The New York Times reports on 31-year-old Matt Green, whose goal is to walk every street of all five boroughs of New York City. By some estimates, that’s in excess of 8,000 miles:
Many people have walked every street in Manhattan. The local historian John McNamara, who died in 2004, walked every street in the Bronx. But Mr. Green believes he is the first to try for every block in all five boroughs — a distance he calculates at roughly 8,000 miles, counting parks, paths, cemeteries and occasional overlaps. He estimates that the project will him take more than two years of full-time walking to complete.
Each morning, Mr. Green, who once lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, but now sleeps on friends’ couches throughout the city, scrawls the day’s route into a three-by-five-inch Caliber notebook. He starts walking between 10 a.m. and noon and keeps going until the sun goes down.
Matt Green has already a couple of adventures under his belt, such as having walked from Rockaway Beach (Queens, NY) to Rockaway Beach (Oregon) in five months and having traversed the entire New York City subway system in just over 24 hours. But for his latest project of walking on every street in New York, he is uploading his routes on a Google map and posting pictures from scenes he encounters. Matt Green’s daily photoblog is a must-see, as it’s a wonderful reflection of New York City culture.
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(hat tip: Steve Silberman)