S. Williamsburg, Brooklyn

23rd st, Queens

photo credit: Jacob Gambino

Cobble Hill

My first documented walk starts in Cobble Hill, a quiet slice of Brooklyn. As authentic as the Dodgers and as upscale as Scarsdale in places. The demographic was mainly young professionals with their strollers and drunk old men stumbling from dive bar to dive bar at 5pm.



This is some of the best/worst graffiti in the area, note the references to Pissing Calvin, a poorly rendered Spongebob and Angelica in a dentists chair. (click the pic to enlarge)


I enjoy this tooth's hastily added wang. A worthy aftersight.


Following a nice trip north on Henry St, we ran across Warren Place Workingmen's Cottages, which were built in 1878-79 by an enlightened businessman after he had toured the slums of London. The architecture was like nothing else in the area, it also has its share of blind alleys and short cobblestoned paths, which always make for a more interesting neighborhood.

In 1878 they took only $1100 each to build. The asking price of such a cottage these days is about 200 times that much.

After a visit to the slums of London, he returned convinced that "No European city suffers so much and so unnecessarily from the evils of overcrowding as does new York today." Deciding to help remedy the evil, he engaged the firm of William Field & Son to build the Cottages, to give the workingmen of the city "the chance to live decently, and to bring up their children to be decent men and women."

--Gerald Wolfe, in New York: A Guide to the Metropolis

Continuing up Amity, we come across the birthplace of Jennie Jerome, Winston Churchill's mother, at 197 Amity.

A noted beauty—an admirer said that there was "more of the panther than of the woman in her look"—Lady Randolph Churchill worked as a magazine editor in early life. There is a persistent rumor that she had a fashionable tattoo of a snake twined around her wrist, which she hid with a bracelet when required.


Say goodbye, Charlie. "Goodbye, Charlie"

Photo credit: Mike Marmora

Why I Walk.

There's something so powerful about the archaic form of self-propulsion. Sometimes I feel like I'm moving the earth beneath me with my legs instead of traversing it's surface. And sometimes I feel like my brain only works at its peak performance when the rest of my body is in movement. Whether I'm alone or accompanied, walking is meditative for me. Sure, I have my unlimited metro pass, but it doesn't give the same sense of satisfaction when I reach my destination via iron monster as opposed to the tender dedication of pumping blood. When someone tells me to meet them somewhere and apologize for the distance being an inconvenience, I smile inwardly because they're fulfilling my selfish desire for alone time.

This journal is a way for me to share my discoveries, communal and personal.