Walking New York: Reflections of American Writers from Walt Whitman to Teju Cole

By Stephen Miller

Walk along with New York’s most celebrated writers on a tour of the city that inspired them in this “evolving portrait of New York through the centuries” (The New York Observer).
 
ONE OF THE NEW YORK OBSERVER’S TOP 10 BOOKS FOR FALL
 
It’s no wonder that New York has always been a magnet city for writers. Manhattan is one of the most walkable cities in the world. But while many novelists, poets, and essayists have enjoyed long walks in New York, their experiences varied widely. Walking New York is a study of celebrated writers who walked the streets of New York and wrote about the city in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
 
Though the writers were often irritated, disturbed, and occasionally shocked by what they saw on their walks, they were still fascinated by the city Cynthia Ozick called “faithfully inconstant, magnetic, man-made, unnatural—the synthetic sublime.” Returning to New York after an absence of two decades, Henry James loathed many things about “bristling” New York, while native New Yorker Walt Whitman both celebrated and criticized “Mannahatta” in his writings.
 
This idiosyncratic guidebook combines literary scholarship with urban studies to reveal how this crowded, dirty, noisy, and sometimes ugly city gave these “restless analysts” plenty of fodder for their craft. In Walking New York, you’ll see the city though the eyes of Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, William Dean Howells, Jacob Riis, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, James Weldon Johnson, Alfred Kazin, Elizabeth Hardwick, Colson Whitehead, and Teju Cole.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780823263165

Stephen Miller

Stephen Miller is a creator and entrepreneur who has grown his platform to nearly one million followers in just two years through his show The Miller Fam, a channel that displays the beauty of diversity and adoption featuring his large, diverse, adoptive family of nine. No clickbait. No fake drama. Just a story that says, “Where grace guides, we'll go.” With over fifteen years of ministry in some of the nation's largest churches, Stephen has recorded six studio albums and is the author of Liberating King and Worship Leaders, We Are Not Rock Stars.

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1

Reflections on Walking

From Plato to Baudelaire

In 2008, Geoff Nicholson published a book called The Lost Art of Walking. Walking may indeed be a lost art for most people who live in advanced industrial societies, yet in recent years many writers have celebrated it. Journalists who cover health issues often talk about the mental and physical benefits of a twenty-minute daily walk, and several writers have argued that a long walk can be a transforming experience—that walking offers psychological and even spiritual rewards. In The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012), Robert Macfarlane says that walking may trigger distinctive ways of feeling, being and knowing. And in a recent New Yorker cartoon, a dog who is also a psychiatrist asks a patient lying on a couch: Have you tried taking long walks?¹

Before the advent of mass transit and the mass production of automobiles, walking was a necessity for most people, not a choice. In most parts of the world, the rural poor still trudge in the fields and tramp along the roads. A reviewer of The Old Ways says: Most people walk not for romance or recreation or enlightenment; they walk because they’re too poor to do otherwise.² Just so, during the Depression, many Britons walked in search of employment. In As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) Laurie Lee says: Among them were carpenters, clerks, engineers from the Midlands; many had been on the road for months, walking up and down the country in a maze of jobless refusals, the treadmill of the mid-Thirties.³

People have gone on long walks not only in search of work but also for religious reasons. Religious pilgrimages, which often require walking, still remain popular. Macfarlane mentions Irish Catholics in Galway who go on barefoot pilgrimages. The most popular contemporary European pilgrimage may be El Camino, or the Way of Saint James, a pilgrimage often done on foot (at least part of the way) to Santiago de Compostela, where the Church of San Diego/Saint James is located.

There are also quasi-political pilgrimages—what Rebecca Solnit calls inspired walking. The most famous may be Mahatma Gandhi’s walk in 1930 to protest British rule. He and seventy-eight followers walked 240 miles in twenty-three days. This walk may have inspired many walks in the 1960s, including the five-day, fifty-four-mile walk in March 1965 by Martin Luther King Jr. and civil rights activists from Selma to Montgomery (in Alabama) to protest segregation. In 1970, the March of Dimes held the first Walkathon. National Public Radio recently discussed the life of a woman named Mildred Norman, a self-described peace pilgrim who spent more than twenty years on the road, walking for peace.⁴

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the wealthy and the powerful usually traveled on horseback or in a horse-drawn vehicle. Yet, aristocrats occasionally chose to go for a walk. For centuries in Mediterranean countries and their colonies, families and friends have strolled at dusk in the plazas of towns and cities—a custom called the paseo in Spain, the passeggiata in Italy. Writing about his visit to Rome in 1581, Montaigne says: the commonest exercise of the Romans is to promenade through the streets; and ordinarily the enterprise of leaving the house is undertaken solely to go from street to street, without having any place in mind to stop at.⁵

Until the eighteenth century, few writers wrote about the pleasures of walking in either the country or the city. In the Vintage Book of Walking there is only one citation from an ancient Greek writer, namely Xenophon. It describes a long march through the Middle East by troops under the command of the Persian emperor Cyrus. Should a forced march be considered a walk? We do know that some ancient Athenians enjoyed walking in the countryside. In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, the title character tells Socrates, I am going for a walk outside the city walls.… You see, I’m keeping in mind the advice of our mutual friend Acumenus, who says it’s more refreshing to walk along country roads than city streets.⁶

Socrates seems to agree with Phaedrus. He is quite right, too, my friend. Yet later in the dialogue Phaedrus tells Socrates: As far as I can tell, you never even set foot beyond the city walls. Socrates admits that he doesn’t like to walk in the country. Forgive me, my friend. I am devoted to learning; landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me—only the people in the city can do that. He is walking outside of the city now because Phaedrus has shown him the leaves of a book containing a speech.⁷

Walking in Athens gave Socrates the opportunity to buttonhole people in order to engage them in a conversation about the ideas they held. In the Apology he says, God has assigned me to this city, as if to a large thoroughbred horse which because of its great size is inclined to be lazy and needs the stimulation of some stinging fly. It seems to me that God has attached me to this city to perform the office of such a fly; and all day long I never cease to settle here, there, and everywhere, rousing, persuading, reproving every one of you.⁸

Since ancient times, most writers have agreed with Phaedrus that it is more pleasurable to walk in the country than in the city. Walking in Rome, Juvenal says, is unpleasant and dangerous. The streets are crowded and dirty, and you may be brained by a falling tile or by cracked or leaky vessels / tossed out of windows. At night you may be accosted by a drunken bully who is intent on beating you up, or knifed by some street-apache.⁹

In the sixteenth century, the revival of interest in the ancient world turned Rome into a tourist attraction. Rome’s ruins, Montaigne says, are testimony to that infinite greatness which so many centuries, so many conflagrations, and all the many conspiracies of the world to ruin it had not been able to extinguish completely.¹⁰ (Montaigne, though, may have explored Rome’s ruins on horseback more than on foot.) Joseph Addison, the eighteenth-century English essayist, walked in many Italian cities because he wanted to see famous historical sites, which he wrote about in a popular travel book, Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705). Addison especially enjoyed walking in Rome, which he called the pleasantest City I have yet seen.… There are Buildings the most magnificent in the world, and Ruins [even] more magnificent than they. One can scarce hear the name of a Hill or a river near it that does not bring to mind a piece of a Classic Authour.¹¹

Walking in London and the British Countryside

Addison is better known for his essays about London, which appeared in the Spectator, an immensely popular journal he published with Richard Steele along with a handful of other contributors. The Spectator was a great advertisement for walking in London. In the first issue of March 1, 1711, written by Addison, Mr. Spectator (the pen name of all the contributors) remarks that he usually spends his days walking around London, mostly going to coffeehouses (he mentions six) and theaters (he mentions two). In short, wher-ever I see a Cluster of People I always mix with them. He doesn’t do much talking; he is an observer, a Spectator of Mankind.¹²

Mr. Spectator may be the first flâneur, though the French word did not come into use until the nineteenth century, first appearing in English in 1854. A flâneur, the Oxford English Dictionary says, is a lounger or saunterer, an idle ‘man about town.’ The flâneur is an aimless stroller rather than a walker with a destination, and in that sense Mr. Spectator, who lives on an inheritance, is a stroller around London. He visits many places, including Vauxhall Gardens, where Londoners walked, met friends, dined, listened to music, and picked up prostitutes. He also visits the Royal Exchange, a two-level shopping mall built in 1669 around a great courtyard. "There is no Place in the Town which I so much love to frequent as the Royal Exchange. He likes this grand scene of Business because it is a cosmopolitan place where a Body of Men [are] thriving in their own private Fortunes, and at the same time promoting the Publick Stock."¹³

In an essay written by Steele, Mr. Spectator describes a day spent walking around London. In the early morning he goes to the market at Covent Garden: "I could not believe any Place more entertaining than Covent-Garden; where I strolled from one Fruit Shop to another, with Crowds of agreeable young Women around me, who were purchasing Fruit for their respective Families."¹⁴ Later in the day he goes to the Royal Exchange, where he enjoys looking at pretty women buying or selling things. In the evening he goes to Will’s, a famous coffeehouse that John Dryden had frequented.

Though many eighteenth-century British writers read and praised the Spectator, most did not agree with Addison that walking in London was enjoyable. In Trivia, Or the Art of Walking the Streets in London (1716), the poet and playwright John Gay gives advice about How to walk clean by Day, and safe by Night. (In Latin, trivia means a crossroad where three roads join; London had many such intersections.) According to Gay, London was a filthy, noisy, and dangerous place. Its streets contained many disgusting things, including dead cats and rats, so it was important to keep [to] the wall while walking. Gay warns about walking in London at night. There are thieves lurking everywhere; and there are prostitutes who steal your money while you’re sleeping. One stanza is entitled How to know a Whore.¹⁵ Gay also argues that luxury, which roughly means commercial expansion, has made walking in London hazardous because it has increased the number of sedan chairs and carriages. This lends credence to Rebecca Solnit’s observation that urban walking has always been a [shady] business, easily turning into soliciting, cruising, promenading, shopping, rioting, protesting, skulking, loitering, and other activities that, however enjoyable, hardly have the high moral tone of nature appreciation.¹⁶

The novelist Tobias Smollett agrees with Gay that walking in London could be unpleasant and even dangerous. According to Matthew Bramble, the main character in Humphrey Clinker (1771), Londoners are madmen who are seen every where rambling, riding, rolling, rushing, jostling, mixing, bouncing, cracking and crashing in one vile ferment of stupidity and corruption—All is tumult and hurry; one would imagine they were impelled by some disorder of the brain, that will not suffer them to be at rest.… The foot-passengers run along as if they were pursued by bailiffs.

Yet walking in London found a few champions. Writing to his friend William Wordsworth, the essayist Charles Lamb remarked, London Streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly. Lamb enjoyed night-walks about her crowded streets, where he saw "the Lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the innumerable trades, tradesmen and customers, coaches, waggons [sic], playhouses, all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden. He was not interested in nature. I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life. When he was living in the suburb of Edmonton, he enjoyed walking toward London. I walk 9 or 10 miles a day alway [sic] up the road, dear Londonwards. Fields, flowers, birds, & green lanes I have no heart for."¹⁷

The early twentieth-century essayist Max Beerbohm was irritated by what he called walkmongers, people who insisted on going for a walk in the country: Whenever I was with friends in the country, I knew that at any moment … some man might suddenly say ‘Come out for a walk!’ in that sharp imperative tone which he would not dream of using in any other connexion. People seem to think there is something inherently noble and virtuous about going out for a walk.¹⁸ And Virginia Woolf, Leslie Stephen’s daughter, swam against the current insofar as she wrote about the pleasures of walking in London. The greatest pleasure of town life in winter … [is] rambling the streets of London. A few paragraphs later, she exclaims: How beautiful a London street is [in winter] … with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness. Woolf is exhilarated by being part of a crowd: As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of the vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.¹⁹

Still, in Britain and the United States, the literature of walking has been dominated by those who like to walk in the country. Leslie Stephen, a leading Victorian essayist and renowned walker, echoes the thoughts of most walking enthusiasts when he writes, Walking is primitive and simple; it brings us into contact with mother earth and unsophisticated nature.²⁰ Reviewing a biography of the English poet Edward Thomas, the literary critic Helen Vendler takes it for granted that only a walk in the country lifts the spirits. Thomas was a compulsive walker (especially during the periods of nervous energy succeeding months of low spirits), and he loved the natural world, from clouds to birds.²¹

Poets and essayists have long exalted the pleasures of walking in amoena loca, pleasant places—a park, say, or a garden, or a rural path. In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton writes of walking amongst orchards, gardens, bowers, mounts, and arbours, artificial wildernesses, green thickets, arches, groves, lawns, rivulets, fountains, and such-like pleasant places.²² In the eighteenth century, many British writers discussed the pleasures of walking in the country. Addison wrote about walking not only in London but also in the countryside, especially in mountainous areas. When we view huge Heaps of Mountains, [and] high Rocks and Precipices, Addison says, we are flung into a pleasing Astonishment at such unbounded Views, and feel a delightful Stillness and Amazement in the Soul at the Apprehension of them.²³

In his Guide to the Lakes (1835), Wordsworth writes, A stranger to mountain imagery naturally on his first arrival looks out for sublimity in every object that admits of it.²⁴ One could view a sublime mountain from a carriage, but most nature writers were prodigious walkers. The letters of the poet Thomas Gray, who called London a tiresome, dull place, are filled with accounts of walking tours he took in the Alps, the Scottish Highlands, and the Lake District.²⁵ And the nineteenth-century English essayist William Hazlitt took a similarly dim view of London: I go out of town [London] in order to forget the town and all that is in it. A walk in the country is another matter: Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner.… I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy.²⁶

The Crowds of Paris

Jean-Jacques Rousseau loved to walk in the country. In the posthumously published Confessions (1781), he claims that walking stimulates thinking: The sight of the countryside, the succession of pleasant views, the open air, a sound appetite, and the good health I gain by walking … all these serve to free my spirit, to lend a greater boldness to my thinking.²⁷

But Rousseau disliked walking in Paris. In Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1782), he recounts that he walked in Paris only in order to get out of Paris. I live in the middle of Paris. When I leave my home I long for solitude and the country, but they are so far away that before I can breathe freely I have to encounter a thousand things that oppress my heart, and half the day goes by in anguish before I reach the refuge I am looking for.… As soon as I am under the trees and surrounded by greenery, I feel as if I were in the earthly paradise and experience an inward pleasure as intense as if I were the happiest of men.²⁸

By contrast, Charles Baudelaire—who once translated Poe’s short story The Man of the Crowd, which is set in London—enjoyed walking in crowds. To be lost in a crowd, Baudelaire argues, is intoxicating. The solitary and pensive stroller finds this universal communion extraordinarily intoxicating.… He makes his own all the professions, all the joys, and all the sufferings that chance presents to him. In another work Baudelaire speaks of "the religious intoxication [ivresse] of great cities. According to Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire speaks of a man who plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of electric energy."²⁹ Spleen de Paris, a section of The Flowers of Evil, was originally entitled The Solitary Walker.

Baudelaire had no interest in nature. When a writer asked Baudelaire for verses about nature, he replied: "But you know perfectly well that I can’t become sentimental about vegetation and that my soul rebels against that strange new religion [of nature worship].… I have always thought … that there was something irritating and impudent about Nature in its fresh and rampant state. In an essay praising makeup, Baudelaire argues that nature is a bad counselor in matters of ethics."³⁰

Baudelaire once wrote to a friend, I detest the countryside, particularly in good weather.… Ah! speak to me of those everchanging Parisian skies that laugh or cry according to the wind. Yet he also claimed that he hated Paris. In a prose poem, he writes, Horrible life! Horrible city! In 1858 he wrote a friend about his desire to leave that cursed city where I’ve suffered so much, and where I’ve wasted so much time.³¹ In a similar mood, Baudelaire once confessed that he wished to live in Honfleur, the Normandy town where his mother lived, but his biographer doubts that Baudelaire really meant what he said: The inveterate lover of Paris streets was incapable of leading a life of blessed retirement. When he decided, in May 1860, that he wanted to see his mother again, he first tried to organize a visit for her to Paris.³²

Baudelaire had one thing in common with Rousseau, though: he associated walking with writing. According to a friend of Baudelaire’s, the poems were habitually made up by Baudelaire in cafés or while walking down the street. Baudelaire often became lost in thought when he walked, paying no attention to his surroundings, and stopping now and then to gesticulate and mutter to himself.³³ In The Sun, Baudelaire speaks of stumbling over words as over paving stones.

Walter Benjamin observed that no one ever felt less at home in Paris than Baudelaire. But Baudelaire did not feel at home anywhere. The Flowers of Evil are proof of my disgust and loathing of all things. In Paris, Baudelaire could cultivate his disgust and loathing. The poet Jules Laforgue says Baudelaire was the first to speak of Paris from the point of view of one of her daily damned.³⁴

Baudelaire preferred Paris to other cities because its gloomy weather reflected his gloomy state of mind. His poems about Paris frequently mention the city’s weather. In The Seven Old Men he says a dirty and yellow fog flooded the city. In Meditation he says a gloomy atmosphere envelops the city.³⁵ In the second edition of The Flowers of Evil, published in 1861, Baudelaire included several poems about Paris and Parisians under the heading of Tableaux parisiens. Baudelaire’s Paris is a phantasmagoric place, a foggy underworld filled with self-destructive people. At the end of Morning Twilight, he says of gamblers and prostitutes: The debauchees were returning home, worn out by their [nighttime] work.

For Baudelaire, walking in the crowd relieves the despair that weighs heavily on him when he is alone in his rented room—a despair that he usually calls spleen. In one poem he talks of enjoying fleeting eye contact with a passing woman. To a Passer-By begins: The deafening street roared around me. Suddenly a beautiful woman in mourning passes. He drank from her eyes … a pale sky where a storm is brewing .… A flash of lightning … then night! It is a moment of exhilaration, but it is only a moment.

In The Swan, Baudelaire writes,

Paris changes! But my melancholy remains

the same. New palaces, scaffolding, blocks,

Old neighborhoods—everything becomes for me an allegory …

Baudelaire occasionally lashes out against bourgeois culture, but his despair is religious, not political. In The Swan he describes a swan stretching his neck toward the ironically and cruelly blue sky … as if he were shouting reproaches at God.³⁶ After the swan has escaped his cage, he scuffles his webbed feet on the dry pavement / while dragging his white plumage on the rough ground. Later in the poem, the poet thinks of the swan again, and the bird reminds him of a thin and consumptive black woman he has seen who is trudging along in the mud.

According to Claude Pichois, it is impossible … to imagine Baudelaire’s work without its Christian dimension, even if his peculiar form of Christianity is one from which the Redeemer is absent.³⁷ Christian writers often talk of life as a journey. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) begins with the line, As I walked through the wilderness of this world. Baudelaire walks through the wilderness of Paris, but there is no progress for him. The despair remains. In Spleen (1) he says: The soul of an old poet wanders on the roof gutters / With the sad voice of a shivering phantom.

We cannot say with any certainty that the writers who are discussed in the ensuing chapters were familiar with Baudelaire, but all would surely agree with Baudelaire’s remark: What bizarre things we find in a big city, when we know how to stroll about looking!³⁸

2

Britons Visiting New York

Fanny Trollope, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens

People who write about walking in the country sometimes talk about walking as the means for inner voyages, as Robert Macfarlane puts it. In The Living Mountain (1977) the Scottish writer Nan Shepherd says that when she walked in the mountains she was searching for profound interiors and deep recesses in her psyche.¹ The British writers who walked in New York in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had no interest in exploring their psyche. They walked out of curiosity; they wanted to know more about America’s fastest growing city.

The best-known British walkers were Fanny Trollope, her son Anthony Trollope, and Charles Dickens, but there were many others as well. The first British assessment of New York may have been by Daniel Denton. In A Brief Description of New York, published in London in 1670, Denton talks about walking in New York’s fields. A man can own such a quantity of land [in New York], that he may weary himself with walking over his fields of Corn, and all sorts of Grain. Denton makes a point that subsequent walkers in the city would make: New York is a land of opportunity. I may say, & say truly, that if there be any terrestrial happiness to be had by people of all ranks, especially of an inferior rank, it must certainly be here: here any one may furnish himself with land, & live rent-free.²

A century after Denton, Patrick M’Robert, a Scotsman, no longer talked about walking in New York’s fields. Walking in New York is unpleasant, M’Robert says, because the streets are in general ill paved, irregular, and too narrow. Writing in 1794, Henry Wansey, an Englishman, had a better opinion of New York’s streets. New York is much more like a city than Boston, having broad footways [that are] paved, with a curb to separate them from the road. The streets are wider, and the houses in a better style.³

In 1807, Englishman John Lambert praised Broadway. The Broadway and the Bowery Road are the two finest avenues in the city. Broadway, he says, is well paved, and the foot-paths are chiefly bricked. According to Lambert, New York is the first city in the United States for wealth, commerce, and population. Lambert mentions two groups of New Yorkers that many observers would write about over the next one hundred fifty years: Jews and African Americans. There are several rich and respectable families of Jews in New York; and as they have equal rights with every other citizen in the United States, they suffer under no invidious distinctions. African Americans do not have such rights: There are about 4,000 Negroes and people of colour in New York, 1,700 of whom are slaves.⁴

William Cobbett, an English radical and notorious anti-Semite, was happy that he did not encounter Jews on his visit to New York in 1818. The city, he says, offers museums, picture galleries, great booksellers shops, public libraries, playhouses and in short, an over-stock of all sorts of amusements and of fineries with the most beautiful streets and shops in the world and without a single beggar, public prostitute, pickpocket or Jew.

But there were prostitutes in New York—at least in certain areas of the city. There are at least 500 ladies of pleasure, M’Robert says, who keep lodgings in a part of the city called the Holy Ground because it belongs to St. Paul’s Church. Here all the prostitutes reside, among whom are many fine well dressed women.⁵ By the 1850s, prostitution had become a major industry in New York. In 1851, the diarist George Templeton Strong complained that New York was a whorearchy. According to Strong, no one can walk the length of Broadway without meeting some hideous groups of ragged girls, from twelve years-old down … with thief written in their cunning eyes and whore on their depraved faces.⁶

Fanny Trollope, the author of the best-selling Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), disliked most American cities and most Americans, but she liked New York, which she calls one of the finest cities I ever saw.… We always found something new to see and to admire. She also points out that there a great number of negroes in New York, all free; their emancipation having been completed in 1827.⁷

Mrs. Trollope, who spent seven weeks in New York, was impressed by the splendid Broadway.… This noble street may vie with any I ever saw, for its length and breadth, its handsome shops, neat awnings, excellent trottoir [sidewalk] and well-dressed pedestrians. Mrs. Trollope may have walked a lot in New York, since she complains that hackney coaches are abominably dear. She clearly is familiar with New York’s streets. The trottoir paving in most of the streets is extremely good, being of large flag stones, very superior to the bricks of Philadelphia. She speaks of the peculiar manner of walking of American women, but she does not elaborate.⁸

Mrs. Trollope mentions a New York custom that made walking difficult on May 1. On that day—called Moving Day—many New Yorkers either renegotiated their lease or moved elsewhere, so the streets were clogged. Rich furniture and ragged furniture, carts, waggons, and drays, ropes, canvas, and straw, packers, porters, and draymen, white, yellow, and black, occupy the streets from east to west, from north to south, on this day. Every one I spoke to on the subject complained of this custom as most annoying, but all assured me it was unavoidable.⁹

For most of the nineteenth century, walking in New York was an ordeal all year round. There were great heaps of mud, garbage, and animal excrement piled up in the streets, write Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace in Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. To this base were added the noxious by-products of slaughterhouses, tanneries, dyers, distilleries, glue works, bone boilers, and stables. The herds of pigs that roamed the city made some inroads on the resulting accumulation, but what goes in must come out, and the porkers added their own contributions to the vile stew.¹⁰

William Chambers, a Scottish visitor, wrote in 1853 that the necessity for seeking vehicular conveyances arises from … the condition of the principal thoroughfares.… The mire was ankle-deep in Broadway, and the more narrow business streets were barely passable. It was also difficult to walk on the sidewalk. All along the foot-pavements [sidewalks] there stood, night and day, as if fixtures, boxes, buckets, lidless flour-barrels, baskets, decayed tea-chests, rusty iron pans, and earthenware jars full of coal-ashes.¹¹

A woman going for a walk on New York’s streets would also have to watch out for the spittle of American men, who spit the hateful tobacco everywhere. Attending an opera, Mrs. Trollope heard, without ceasing, the spitting. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said he would forgive Mrs. Trollope her criticisms of the United States if Domestic Manners of the Americans helped put a stop to spitting.¹²

Traffic was terrible on all major New York thoroughfares. So was the noise. In an article about New York for a Pennsylvania newspaper in 1844, Poe complained, The street-cries, and other nuisances to the same effect, are particularly disagreeable here. Immense charcoal-waggons infest the most frequented thorough-fares, and give forth a din which I can like to nothing earthly.¹³

Broadway, the historian Luc Sante says, was quite unmanageable well before the middle of the nineteenth century.… It was plied by every sort of truck, wagon, cart, and coach, although the bulk of traffic was made up of the all-purpose two-wheeled delivery carts driven by white-smocked carmen that were the terror of all. Broadway, though, was the first street in the city to benefit from improvements. The first sidewalk built of brick (in the mid-1700s) was on Broadway. So were the first numbered houses (starting in 1793), the first gas lighting in the city (1825), and the first electric arc lights (1882).¹⁴

Thirty years after Fanny Trollope wrote Domestic Manners, her son, novelist Anthony Trollope, also visited New York. Like his mother, Trollope traveled widely in the United States, but he stayed in New York for only two weeks. Trollope admired America far more than his mother did, and he admired many things about New York, especially its schools and hospitals: New York is a most interesting city.… In no other city is there a population so mixed and cosmopolitan in their modes of life.

Reviews for Walking New York

[karen59_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As a native New Yorker, with parents who grew up on the Lower East Side, I could imagine the sights and sounds described by the American writers chosen by Stephen Miller. It brought me right back to the streets that I have walked on over and over again. This book is about class, race, immigration, poverty and wealth and what it means to be "home" or not in this exhilarating, tough, exciting, vicious city. I learned alot about New York during a particular time since there was a predominance of writers from the 1800's with vivid descriptions of the city. I also missed hearing more voices from women, immigrants and others from the multitudes of writers who live in the diverse landscape that is New York City. Overall, however, a vibrant walk through the city that calls to so many of us to it.