A Walking Reverie: My Commute for the Pandemic
A daily trek over the Manhattan grid eases into a groove
Going back to the office after months of being indoors — other than the quick trips to the supermarket — felt like I was stepping out of the capsule without a tether. Minimizing the use of public transportation seemed safest of all. The two-and-a-half-mile trek to work was doable. I was fit enough, and the forty-minute walk would span Central Park, a bonus. The city had changed during the five months most everyone was indoors. How much, I wasn’t sure. I was going to find out walking the streets, the best way to know a place.
In late August 2020, I started doing the round trip a couple of times a week, Upper East Side to Morningside Heights, trying out different routes. By the end of November, I had worn a groove into my favorite, starting at Madison Avenue and 82nd Street, at the Lillie Devereaux Blake School (P.S. 6), across the street from my apartment.
Rows of gray vinyl spots stamped with the P.S.6 logo and a chilly, “WAIT HERE,” appeared one morning on the sidewalks, pasted six feet apart. It wouldn’t be until late September that kids and their parents came to line up on the marks. When they do, school aides close the surrounding streets, and use them to allow extra space for the pre-boarding lineups. The cheery noise, reminding me of my days shepherding my two kids to the school, was a welcomed change to what had been a quiet start to my walk.
Today’s children will remember this year like I remember the Albert Shanker-led teacher’s strike of 1968 that kept us out of school for weeks that fall. Some, the creative ones, will follow P.S. 6 alumni, like Peter Yarrow from Peter, Paul and Mary, who does frequent benefits for the school, and Lenny Kravitz, musician-cum-designer, to draw, sing, and write about the pandemic year. I also think about how many children will not recover from the missing year.
I head north on Madison Avenue, choosing it over the more residential Park and Fifth avenues. The light foot-traffic and open storefronts on Madison are a diversion. At 86th Street, a major two-way street, I assess the ongoing demolition of two adjacent buildings on the southeast corner. In a few short weeks, the demo amigos, all in their canary yellow company t-shirts and rust-colored hard hats, take down the small five-story building facing 86th Street that was the home of Demarchelier, a French eatery, and a neighborhood stalwart, and also the two-story building along the avenue that housed the much larger Morini restaurant, Purdy Opticians, a cleaners, and two other stores.
One day, a twelve-foot inflatable rat on a flatbed truck parks on the street. The ugly gray rodent poses there for a week or so to protest non-union work. A couple of hefty guys stand near the rodent showering dirty looks at the Latino men in yellow. Most mornings, though, the union guys sit in the truck cab staring at their phones. One morning, the rat is gone for good.
I am drawn to the dismantling, the deconstruction representative of what is happening around the city, of how quickly something real is gone. Soon after the exterior walls are down, the heavy equipment is gone, too, leaving a vacant lot littered with discarded bricks. The workers leave the typical empty-lot wooden perimeter fence, the one with the diamond-shaped peek-in-slots, which I use often, in case of any new activity.
This lot will be replaced by a large condo, a common occurrence on the Upper East Side. Long-time residents lament the loss of many of the neighborhood’s quaint two-story buildings, many of them brownstones, to generic glass towers. I look forward to the refurnishing of this corner, glass tower or not.
I head into Carnegie Hill, noticeably free of the school buses that serve the many private schools in the area. Without the buses, there’s no gridlock and there’s no honking. On some mornings, this area seems eerily empty. A dog-walker here and there, but the sidewalks are mostly mine alone.
The shacks constructed for outdoor dining are new. On 92nd Street, across from the Hotel Wales, one of these structures stands out for its crèche look, a chalet just in time for the holidays. The wooden structure has a gable roof covered in felt grass and adorned with wisteria vines that rise along the walls. At the top is a Santa-compatible faux-brick chimney with puffy cotton smoke blowing north. This shack covers about fifty feet of curbside parking and seems mostly enclosed. I wonder how it qualifies as outdoor dining.
The imposing block-wide Madison Avenue Armory comes up next. It looks more like a red-brick castle with a tower and turrets at each corner. A large stone plaque reads, “Boutez en Avant,” which I look up. It was the battle cry of Squadron A, the original tenants. Built around the turn of last century, I presume soldiers posted here served during the Great War while the 1918 influenza pandemic was rampant. Young men must have walked on this block carrying a rifle and wearing a mask, thinking it was enough protection for their future.
The armory had a big cameo in the 1991 movie, The Fisher King, starring Robin Williams. Supposedly, it was where the Holy Grail was hidden, funny because the armory structure is just a façade hiding a yard for the school next door.
I’m off Carnegie Hill when I cross 96th Street, another major two-way street. Ahead, the activity thickens as I approach the Mount Sinai Hospital complex. Aiming to avoid large gatherings, I turn left on 97th Street, just south of the hospital. There, mid-block, I discover a Russian Orthodox church with five beautiful onion domes shining in the morning sun. I must have walked this block dozens of times and never noticed the domes. I reprimand myself for looking at my shoelaces — my father had a saying, “don’t look at your shoelaces, look up at the second story windows where the señoritas stand.”
I pause for a moment to admire the stained glass triptych over the front steps of the church, the ornamental tiles, blue, yellow, and red along the roof line, and the onion domes. I imagine how beautiful it must be inside. I take a couple of photos to see if I can stump my wife who knows every building on the Upper East Side.
I reach the stretch of Fifth Avenue also known as Museum Mile, connecting the two smaller museums north of the hospital, Museo del Barrio and the Museo de la Ciudad de Nueva York, to the swankier powerhouses, the Met and the Guggenheim.
I enter Central Park at the East Meadow, the former home of the Covid-19 field hospital, set up in the spring when things were looking bleak. With the expected winter surge of the coronavirus, I hope it doesn’t come to that again. The East Meadow, also formerly a soccer dust bowl before a recent renovation, is verdant green, and temporarily off limits for maintenance and lawn care.
Moving west, I approach East Drive, the northbound leg of the six mile loop inside the park. Its two lanes used to carry vehicular traffic. I dig deep to recall it full of cars, to remember how cabbies careened into it like it was their Grand Prix, used it like a wormhole to come out on the other side of the city, and how some unscrupulous drivers would loop disoriented tourists as the meter went ka-ching, ka-ching.
Runners and cyclists long ago inherited these lanes. The newcomers are the electric personal transportation vehicles. Riders in business-casual, antifa-wannabees in black bloc, moms, and the rarest of species in the park, tourists, zoom by on powered scooters, e-bikes, motorized skateboards, and the futuristic looking single-wheel hoverboards. The speeds they generate dissuade me from considering such a device. Walking seems more civilized. And safer.
Because this is a feel-good walk, I won’t go into what is the most abundant species scurrying in the park.
After crossing East Drive, I arrive at the most uplifting part of the walk, traversing the North Meadow, a huge lawn of baseball and soccer fields. Here, I remove my mask and take a diagonal path, southeast to northwest, over the lush grass. In the mornings, I am usually the only person on the fields other than when the crews from the Central Park Conservancy, in their golf carts, are attending to the fences, the sprinklers, or the chalk lines. Once I am out into the open, the buildings, revealing themselves above the treeline, lean in for a peek. Behind me is the imposing dark brown hospital building on Fifth Avenue. In the evenings, on my return trip, it’s a dark box with lit windows looming over the East Meadow.
Ahead is the rest of the twenty-three acre lawn. When I am halfway across, the majestic El Dorado, with its twin spires, comes into view, leading a line of pre-war buildings on Central Park West that recede toward the bottom of the park. The western-most pencil skyscraper, these rising like weeds on 57th Street, is also visible.
There’s much tranquility and peace here. I have a quarter of a mile of grass to roam in every direction. I swing my head around to take it all in. I hear dogs barking on the nearby hill over by the handball courts, their owners chatting while the dogs wrestle, roll, and run around, free from their leashes till nine. Their wagging tails exactly my sentiment.
One morning, I spot a couple of mushroom colonies on the edge of the meadow. Each colony has dozens of caps growing on top of one another like something by Gaudi on the Passeig de Gràcia in Barcelona. That no one, no kid or animal, has punted the fungus, allowing it to grow, out in the open, to this size is a miracle of preservation or very rapid growth. I squat to take pictures of both colonies to share with my colleagues.
I exit the North Meadow on a little spur that leads to The Pool, a duck-filled pond and one of the most beautiful sights in the park. During the return trips, I take photos when the angled sun turns the leaves gold even in the watery reflection. In the mornings, I enjoy the solitude of this area, the northwest part of the park is usually less crowded, but during the pandemic and in late August, I feel like I am Robert Neville or The Last Man.
I walk over the little wooden bridge by the Glen Span Arch, taking the right fork that leads to Great Hill. The incline is steep, densely covered, and free from city noise. I hear the repeated squawking of a bluejay above me. Angry loud. I am intruding. Initially, I had been reluctant to take this desolate path, my Spidey-sense kicking in, but once I did, it became a path to savor.
I reach the Great Hill, huffing. This must be the highest point in the park. Great Hill flattens to an oval lawn with a cinder track around it. When I step on it, I think about my high-school track days, before synthetic surfaces became the norm, and how I used to love running on cinder with my quarter-inch spikes. I feel a bit of adrenaline thinking about how it felt to run all out in quarter mile races. This morning there are a couple of joggers on the track, but most souls out here have their heads down as if grazing with their dogs in the middle of the lawn.
There are seven paths in and out of Great Hill. If the small utility shed is twelve o’clock, I enter at five and exit at one o’clock, a path that goes straight downhill, forcing me into a slight jog. I jump off the path when it touches West Drive, where runners and cyclists begin their turn south on the counter-clockwise loop. I walk against the flow of West Drive for a short distance, exiting on the northwest corner of the park, which empties onto Frederick Douglass Circle.
I had been walking past the circle until Douglass started showing up in my life. I happened to read a 1868 letter, from Douglass to Josephine S.W. Griffing, discussing Black and women suffrage and why he had to prioritize the former. Then, I watched the Good Lord Bird, a television series about Douglass’s friend, John Brown, the abolitionist and leader of the raid at Harpers Valley, a prelude to the American Civil War.
The statue of Douglass stands looking north at his namesake avenue, but just in front of him, in what can only be called poor placement, is a lamp post with a black and white one-way street sign and a red “No Standing” sign, both at eye level blocking his view. Later at home, I check Google Street View to verify the angle. Unfortunately, Google smudged Douglass’s face to protect his identity.
I walk west along Cathedral Parkway (110th Street) into Morningside Heights. Morningside Park is to my right. At the corner ahead, the avenue splits, Columbus to the south and Morningside Drive to the north. In the early eighties, while in school, I was approaching this same corner when lightning, followed by a snowburst, made for a surreal scene, magic that I tried to capture in a poem.
An elevated subway once rose above this corner, the infamous Suicide Curve, not just because it was dangerous for the trains, but because people jumped from what was then the tallest station in the system. The only hint of that elevated turn are the backs of the apartment buildings on 109th Street. They angle away from the corner, like a wedge of cheese. The curved track rode over the one-story buildings on 110th in order to complete the ninety degree turn. There’s a 1924 aerial photo of this corner floating on the web that hints at how much the el commanded the landscape.
Also, no longer on this corner is the huge rock that anchored the backside of the St. John the Divine Cathedral property. The rock seemed to hold the Cathedral School from sliding down the hill. Over it was a playground. The schist was blasted away to make room for a condo. I knew someone that lived across the street. He said he almost went crazy from the pile-drivers pounding into the rock, for weeks, to make space for the new building’s foundation.
The home stretch is the steep incline up Morningside Drive. The rear of the Cathedral, on my left, are the backsides of the seven chapels surrounding the altar. They are intricate and ornate, a formidable structure rising to a pinnacle where the Archangel Gabriel in verdigris is blowing his trumpet at Harlem. These limestone walls are covered in soot, in need of power washing. The amalgamation of the soot, the passage of time, and the pandemic reminds me of the Black Thing, the evil dark cloud attacking the universe in “A Wrinkle in Time,” the classic book by Madeleine L’Engle. Briefly, I dream of a tesseract, her space-time folding device, to carry me behind these walls, “tessering” to the mid-twentieth century when she was the Cathedral’s librarian—hmm, maybe someone from the future will want to join me on the walk — she’s bound to have insights on books to read during a pandemic.
Morningside Drive is deserted even on busy days, only leaves blow about today. My thighs, tiring, feel the incline. At the top of the hill, at 114th Street, my walk comes to an end in front of a four-column portico facing Morningside Park and Harlem. Above the columns, in Roman letters, is the inscription, EGLISE DE NOTRE DAME. The church is home to a grotto altar, one of those hidden gems in the city. It’s usually open and empty; a great place to meditate.
The former Saint Luke’s Hospital — now part of the Mount Sinai Hospital complex — is just past the church. A few ambulances idle at the front entrance, a reminder that I am in the city during a pandemic, a city that has begun to stir, waking up from a months-long knock-out and still a little groggy. The pulse is the same, but it’s constitution has changed. How much, I’m not sure. I will need the perspective of a few more round trips in the new year, after relief from the vaccines re-opens the streets.
I order my coffee from the street cart — an essential worker, if ever there was one. While I wait for the medium-with-milk, the exertion begins to feel real good, invigorating in my legs and in my soul, the walk decelerating the Manhattan bustle to forty minutes of solitude and freedom. What a mistake it would have been to have taken the M4 bus today.
