OH WOW COOL!
Apr. 16th, 2005 11:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
Well, not that cool. But pretty cool. This guy has walked every block in Lower Manhattan. That's... a lot.
His Long Walk Home
By PETER EDIDIN
WALKING with Robert Jay Kaufman after lunch is not good for the digestion. He is tall and has long legs that speed up when something engages his interest. He constantly jaywalks. He never takes more than a few steps before stopping to consider some element in the cityscape. And inclement weather, like the mini-monsoon that drenched the city a couple of weeks ago, is a minor inconvenience.
On Franklin Street in TriBeCa, between Greenwich and Hudson, for example, in the midst of that downpour, he ordered a halt. "Look at the Renaissance details - the arches and the verticals," he said of several buildings on the north side of the street. "You can see the egos of people who put up the buildings, all of which were built probably within 20 years of each other. Each one tried to do something different, to get noticed."
Crossing the street, Mr. Kaufman pulled out a credit card, squinted along its edge to check the alignment of the window casements and decorative details of a tiny two-story brick house, recently restored, and pointed out where the builder had intentionally varied the scheme. It is that attention to symmetry and proportion, he suggested, that makes the little structure feel so right to a passer-by.
Manhattan has 1,544 blocks below 14th Street, or so Mr. Kaufman says. That number, like many things about the city's oldest precincts, is debatable; it depends, among other things, on how one defines "block." The City Planning Department, for example, estimates that Manhattan has 3,450 blocks, 1,100 of which are below 14th Street.
Still, Mr. Kaufman has earned the right to his opinion.
Mr. Kaufman's day job, so to speak, is heading the illustration and animation department at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. But in the spring, summer and fall of 2003, this 54-year-old urban adventurer spent 52 days wandering back and forth over every one of those blocks. His circuitous ramble covered roughly 300 miles, during which he ran through three pairs of walking shoes and developed, he said, "legs of steel and feet of clay."
The tale of this trek along what he describes as "my Appalachian Trail with restaurants" is told in words and pictures in "Blockology: An Offbeat Walking Guide to Lower Manhattan," a new book that Mr. Kaufman wrote, illustrated and published through the aptly named Turning Corners Press, of which he is both proprietor and sole employee.
The book's theme is experiencing the essential downtown New York through the close, leisurely observation of the architecture and ambience of its blocks. It is a mission he regards as both humble and noble. City dwellers tend to take the block for granted, despite the fact that it is the fundamental element of urban space. Or as Mr. Kaufman puts it: "The block integrates society. It's the true marketplace."
"Blockology," though, is less a work of scholarship than of love. It is a work Mr. Kaufman felt compelled to create, and it exists as a testament to the hold that the city can exercise over the imagination, especially the imagination of an artist.
It is also a valentine to the city that gave Mr. Kaufman a name and whose publishing industry gave him a profession as an illustrator. Not surprisingly, given his romantic attachment to the place, it was also here that Mr. Kaufman met his future wife - a graphic designer named Susan Scott - at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, of all places.
No one knows what Mr. Kaufman's forebears were called before they immigrated to New York from Russia in the 19th century. Like many greenhorns, they swapped their old-country name for one that sounded more American. What is known is that the family thrived in the city and developed a fierce loyalty to it.
When he was a boy, in the 1960's, "there were tremendous fiscal and crime problems," Mr. Kaufman recalled the other day in a pouring rain, "and everybody seemed to be leaving for the suburbs." Even his own family had migrated to Chatham Township, N.J.
"But when the family got together, it was always in Manhattan, at my aunt's or uncle's," he said. "Everyone was just mad about the city; it was the only place to live in America. There was constant discussion of the best restaurants and plays. You rarely heard a bad word about the place. So I had a very romantic notion about it, and I also had parents who allowed me to wander with a friend or cousins at a very young age." As young as 11, he used to go without an adult to Yankee games or get cheap balcony seats at the theater.
After high school, Mr. Kaufman studied art in California, but he returned to the city in 1977, to a loft on Franklin Street in what was then the urban wilderness of TriBeCa. "We had a potbellied stove," Mr. Kaufman recalled, "and every night in the winter I used a circular saw to cut up the wood pallets we would find in the streets. Everybody's goal was to find a girlfriend who lived in a heated place."
Eventually, he moved on, first to Hoboken after he was priced out of TriBeCa, and then to teaching jobs in North Carolina and later Boston. Still, he never found anyplace as intriguing to live in as New York, and for years, he contemplated creating a guide to Manhattan. Over time, his focus narrowed to the lower part of the island, in part because of what he described as its Roman character, the way that even natives get lost in its twisting streets and alleys.
The idea languished for lack of time, energy and resolve. Then came Sept. 11.
"I had to come back," Mr. Kaufman said simply. "I felt this was my home, and it had been attacked."
After arranging for a sabbatical, he sublet an apartment on Avenue A in the East Village. In late May 2003, he started walking. With time out for visits to his family outside Boston, he finished on Oct. 31.
In the beginning, Mr. Kaufman wasn't quite sure what sort of project he was working on. "I had this daily ritual," he said. "I'd get up in the morning, and I'd walk two, three hours. Then I'd find someplace to have lunch and rest my feet, and then go and do another couple of hours."
One day he used a pedometer to check his mileage. "I found I walked about five miles, covering maybe 30 blocks. All the crisscrossing of the street really added up."
In an effort to make sense of all he was seeing, he created a master list with six categories - architecture, shopping, restaurants, nature, people and views - and he used those categories to give each block an overall score. He also kept anecdotal notes and took pictures; by the time he was finished he had amassed 2,000 photographs and filed 15 binders.
As he expected, people often asked Mr. Kaufman what he was up to, and many assumed, or hoped, that he was really doing something else.
"They really wanted me to be the person who fixes the sidewalks," he said, "some kind of city official that they could complain to. My second day out, there was one woman who wouldn't accept the fact that I wasn't the foreman on a construction site. She was complaining about the noise level of the construction and so forth, and she would not believe me."
But at least one person loved the idea. A librarian, whom Mr. Kaufman met while visiting the historic Ottendorfer Branch of the New York Public Library, on Second Avenue, called him "the wandering artist."
As he grew more comfortable with his daily routine, Mr. Kaufman became increasingly attuned to the singularity of each block. "I began to see blocks as personifications," he said, "each one having an ancestry and a personality, suffering some of the ill effects of getting older and then having periods of rejuvenation."
Vesey Street was one of his favorites. "On the south side," he said, "you have one of the great landmark churches, St. Paul's, and the cemetery-park space. On the north side, you have these wonderful buildings from the early 20th century, which were built in homage to the city as a burgeoning financial empire. There's a certain blend of the old classic New York with the really old New York, the city of George Washington's day."
Mr. Kaufman calls this a link block, one that connects different segments of the city, in this case the City Hall area, which is reminiscent of the 19th century and Tammany Hall, with the modern high-rise metropolis of the World Trade Center area and Battery Park City.
He also identified guest blocks (places where only tourists gather), gut blocks (where the pace of renovation is such that they are different every time you return) and uncuisine blocks (where every restaurant serves the same food). Altogether, he coined 49 terms to describe the types and functions of city blocks. Nor is this list exhaustive; in the book, he invites readers to contribute to the lexicon at his Web site, www.turningcornerspress.com.
Of the 1,544 blocks he visited, Mr. Kaufman revisited dozens of them, ultimately choosing to illustrate and describe 35.
The severe culling was a choice, not a necessity. "So many travel books are stuffed with information," Mr. Kaufman said. "But the city's environment is too complex for people to understand it that way. You have to allow people to wander. It doesn't matter what direction you go in; it's the journey and the observation.
"That's the idea of 'Blockology,' " he continued. "I want the book to help people be more observant, and to realize that the visual world that they live in really counts for something; it's not to be taken for granted. In the suburbs they have severe difficulties with teenagers because they're visually bored. Somebody down the street just planted a new shrub. Whoop-de-do."
He illustrated the text not just with photographs, which he thought were too literal and tended to focus attention on details like a cornice or a picturesque sign, but with collagelike combinations of photographs and illustrations that he hoped would suggest what he called "imagined realities."
After printing 4,000 copies - his total investment for the project was $40,000 - he began hawking it at local bookstores and on his Web site. Through sales of the book, Mr. Kaufman hopes to earn enough money to create a new love letter to New York, this time based on the thousands of photographs he took during his long walk. But mostly, he seems to want to replicate the experience of working on "Blockology," the wandering, observing and meditating on a great city.
"It was the best thing I've ever done in my life," he said. "I doubt anything will top it. I'd always found tremendous contentment in walking. And just to make a profession of it was too good to be true."
I want honeysuckle by my window. Whee, tangent!
His Long Walk Home
By PETER EDIDIN
WALKING with Robert Jay Kaufman after lunch is not good for the digestion. He is tall and has long legs that speed up when something engages his interest. He constantly jaywalks. He never takes more than a few steps before stopping to consider some element in the cityscape. And inclement weather, like the mini-monsoon that drenched the city a couple of weeks ago, is a minor inconvenience.
On Franklin Street in TriBeCa, between Greenwich and Hudson, for example, in the midst of that downpour, he ordered a halt. "Look at the Renaissance details - the arches and the verticals," he said of several buildings on the north side of the street. "You can see the egos of people who put up the buildings, all of which were built probably within 20 years of each other. Each one tried to do something different, to get noticed."
Crossing the street, Mr. Kaufman pulled out a credit card, squinted along its edge to check the alignment of the window casements and decorative details of a tiny two-story brick house, recently restored, and pointed out where the builder had intentionally varied the scheme. It is that attention to symmetry and proportion, he suggested, that makes the little structure feel so right to a passer-by.
Manhattan has 1,544 blocks below 14th Street, or so Mr. Kaufman says. That number, like many things about the city's oldest precincts, is debatable; it depends, among other things, on how one defines "block." The City Planning Department, for example, estimates that Manhattan has 3,450 blocks, 1,100 of which are below 14th Street.
Still, Mr. Kaufman has earned the right to his opinion.
Mr. Kaufman's day job, so to speak, is heading the illustration and animation department at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. But in the spring, summer and fall of 2003, this 54-year-old urban adventurer spent 52 days wandering back and forth over every one of those blocks. His circuitous ramble covered roughly 300 miles, during which he ran through three pairs of walking shoes and developed, he said, "legs of steel and feet of clay."
The tale of this trek along what he describes as "my Appalachian Trail with restaurants" is told in words and pictures in "Blockology: An Offbeat Walking Guide to Lower Manhattan," a new book that Mr. Kaufman wrote, illustrated and published through the aptly named Turning Corners Press, of which he is both proprietor and sole employee.
The book's theme is experiencing the essential downtown New York through the close, leisurely observation of the architecture and ambience of its blocks. It is a mission he regards as both humble and noble. City dwellers tend to take the block for granted, despite the fact that it is the fundamental element of urban space. Or as Mr. Kaufman puts it: "The block integrates society. It's the true marketplace."
"Blockology," though, is less a work of scholarship than of love. It is a work Mr. Kaufman felt compelled to create, and it exists as a testament to the hold that the city can exercise over the imagination, especially the imagination of an artist.
It is also a valentine to the city that gave Mr. Kaufman a name and whose publishing industry gave him a profession as an illustrator. Not surprisingly, given his romantic attachment to the place, it was also here that Mr. Kaufman met his future wife - a graphic designer named Susan Scott - at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, of all places.
No one knows what Mr. Kaufman's forebears were called before they immigrated to New York from Russia in the 19th century. Like many greenhorns, they swapped their old-country name for one that sounded more American. What is known is that the family thrived in the city and developed a fierce loyalty to it.
When he was a boy, in the 1960's, "there were tremendous fiscal and crime problems," Mr. Kaufman recalled the other day in a pouring rain, "and everybody seemed to be leaving for the suburbs." Even his own family had migrated to Chatham Township, N.J.
"But when the family got together, it was always in Manhattan, at my aunt's or uncle's," he said. "Everyone was just mad about the city; it was the only place to live in America. There was constant discussion of the best restaurants and plays. You rarely heard a bad word about the place. So I had a very romantic notion about it, and I also had parents who allowed me to wander with a friend or cousins at a very young age." As young as 11, he used to go without an adult to Yankee games or get cheap balcony seats at the theater.
After high school, Mr. Kaufman studied art in California, but he returned to the city in 1977, to a loft on Franklin Street in what was then the urban wilderness of TriBeCa. "We had a potbellied stove," Mr. Kaufman recalled, "and every night in the winter I used a circular saw to cut up the wood pallets we would find in the streets. Everybody's goal was to find a girlfriend who lived in a heated place."
Eventually, he moved on, first to Hoboken after he was priced out of TriBeCa, and then to teaching jobs in North Carolina and later Boston. Still, he never found anyplace as intriguing to live in as New York, and for years, he contemplated creating a guide to Manhattan. Over time, his focus narrowed to the lower part of the island, in part because of what he described as its Roman character, the way that even natives get lost in its twisting streets and alleys.
The idea languished for lack of time, energy and resolve. Then came Sept. 11.
"I had to come back," Mr. Kaufman said simply. "I felt this was my home, and it had been attacked."
After arranging for a sabbatical, he sublet an apartment on Avenue A in the East Village. In late May 2003, he started walking. With time out for visits to his family outside Boston, he finished on Oct. 31.
In the beginning, Mr. Kaufman wasn't quite sure what sort of project he was working on. "I had this daily ritual," he said. "I'd get up in the morning, and I'd walk two, three hours. Then I'd find someplace to have lunch and rest my feet, and then go and do another couple of hours."
One day he used a pedometer to check his mileage. "I found I walked about five miles, covering maybe 30 blocks. All the crisscrossing of the street really added up."
In an effort to make sense of all he was seeing, he created a master list with six categories - architecture, shopping, restaurants, nature, people and views - and he used those categories to give each block an overall score. He also kept anecdotal notes and took pictures; by the time he was finished he had amassed 2,000 photographs and filed 15 binders.
As he expected, people often asked Mr. Kaufman what he was up to, and many assumed, or hoped, that he was really doing something else.
"They really wanted me to be the person who fixes the sidewalks," he said, "some kind of city official that they could complain to. My second day out, there was one woman who wouldn't accept the fact that I wasn't the foreman on a construction site. She was complaining about the noise level of the construction and so forth, and she would not believe me."
But at least one person loved the idea. A librarian, whom Mr. Kaufman met while visiting the historic Ottendorfer Branch of the New York Public Library, on Second Avenue, called him "the wandering artist."
As he grew more comfortable with his daily routine, Mr. Kaufman became increasingly attuned to the singularity of each block. "I began to see blocks as personifications," he said, "each one having an ancestry and a personality, suffering some of the ill effects of getting older and then having periods of rejuvenation."
Vesey Street was one of his favorites. "On the south side," he said, "you have one of the great landmark churches, St. Paul's, and the cemetery-park space. On the north side, you have these wonderful buildings from the early 20th century, which were built in homage to the city as a burgeoning financial empire. There's a certain blend of the old classic New York with the really old New York, the city of George Washington's day."
Mr. Kaufman calls this a link block, one that connects different segments of the city, in this case the City Hall area, which is reminiscent of the 19th century and Tammany Hall, with the modern high-rise metropolis of the World Trade Center area and Battery Park City.
He also identified guest blocks (places where only tourists gather), gut blocks (where the pace of renovation is such that they are different every time you return) and uncuisine blocks (where every restaurant serves the same food). Altogether, he coined 49 terms to describe the types and functions of city blocks. Nor is this list exhaustive; in the book, he invites readers to contribute to the lexicon at his Web site, www.turningcornerspress.com.
Of the 1,544 blocks he visited, Mr. Kaufman revisited dozens of them, ultimately choosing to illustrate and describe 35.
The severe culling was a choice, not a necessity. "So many travel books are stuffed with information," Mr. Kaufman said. "But the city's environment is too complex for people to understand it that way. You have to allow people to wander. It doesn't matter what direction you go in; it's the journey and the observation.
"That's the idea of 'Blockology,' " he continued. "I want the book to help people be more observant, and to realize that the visual world that they live in really counts for something; it's not to be taken for granted. In the suburbs they have severe difficulties with teenagers because they're visually bored. Somebody down the street just planted a new shrub. Whoop-de-do."
He illustrated the text not just with photographs, which he thought were too literal and tended to focus attention on details like a cornice or a picturesque sign, but with collagelike combinations of photographs and illustrations that he hoped would suggest what he called "imagined realities."
After printing 4,000 copies - his total investment for the project was $40,000 - he began hawking it at local bookstores and on his Web site. Through sales of the book, Mr. Kaufman hopes to earn enough money to create a new love letter to New York, this time based on the thousands of photographs he took during his long walk. But mostly, he seems to want to replicate the experience of working on "Blockology," the wandering, observing and meditating on a great city.
"It was the best thing I've ever done in my life," he said. "I doubt anything will top it. I'd always found tremendous contentment in walking. And just to make a profession of it was too good to be true."
I want honeysuckle by my window. Whee, tangent!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Manhattan walks
Date: 2005-04-17 06:09 am (UTC)"Between May 2002 and December 2004, I walked every street on the island of Manhattan."
Pretty great site, Conuly, if you want to take a peek. :)
Wench