it probably seems like it's a random list of stuff.
It's like, how is this guy deciding what to do?
How does this all fit into something?
And for me that's not a problem
because I'm not deciding to look for anything,
and I'm not trying to fit it into anything.
It fits into what it ultimately becomes.
The collection of all the random things
that I'm looking at become the puzzle
that they are pieces fitting into.
I don't have to know what the puzzle was when I started.
These dots you see on any kind of storm sewer inlet,
they are a mark left by city workers
when they come to treat the sewer
for West Nile virus,
so when they come back by they can verify
that it had been previously sprayed
by seeing if the dots are there.
Holy shit.
Damn, man.
One good example is right here.
This is the Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows Park.
The building that it's in was built
for the 1939 World's Fair.
It was the New York City Building,
and I actually just noticed this.
Underneath where it says Queens Museum,
you can still see this lettering from the World's Fair,
where it said The City Of New York.
You can just faintly make out
that lettering where it used to be.
There was actually, during the '64 World's Fair,
there was a really cool exhibit built in here.
It was called the Panorama of the City of New York,
just a giant, three dimensional, physical scale model
of New York City.
Huge model of New York, each building's there.
There's almost a million individual buildings on this model.
It's just really mind boggling
kind of seeing the scope of the whole city.
For me, there's a big difference
between reading about a place in a book
and being there in person.
When I'm actually in the same physical space as a place,
all of a sudden it comes alive to me
because just being there next to it,
just on a very human level,
gives me this relationship to it
that I don't have when all I know about it is facts,
but when what I know about it
is what it feels to stand in front of it,
what it feels like to touch it,
or what it feels like to discover something about it,
to have found it for myself,
to have had some kind of aha moment,
some kind of like, oh, look at that.
This is the Audubon Ballroom and Theater,
which is where Malcom X was shot and killed in 1965.
You know, there's no sign up or anything,
so I just thought this is a cool looking building,
so I just took a photo of it,
and then found out the story.
Just like a person,
when you meet a person you become
much more interested in them.
I think it's the same thing with a city.
I mean, a city is a thing built by people
and full of people,
and so I think it has a lot
of those same characteristics that,
when you meet a part of the city,
all of a sudden you care about it a lot more,
and it's come alive to you.
It's an actual place were you stood,
and you felt something there,
and you have some memory of it.
How you doing?
This is a memorial to Eric Garner.
When he was being choked to death,
he kept saying, "I can't breathe.
"I can't breathe."
This building, 42 Amboy Street,
what used to exist here was 46 Amboy Street,
which was the location of the first
birth control clinic in America.
It was opened by Margaret Sanger in 1916.
I think the way that I found out about it
was I was walking in Brownsville,
and I had a photo of something in the area,
and in reading about that I somehow
came across this birth control clinic.
You know what used to be right over here?
- No.
- This was the first birth control clinic in America.
- What?
- The first place where birth control
was handed out to people.
- Wow.
- Yeah, it was only open for nine days.
Then the government shut it down,
so this, you can see that same brick work up there.
This was the birth control clinic,
what used to be right there.
- Wow.
So yeah, you can see all these women out there.
It's been closed.
That's really interesting--
You can see that whole street there, yeah.
Wow.
- The plaque on this rock,
right beside the service road
to the Long Island Expressway,
says, "General George Washington traveled this road
"on his tour of Long Island, April 24th, 1790."
Is that it?
No.
We're looking for the Queens Giant,
which is the tallest known tree in New York City,
and the oldest, ah, there it is,
the oldest living thing in the city.
It's estimated 350 to 450 years old.
It's not really a public visiting place
'cause they're trying to preserve the tree,
so there's not like a clear trail
or signs to it or anything.
Whoa, here's the sign, kind of hidden back here.
"This tulip tree is the tallest carefully measured tree
"in New York City, with a height of 133.8 feet.
"It is also probably the oldest living thing
"in the city at an estimated age of 400 years or more.
"It was standing tall when General George Washington
"passed close by in 1790 on a tour of Long Island.
"It has survived miraculously from a time
"when native Matinecock people trod softly
"beneath it to an age when automobiles roar
"by oblivious to its presence.
"If we leave it undisturbed,
"it may live among us for another hundred years or so."
There's a big hole in the tree here,
and it's kind of the bottom of the trunk is hollowed out.
There's a Tupperware container inside the tree.
It's got some note paper and stuff in it.
Wow, this book is just filled with poems people
have written or notes.
"If trees could only talk.
"The things it's seen, the things it's felt.
"The wisest creatures of us all can live without us,
"but we can't without them.
"Respect life."
"This is my first visit to the Queens Giant.
"She is a wonderful creature that has seen so much
"and nourished many lives.
"Even just meeting her now,
"it's undeniable that her spirit shines,
"and the beat goes on."
Sounds like a class came out here.
"I never knew this thing was here.
"This is so awesome to be able to be here
"with my friends and teachers.
"East Side Community High for forever.
"Zipporah G."
Gabriel says, "I salute this sentinel of life,
"this tower of what is natural and good.
"May our own little lives be inspired
"by its breathing breadth and height."
"July 18th, 2013.
"Summertime and the living's easy.
"Enjoy your life, every moment, every memory,
"before it's over."
Wow, that's pretty awesome.
Just thinking about the Queens Giant
being 400 years old or whatever
means that it's essentially been there
for the entirety of the existence of New York City,
from the earliest Dutch settlement,
and so it's kind of mind blowing
to think that that tree has been there
kind of seeing the entire transformation of New York City
from a natural area into the metropolis that it is today,
and kind of all of those changes that mankind has wrought
on this enormous scale here,
that tree has just been there through all of it.
You know, it seems in my head almost like something
that exists on a geologic time scale.
That it would have just taken such monumental efforts
to turn New York City into what it is today,
and that that tree has just been kind of sitting there
watching the whole time.
Somewhere in this last block, I think,
I just crossed 8,000 total miles for the walk.
I was just over a mile shy at the start of the day,
and when I started the walk,
8,000 was the number I'd throw out as, you know,
how far is it gonna be?
I don't know, maybe 8,000 miles.
So in that sense, it seems like I'm getting pretty close
to the end,
but it doesn't feel like that to me.
The research and writing and blogging part
of this project has just grown and grown,
and I have such a huge backlog of posts left to write,
and I still have, I don't know,
maybe another 500 or 1,000 miles
till I'm actually done,
so all that combined makes me feel
like I'm just somewhere
in the middle of the project, really.
It doesn't feel like I'm close to the end,
even though I've hit 8,000.