Pedestrian 49: Ten Years in New York

Last month marked ten years of living in New York City. A decade. Almost a third of my life. I celebrated, of course, by going on a walk.

I started the day with an hour-long train ride to Fresh Pond Road in Ridgewood, Queens. The cold was already biting at my cheeks when I stepped off the platform and walked a few blocks to a three story row house. This was my second apartment, but the first where I had my own room, a closet, a desk. The stoop marked the edge of a four-and-a-half mile radius that contained the entirety of my New York life. Between there and Sunset Park, where I live now, lay every apartment I had called home. Over the course of seventeen zigzagging miles, I would walk to each of them.

A blizzard had just covered the city in snow, and I spent the morning tiptoeing along narrow desire paths carved through unshoveled sidewalks. I stopped to wipe my nose with my gloves and realized I hadn’t bothered to check the forecast before leaving—the temperature read 20°F. Not unlike the conditions I arrived in ten years ago. Back then, I had a few bags, less than $1,000 to my name, and a freshly issued credit card that I thankfully didn’t have to use.

I walked on to Myrtle Avenue, crossed Malcolm X Boulevard, and made my way down to Monroe Street in Bed Stuy. Standing outside a four story walk up, I wanted to go inside to see the hallways, the old tiles, the ancient decorations. To see if my junk mail still arrived there. I remembered pulling up in a taxi ten years earlier, fresh from JFK Airport. My first apartment.

I was certain my move was only temporary. A relocation, I told myself, after which I’d return to Chicago. Many people I know share this feeling—transplants and born and raised New Yorkers alike—that eventually you will leave, whether by choice or by circumstance.

I walked on toward Marcy Avenue, watching people shovel their cars out from beneath mountains of snow. Children built a snowman outside the bodega. Across the street stood my fourth apartment, the first I ever shared with my girlfriend, Iris. I still recognized the building, though nothing inside looked the way it did when we lived there. Only a month after moving in, the building caught fire and destroyed almost everything we had.

That was 2019. It could have been my cue to pack up and leave the city. Instead, I told myself to wait. Replace my clothes, my furniture, my books. Wait until my fifth anniversary. When that date approached, I pushed it to my thirtieth birthday. By the time I turned thirty, I’d forgotten the deadline entirely. Leaving New York was no longer something I thought about.

Writing this reminded me of learning Spanish. I’ve been at it for two years now, and in trying to understand the process, I’ve read countless accounts of how others have learned a new language. Nearly all of them mention the same thing: at some point, practice stops feeling like practice and becomes part of daily life. Somewhere around the pandemic, the city became part of me. I’d learned the language of being here.

A walk doesn’t let you forget how you got from point A to point B. Each stretch formed a route Google Maps could never chart. “[A] path of the mind’s habit, direction, and turn,” as Wendell Berry writes, “[each] as personal as old shoes.”

I continued on from Bed Stuy to Fort Greene, through Prospect Park, and on to Flatbush and thought about the laundromats where I washed my clothes, the bodegas that fed me, the train stops where I shuffled to and from work, the sidewalks I crossed to meet friends. Each apartment felt like another layer in an onion I’d been slowly peeling.

I moved here, believe it or not, because I thought I wanted to stop making art and become a graphic designer. To follow a relationship. To follow my friends. Because it seemed like the next step. I didn’t think too hard about it then, but New York, difficult as it could be, kept offering another layer to peel back. Each time I thought I was nearing the center, another waited.

It was dark when I reached the hill of Sunset Park. From the top, I looked out at the Manhattan skyline and thought about how the city once felt ungraspable, almost terrifying. Somehow that feeling had evaporated—maybe because I’d walked the hell out of it.

I’d always thought of myself as someone who prioritized mobility, who felt a constant pull to keep moving and never stay long enough to set down roots. Mobility is often sold as a luxury, but I’ve stumbled into another kind, something slower and far less flashy.

I admire people who have stayed long enough in one place for it to become inseparable from who they are, the way a river erodes stone. I never disliked Iowa, where I was born, but I felt the pull to go elsewhere, and for years I carried a disjointed idea of what home might be, one foot in one place, the other somewhere else.

But after ten years, I’ve had the quiet feeling of watching this place—New York City—cohere. Of beginning, at last, to feel a sense of membership in the place I call home.

Thanks for reading,
A.W.
Brooklyn, NY 11220