Street journeys

I have a curious premonition that journeys will be a recurring theme of this blog. There will be solo journeys and group journeys, around and between cities, across oceans, continents and borders; journeys to the country, to the mountains, to the coast; journeys on planes, trains, buses and boats, on public transport and on foot. I'm hoping there will be plenty of internal transportation, of the kind set in motion by a good book, and doubtless, by the end, I'll realise I've been on some kind of metaphorical, spiritual journey too, though I promise to spare you the details of that.

The current stage of my trip is characterised by urban, pedestrian journeys around Brooklyn and Manhattan, every one of which, be it down a street or round a block or across a park, serves to reaffirm the vastness of this endless, unconquerable city. I am currently reading this appropriately-themed book, selected from my host KC's extensive collection of intriguing tomes:

New York, the author claims, is one of the great walking cities, even though the systemised grid layout of the streets - 'each block present[ing] you with a traffic signal and the instruction to walk or not walk' - puts many people off exploring it on foot. With my tendency to prioritise aesthetics over logic, I initially found the idea of a grid system decidedly lacking in imagination. Numbers over names, convenience over quirks - it all seemed so unromantic. But it's grown on me. I like that you can estimate the distance of one address from another without having to look at a map. I like that you can track your progress down a street by counting the number of cross-streets that intersect with it. I like that the grid system fits with New York's angular, constructed geometry, with the straight lines and right angles that define its iconic aesthetic. Most of all, I like the words that the system necessitates, each of them singularly American and slightly wooden-sounding in my English accent: block, sidewalk, crosswalk, cross-street, intersection, avenue. They have a utilitarian romance to them. They are simultaneously familiar (because everyone uses them In The Movies) and exotic (because no British person uses them in his or her everyday speech).

It sounds from the above like I have been walking a lot, but I haven't - not really. When I lived in London, I walked all over the place. It was a way of making the city my own and of piecing together a landscape fragmented by underground travel. Whenever I visit a new city I walk as often and as far as I can, attempting to trace a path across it rather than skimming over (or under) the surface. But there has been a significant barrier to my doing so in New York: the stagnant, grimy heat the city has been enduring of late. My walks have therefore been purposeful and as efficient as I can make them, frequently aided by Google maps and the subway. But yesterday it was a little cooler, and I took the opportunity to wander round a place that usually gets forgotten by New Yorkers and tourists alike: Roosevelt Island.

It is an eerie, fascinating place. Two miles long and only 800 feet across at its widest point, it sits in the middle of the East River, connected to Manhattan by cable car, Queens by road bridge, and to both by subway. But despite its central location, and even though it was the site of my most substantial pedestrian journey yet (I walked its length twice and its breadth four or five times), Roosevelt Island feels less like a place where journeys happen than a place where journeys end.

Neither the cable car nor the traffic on the road bridge continue on through the island to the opposite shore, but must stop there, turn around, and go back the way they came. Even though the bustle of Manhattan is clearly visible - and audible - from the west side, the island itself feels adrift in a time and a place apart. Its main and pretty much only street is called - you've guessed it - Main Street (no grid system here), which gives it a small-town, provincial feel. Many of its residential buildings have the tired, run-down appearance that is the fate of most 1970s architecture. Apart from a new development clustered around the subway station, its businesses cannot keep up with the fashions and fads of those across the water, and nor do they try.

At both the north and south ends of the island are branches of the Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital, a chronic care facility - not the kind of hospital you pass through during a temporary sickness, but the kind where you stay a while. The island was also once home to the New York City Lunatic Asylum, the Charity Hospital, and the Smallpox Hospital, where sufferers of unpleasant contagious diseases were quarantined, and which now stands in ruins on the island's south tip. At other times in its history, it was the site of a penitentiary and a workhouse. For many former residents, their journey to Roosevelt Island was likely to be their last.

The old Smallpox Hospital - to be converted to a museum within the next five years.

And now, as an antidote to the doom and gloom into which this post has somehow descended, here's a list of the FUN things I've been up to. While in New York, I have: played in the sprinklers at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden; seen the ORIGINAL Winnie-the-Pooh and friends, as played with by Christopher Milne (aka Christopher Robin); been a quintessential tourist at Grand Central Station and the Metropolitan Museum; walked the High Line, a former elevated railway that's now a park; danced to jazz in Williamsburg and to 'Twist and Shout' at an outdoor screening of Ferris Bueller's Day Off; seen the New York Philharmonic in a park; been to a flea market; drunk a 'Rose Tyler' at a Doctor Who-themed bar, stuffed my face with pizza slices and practically drowned in iced coffee. On my list for today: Washington Square Park, and doughnuts. Sorry, donuts. Better get on and do that.

The real Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet; A.A. and Christopher Milne in the background.