Today the lower stretch of the Bowery, the old Post Road in this section of New York south of the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge, is firmly planted in Chinatown. The population in this area of New York is, unsurprisingly, heavily Asian. I pass through three census blocks on my way from the Manhattan Bridge to the Brooklyn Bridge near City Hall and Asians make up about four out of five of the nearly 16,000 residents. The signs on the buildings are in Chinese characters and only occasionally in English. Many of these buildings are painted red, a color of good fortune in Chinese culture. One of the buildings along this stretch, at Pell Street, is easy to miss, but is one of the few remaining buildings in the area dating to the eighteenth century. On the opposite side of the street is Confucius Plaza, a large ugly modern apartment block near the Manhattan Bridge. In the late eighteenth century this area was owned by the Delancey family who planned and developed a neighborhood consisting of a grid of streets around what was to be Delancey Square. The grid was built but the square was eliminated from the plan and the neighborhood east of the Post Road became the Lower East Side. The grid was extended a couple of blocks west of the old Boston Road, or the Bowery as it became known, and this today is Chinatown, settled by immigrant Chinese in the nineteenth century at the northern edge...

Authors: weekendwalk

Today the lower stretch of the Bowery, the old Post Road in this section of New York south of the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge, is firmly planted in Chinatown. The population in this area of New York is, unsurprisingly, heavily Asian. I pass through three census blocks on my way from the Manhattan Bridge to the Brooklyn Bridge near City Hall, and Asians make up about four out of five of the nearly 16,000 residents. The signs on the buildings are in both Chinese characters and in English. Many of these buildings are painted red, a color of good fortune in Chinese culture. One of the buildings along this stretch, at Pell Street, is easy to miss but is one of the few remaining buildings in the area dating to the eighteenth century. On the opposite side of the street is Confucius Plaza, a large ugly modern apartment block near the Manhattan Bridge.
In the late eighteenth century this area was owned by the Delancey family who planned and developed a neighborhood consisting of a grid of streets around what was to be Delancey Square. The grid was built but the square was eliminated from the plan, and the neighborhood east of the Post Road became the Lower East Side. The grid was extended a couple of blocks west of the old Boston Road, or the Bowery as it became known, and this today is Chinatown, settled by immigrant Chinese in the nineteenth century at the northern edge of the notorious Five Points neighborhood. Today Chinatown has escaped its historical boundaries and has even taken over most of Little Italy. As I continue down the last block of the Bowery I can see the beginnings of what looks like a transition to an area of large buildings and the end of the small residential and commercial buildings of Chinatown. As I enter this transitional area I reach the edge of colonial New York City and the final mile of the old Post Road.
*****
Milestone number one is shown on Christopher Colles’s 1792 map at the point where the old road made an abrupt turn to the north. This curve can be seen on eighteenth century, nineteenth century, and even contemporary maps of New York. A wonderful online project called Oasisnyc.net is making a heroic effort to map the entire city block by block including overlays of the topography and the historical land use through the long history of settlement. One set of maps shows the original Lenape footpaths that once criss-crossed the island. One of these became the old colonial road north out of New York City, which eventually became the road to Boston and is the road I have been walking as closely as possible to the original path. This map shows the Lenape trail in lower Manhattan superimposed on a map of the current streets of the city. One thing that immediately stands out is that there was a large body of water around which the Lenape trail passed to the south and east before the trail curved northward. The trail then essentially followed the line of what is today the Bowery as I have been doing (in the opposite direction of course) for the last couple of miles. When the old Lenape Trail reached what is today Madison Square Park it turned to the northeast to take the path of least resistance through the hills and across the streams that once were much more prominent features of Manhattan Island. This is essentially the route I followed across Manhattan.
The streams are mostly gone and many of the hills have been leveled, but the trail created by the feet of the Lenape Indians of Manna-hata (the island of steep hills) still exists here in the most densely populated place in North America, in the financial center of the world, with its soaring towers of commerce, in the neighborhoods that have been transformed from farmland to slums on the edge of town to high-end residential areas to commercial centers back to slums in the middle of a great metropolis and back again into desirable areas to live. The path of the Indians who lived here for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years still exists under all this asphalt and steel and concrete and glass and traffic and has been passed over by literally millions of people on the way to finding the American Dream or to an early death in an overcrowded tenement. The Indians are gone, the forests and streams are gone, most, but not all, of the vestiges of nearly two centuries of colonial New York are gone, as are most of the buildings of the nineteenth and even of the twentieth centuries, but the old path that antedates the recorded history of America is still plainly visible on a map of New York standing out from the grid. I think that is pretty damn cool, and it is the primary reason I have pursued this project.
*****
As I mentioned above, Colles’s map shows the one mile stone at the place the old road curved to the north. This is the spot at which the old trail would have passed around the body of water I mentioned, which was present into the early nineteenth century and was called the Collect Pond. The one mile stone was located at the junction of Division Street and the Bowery in an area called Chatham Square. Today this is in Chinatown and is sometimes referred to as Kim Lau Square, but it has been in existence as a square since at least 1766 as seen from maps of that period. Chatham Square was the center of the cattle market in New York, located as it was at the edge of the city and along the main road into the city. Nearby was a tavern called the Bull’s Head, (what else?) which had a long and interesting life in various locations in the city.
Near Chatham Square on colonial maps of New York (like the one below) tanneries can be seen to the west of the old road near the Collect Pond. The Collect Pond, a spring-fed pond, eventually became polluted by the waste products of the tanneries and slaughterhouses and became a public nuisance, which led to it being filled in with dirt from nearby hills that were leveled in the early 1800s. The area east of the Collect Pond was still swampy, however, and thus was considered insalubrious. Hence it became a place for poor people to settle, and the neighborhood came to be called Five Points, a reference to the intersection of three streets (hence five points, or corners) at the center of the neighborhood. The old Post Road (or Boston Road, or the Bowery) was the eastern edge of this notorious neighborhood (mentioned in my last entry). The first settlers were, unsurprisingly, African Americans, who were in turn succeeded by Irish refugees from the Potato Famine of the 1840s. The neighborhood achieved permanent notoriety in Charles Dicken’s description in his American Notes on a visit in 1842:
"What place is this, to which the squalid street conducts us? A kind of square of leprous houses, some of which are attainable only by crazy wooden stairs without. What lies behind this tottering flight of steps? Let us go on again, and plunge into the Five Points. This is the place; these narrow ways diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth. Such lives as are led here, bear the same fruit as elsewhere. The coarse and bloated faces at the doors have counterparts at home and all the world over. Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken forays. Many of these pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright instead of going on all fours, and why they talk instead of grunting?"
Today Five Points is an unpleasant memory: the city demolished the neighborhood around 1900 and replaced it with administrative buildings for both city, state, and federal governments, collectively known today as the Civic Center. At Chatham Square the Bowery ends, and the old Post Road continues as Park Row, passing through the southern edge of the Civic Center area of New York City, before reaching the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, then passing City Hall, and ending at Broadway. Unfortunately, one negative aspect of the events of September 11, 2001 relevant to the Post Road is that the area around the Police Headquarters, which is on Park Row (also called Avenue of the Finest), is now closed to the public for security reasons. Thus I have no choice but to take a detour at this point along the Post Road. The old Lenape trail followed roughly along Park Row mainly to avoid the swampy areas around the Collect Pond, but since the Pond is no more and I have little choice anyway, I head right onto Pearl Street and into Foley Square, through a canyon of city, state, and federal courthouses and administrative buildings. I turn left in Foley Square and head down Centre Street which brings me shortly back to Park Row near the Tweed Courthouse and the lovely City Hall.
City Hall dates from the same period as the filling in of the Collect Pond. The building was built upon what in colonial New York was the Common at the northern edge of the city, shown on the map below published in 1776. Prior to 1812 City Hall was located on Nassau and Wall Street in what is now the Financial District. The original City Hall became Federal Hall when New York was briefly the capital of the new nation, and then returned to its function as City Hall until the completion of the new City Hall at this point a half mile north. The milestones along the Post Road were measured from the original City Hall, or Federal Hall as it is called on the map of Christopher Colles dating from 1792. When the current City Hall was opened in 1812 the milestones were replaced using the new building as the zero point. This is the source of the often conflicting descriptions of the location of milestones in Manhattan. For instance Milestone 1 is listed in many sources, including Wikipedia, as being on the Bowery, opposite Rivington Street, while on Colles’s map and in many other sources, the first milestone is located at what is now the Bowery at Division Street. The Bowery at Rivington Street is indeed about one mile away from the current City Hall but 1.6 miles from Federal Hall, while the Bowery at Division Street is about one mile from Federal Hall but less than a half mile from today’s City Hall. This location problem continues all the way up the island and, compounded by the opening of the Harlem Bridge and the subsequent rerouting of the Post Road from upper Manhattan through the South Bronx, makes sorting out the original location of the no longer extant milestones difficult and confusing.
*****
Above is a map of New York City in 1776. This map shows just how small New York City was, with about 25,000 people living in an area extending only about as far north as Chambers Street (below the gardens visible on the map), with some new development in the area north and east of the Collect Pond (labelled ‘Fresh Water’) around the Bowery, in what is now the Lower East Side but which was the Delancey Estate at the time. The Delancey family were Loyalists and thus their property was confiscated after the war. The Common below the Collect Pond is the site of City Hall today. Notice the sweeping curve of the old road to Boston as it passes the Collect Pond and through the Common before heading south as Broadway to the southern tip of Manhattan Island.
Below are scenes from the last mile of the old Post Road in lower Manhattan. Clockwise from top left: 1. A Federal-era building still stands along the Bowery in Chinatown. 2. Chinatown scene on the Bowery at Division Street, near the Bloody Angle, the center of the Tong wars of early twentieth century Chinatown. This is also the location of the one mile stone on Colles’s 1792 map of the Post Road 3. Manhattan Municipal Building, across from City Hall, was completed in 1914 to accommodate the large increase in the size of the bureaucracy required to run the consolidated City of New York after 1898, when the Boroughs officially became a part of the City and increased the population to over 3,000,000 residents. 4. City Hall, completed in 1812, replaced Federal Hall on Wall Street, and became the new point from which milestones were measured. Located on the site of the Common visible on the 1776 map above.
Park Row continues past City Hall and the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge, and passes a series of elegant buildings, some of which are now part of the campus of Pace University but which, in previous incarnations, were the offices of many of the newspapers in New York, hence the epithet applied to this section of the old road to Boston, ‘Newspaper Row.’ All of the chief newspapers of the day (including the New York Times before their move to Long Acre, now Times, Square in 1904) had offices here and many well-known publishing figures, including Joseph Pulitzer, Horace Greeley, and William Randolph Hearst, spent long hours shuttling back and forth between their offices here, and the halls of power across the street. It is not an overstatement to say that this was the center of information distribution in America in the nineteenth century.
Opposite City Hall on Broadway is the magnificent Woolworth’s Building, another of my favorite buildings (I would list my three favorite skyscrapers in New York as --3. Flatiron Building, 2. Woolworth Building, 1. Chrysler Building, and all three happen to be on the old Post Road!) Completed in 1913, the Woolworth Building became the tallest building in the world until surpassed by the Chrysler Building in 1930. Only a year later the Empire State Building became the tallest building in the world, a position of primacy it held until 1971, when the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were completed. The site of these buildings is clearly visible from the corner of Park Row and Broadway, as they were located only one block west of Broadway directly behind the churchyard of St. Paul’s Chapel. Sadly, the Empire State Building is once again the tallest building in New York, and, while more than a dozen buildings around the world have surpassed it as the tallest skyscrapers in the world, it is still 15th on the list after 80 years.
St. Paul’s Chapel is marked on Christopher Colles’s map at the place where the old road takes its final turn, this time due south on Broadway, before it reached the end at Bowling Green, less than 1000 yards away. To Londoners the church should seem familiar as it was based upon the Georgian St. Martin’s-in-the-Field. When completed in 1766 (it is the oldest standing church in New York) it was at the northern end of the growing city. After the Revolution, when New York was the capital of the country for two years, George Washington came here to worship following his inauguration and was a regular parishioner during his time in New York as President of the United States. Inside the church George Washington’s original pew remains, along with many historical relics of the illustrious old building.
The main thing I notice, however, is the large amount of material commemorating the victims of 911; above the main floor, attached to the balcony, are a number of banners from around the country and the world, including a large banner signed by and sent with sympathy from the families of the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing. A few of the many posters, photographs, cards, and letters that once festooned the gates outside are on display in the chapel. A door at the rear of the chapel leads to the churchyard, where the site of the World Trade Center is visible just across the street. Today there is a great deal of construction, but what strikes me is that it still is essentially a hole in the ground after ten years. I had originally generated the idea of walking the Post Road in the summer of 2000. A year later I was still planning to do the project when the planes crashed into the twin towers. Shortly thereafter, I made a promise to myself to commemorate the victims of this senseless attack when I finally arrived at St. Paul’s Chapel, whenever that day should arrive. Ten years and five months after that unforgettable day, I stand in the churchyard for a moment and look at the still unfinished site, light a candle in the chapel, and head out to Broadway and the final few yards of my journey.
*****
As I head down Broadway in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan it starts to hit me that I am finally walking the last mile of a journey that has taken me from downtown Boston on a tortuous course through the cities, suburbs, farmland, forests, and along the shore of much of Southern New England, through Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and now finally, New York, on a road that for the most part still exists and has existed since before the first European laid eyes on this continent. Perhaps the emotional impact of my visit to the site of the September 11 terrorist attack has also contributed to the upwelling of emotion I feel as I make my way to the end of the road. It is February 25, 2011, at 11:42 a.m. when I find myself standing in front of the Federal Hall Memorial, New York City, the end of the Post Road from Boston. It is raining pretty steadily so any tears streaming down my face are easily concealed from the busy passersby on Wall Street. Perhaps the occasion does not warrant quite such an emotional reaction, but for me the end of this journey is the culmination of over a decade of stop and start planning and research. The walk itself took only a small fraction of the total time I have poured into this project, and to finally be able to say that I did it gives me a feeling of immense satisfaction. But am I really done yet?
Of course I now face the question that has been bothering for many months as I planned this walk: Where exactly should I end this walk? The end of the Post Road is logically the place where it begins at the other end from where I started, and there is no doubt that Federal Hall was the start of the Post Road in New York City. But if I am following the Lenape trail, the continuation of a string of Indian trails which were the precursors of the Post Road, I surely must follow that trail to the end of its course at the southern tip of Manhattan. Except that the southern tip has changed over the course of the long history of the city by the addition of land extending the shoreline further south than it was in colonial New York or indeed when the Lenape ruled the area. The Bowling Green at the end of Broadway once fronted the harbor, but by the middle of the eighteenth century there was a large fort at the tip of the island, which today is part of Battery Park. Thus, in order to truly say I have finished the walk, I continue a few more yards down Broadway, through the Bowling Green, the oldest public park in New York City, past the statue of the Charging Bull, past the Museum of the American Indian, formerly the Alexander Hamilton United States Custom House, down to the bottom of State Street which was the southern tip of Manhattan in 1609 and marked the end of the Lenape trail, and across Battery Park to the edge of New York Harbor. From here I gaze across the harbor and see the Statue of Liberty and now I know I am done.
I walk along the waterfront toward the Staten Island Ferry Terminal and start to think about another day when I will continue to follow the route of the trip taken by Alexander Hamilton from his home in Annapolis Maryland to this spot and beyond to Boston. Hamilton, James Birket, and especially Sarah Kemble Knight have been my constant companions on this journey, and it is with no little regret that I bid them farewell. I will meet Alexander Hamilton again, but that trip is for another day. So, with a final wistful gaze at the ferry as it heads across the harbor to Staten Island, where a traveler from the colonial era like Alexander Hamilton would have continued to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and beyond to the rest of America, I turn from the harbor and head back up Broadway, back up the old Post Road, back up the road to Boston, back home.
*****
The Post Road. A name that is easy to forget, a road that is easy to bypass or to dismiss as a vestigial element of some long gone way of life. To do so is to ignore the long course of the development of America that can be easily seen in all its layers of complexity simply by meandering along the old Post Road. For many millions of Americans, the Post Road is just around the corner, a familiar yet almost completely unknown road. Sometimes it is not called the Post Road, but the original road that connected New York to Boston is still there, the road that linked the ‘cities in the wilderness’ that became the political, cultural, and economic centers of the newly established United States, a century and a half after the road was first traveled by early European settlers such as John Winthrop, Jr. I highly recommend a walk along the post road--it is pretty easy to do and I promise you will be rewarded for taking the time to travel deliberately and to see the history of the country, to see the changes over time that have transformed the landscape, to get a sense of the incredible richness of our cultural heritage, or merely to get outside and get some exercise. Walking the Post Road is a heck of a lot more interesting and fun than driving it, that is for sure. And now you have a guide to follow it. Have fun.
The end of the road: Top left: Washington’s Pew in St. Paul’s Chapel on Broadway. Top right is Federal Hall Memorial. Center left: the Bowling Green, with the old Custom House in the background. Center right is the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street (in case you are the one person on the planet who does not know that fact). Bottom left: Only Jesus could walk any further: The end of the road at New York Harbor, with the Statue of Liberty over my shoulder. Bottom right: Looking back up Broadway from the end of the Post Road. Time to go home.

...

Manhattan below Madison Square was the virtual edge of New York City in 1836, as the map below shows. Although the grid plan had been adopted and some streets above Madison Square had even been built, the population only slowly followed. In 1840, four years after the map below was published, the Census counted 312,710 residents of New York. Of these, only about 11,000 lived north of 26th Street. Twenty years later over 230,000 New Yorkers (of 805,000) called home somewhere above Madison Square and the numbers continued to accelerate. Today more than two thirds of Manhattan’s 1,630,000 residents lives in the areas north of what is often called Lower Manhattan (although the definition seems to change depending on who is defining the area: some argue it is the area below 23rd Street, some say it is below 14th Street, others the area below Houston Street, and still others [the purists] argue that Chambers Street marks the northern limit of Lower Manhattan). Of the areas below Madison Square (roughly below about 26th Street), the area north of 14th Street ( Chelsea, the Flatiron District, Union Square, Gramercy Park, etc.) has a population of a little over 100,000, while Greenwich Village and the East Village (Houston to 14th Street) have close to 150,000 residents. The area below Houston Street, essentially the northern limit of New York City before 1800, today has about 170,000 people. Thus, although more and more people choose to live in Lower Manhattan, the roughly 400,000 residents today...

As I enter Central Park, the old road disappears for one of the very few times along the course of this project. I found the road in a shopping mall in Stamford, Connecticut, in the Bronx and upper Manhattan, in Downtown Boston, Providence, and New Haven. I found the road in a forest in the middle of the Moose Hill Wildlife Sanctuary in Sharon, Massachusetts, and I found the road in innumerable areas where it was supposed to be long gone. Here in Central Park, in the green heart of Manhattan, designed and created by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted in the years 1858-1873, a place full of elegantly constructed rustic landscapes replete with winding paths, a place it might be supposed the designers might have taken the natural contours of the road into account and kept the old road as a memory of a more rural New York, the old road was completely obliterated. I live less than a ten minute walk from Olmsted’s great contribution to Boston’s green space, the majestic Emerald Necklace, and I live a twenty minute walk from Olmsted’s house and studio, and I am deeply impressed by the numerous contributions Olmsted made to seemingly every urban landscape in North America, from Mont Royal Park in Montreal to the US Capitol Grounds in Washington, from the design of Stanford University and numerous other college campuses, to the design of the Vanderbilt Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. Yet I would be remiss if I did...

Authors: weekendwalk

I am standing next to the Subway stop at 155th Street and St. Nicholas, one of the stops in Harlem along the famous ‘A’ train route. (2) The ‘A’ Train, immortalized by Duke Ellington’s Orchestra, is in fact the quickest way to get to Harlem. It is also the quickest way to follow the Old Post Road from 125th Street north to 207th Street in Inwood at the northern tip of Manhattan. The route of the ‘A’ Train takes it up Central Park West, which then becomes Eighth Avenue (Frederick Douglas Boulevard) from 110th to about 125th Street, after which the train follows the route of the old road to Boston, St. Nicholas Avenue to Broadway, along which the train roughly continues through to the end of the line at 207th Street. Of course, as it is underground, the only thing you will learn about the post road is that it curves occasionally.
155th Street is traditionally regarded as the northern border of Harlem, probably the most well-known neighborhood in the city of New York. Well-known it might be, but I myself had never set foot in Harlem until this very moment, despite the fact that I have visited New York on a regular basis since at least 1969. I could pretend that the many wonders of Greenwich Village, the Upper West Side, or Chelsea kept me so occupied that I never could find the time to visit. Or I could just admit up front that I never could get up the energy to wander into a place that seemed somewhat unwelcoming to the outsider. After all, I knew someone who, as a student at Columbia University, had a bullet fly through his dorm room window overlooking Morningside Park in the 1980s. I never went there because I was afraid to go there, and the rewards did not seem worth the risk.
Why do I not have the same fear now? Perhaps it is because I have read so much about the transformation of Harlem in the last two decades that I want to see what all the fuss is about. Perhaps it is because I have a famous photograph by Art Kane of many famous jazz musicians gathered on the steps of a brownstone on 126th Street in Harlem in 1958, and I am curious about both the picture and the outsized role Harlem seems to have played in the development of music in the twentieth century. Perhaps it is because every time I think I am going into a dangerous area (Roxbury, New Haven, Bridgeport, the Bronx) my fears turn out to be not only unwarranted but embarrassing as I realize that, although at heart I am afraid of standing out, nobody seems to pay any attention to me. Or perhaps it is because I am only ten miles from the end of my long journey on the Post Road, and I am excited to get through Harlem as fast as possible to reach the finish line.
I am sure all of these factors play some role in my current motivation to plunge in. I will add one more factor: I am older now, and I have wandered through many places that the average person would consider far less safe than Harlem: Mexico City, Zagreb during anti-Serbian riots in 1990, backwoods towns in Malaysia, alone but for the monkeys in Calakmul, a marvelous Mayan city buried deep in the jungle in the southern Yucatan near Guatemala. I enjoy seeking out the new and the unfamiliar as long as it is on my own terms. Hence I enjoy wandering through strange and exotic areas on foot, but I have no interest in bungee-jumping off a bridge. I will gladly plunge into the night market in Chiang Mai, peer into an active volcano in Indonesia, or wander alone in the Central American rain forest without a second thought, and pretend to be an adventurer, as long as I know where I will sleep that night. I am uninterested, however, in riding a roller coaster because I am sure that it will collapse and I will die. I guess one picks one’s poison. And since I have yet to be “poisoned” by wandering into “unsafe” places I guess I feel confident that this last few miles will be fine, so in I go.
*****
My first memory of the name Harlem dates to my childhood in Bermuda when I saw the Harlem Globetrotters on TV. I was fascinated by their antics but did not register that Harlem was a place until much later, probably on a visit to my grandmother, who lived in Manhattan for many years, albeit miles away from Harlem in spirit and substance. Certainly by the time I was a teenager I knew what Harlem was but by then the die had been cast: too many movies about bad guys from “Uptown,” and images of riots on TV were enough to set the image in my mind of a burned out neighborhood filled with poor black people, harassed at every corner by drug dealers, pimps, and murderers in Cadillacs; in short, Harlem became a synonym for the Ghetto, a place to be avoided.
Slowly my image of Harlem became more nuanced: I was a big fan of Francis Ford Coppola as a teenager and saw the Cotton Club, which was a crappy film but which gave me new insight into Harlem as a musical hothouse. Later I became interested in jazz music, and now my image of the neighborhood was transformed from one of decay into one of artistic ferment, albeit in the quickly receding past. Finally, and I know this sounds strange, but when Bill Clinton returned to the private sector in 2001 and set up his offices in Harlem, I was downright intrigued; If the President of the United States (although he was the first “black” President) feels comfortable setting up shop in Harlem, then how bad could it be? I did a little research now and then, and it was obvious to me that Harlem was on an upswing. Magic Johnson was opening a movie theater, the Body Shop and Ben and Jerry’s had opened outlets (although the Ben & Jerry’s store subsequently closed), as well as Starbucks in 1999. It seemed to be a happening place again after half a century of steady decline.
But it was not until I began to research the Post Road that I realized that I would finally become acquainted with Harlem on the ground and not as a mythical location. And so, on a chilly but bright day in February, I find myself walking down St. Nicholas Avenue, which cuts through the heart of the neighborhood. My first impression is that there is some really good housing stock here, lots of elegant early twentieth-century apartment buildings. The nice architecture continues for the next ten to fifteen blocks. The area to the left of St. Nicholas Avenue is the higher ground for this ten block stretch. I discover later that this area is the famous Sugar Hill, the place in which many many successful black families lived. Among the many well-known people who resided there were W.E.B. DuBois, Adam Clayton Powell, Thurgood Marshall, and Duke Ellington himself, hence the mention of Sugar Hill in Take the ‘A’ Train.
At 145th Street St. Nicholas Avenue once merged with a road coming in from the northeast that led to another bridge across the Harlem River, Macomb’s Bridge, the fourth oldest bridge in New York City (after King’s Bridge, Dyckman’s Bridge, and Harlem Bridge), built in 1814. The streets are today separated by Jackie Robinson Park (ironic since Macomb’s Bridge leads directly to Yankee Stadium and Robinson played for the Dodgers). There is a small gap in the hills here through which St. Nicholas Avenue passes, and then the road runs along the base of a steep escarpment which rises to the west. At 141st Street, a short but very steep walk half a block uphill leads to Hamilton Grange, the home of Alexander Hamilton, Founding Father, First Secretary of the Treasury, and the guy whose face is on the ten dollar bill. This is the Alexander Hamilton my readers probably think I am describing when I speak of the diary of the traveler, but the diarist Hamilton lived in Annapolis, Maryland and was long dead by the time of the Revolution (he died in 1756). Hamilton Grange was built in 1802, but Alexander Hamilton lived here for only two years before being killed in a famous duel with Aaron Burr who, as I mentioned in the previous entry, lived up the street a few blocks more than three decades later. This is the third house along the route that is over two centuries old. James Birket, as early as 1750, mentions that the “13 miles of good road” from Kingsbridge to New York “is very narrow but butified with many handsome seats belonging to the Gentlemen in York.”(3) But I did not expect to find even one Colonial or Federal house surviving in New York City. Hamilton Grange is undergoing restoration, which involved moving the whole building a couple of blocks to a more prominent location here in St. Nicholas Park.
Behind Hamilton Grange further up the hill is the campus of City College. The hill to the right looms overhead as I make my way along St. Nicholas Avenue for the next dozen blocks. At 3:20 p.m. I reach 133rd Street, which is where Colles’s located the 9 milestone on his map of 1792. At mile nine on Colles’s Map is a ‘Day’ tavern. This spot was traditionally known as “The Halfway House” and is listed as such on all the Almanac tavern lists. Sarah Knight stopped here at 3 p.m. on the first day of her return journey on December 21, 1704, where she “Baited and went forward.” (3) A road shown on Colles’s map leads east to Harlem, the center of which was closer to the Harlem River in the eighteenth century. The Harlem Bridge was built at 129th Street in 1798, making the road I am traveling obsolete, as I have discussed in recent entries. A few minutes later I reach 125th Street, the heart of Harlem in the twentieth century.
*****
CHRISTOPHER COLLES’S MAP OF THE ROAD TO BOSTON, SHEET 1 SHOWING THE LAST 12 MILES, ALL ON THE ISLAND OF MANHATTAN.
Looking down St. Nicholas Avenue at 153rd Street in Harlem
The settlement on the Harlem River ten miles north of New York City was called Haarlem as early as 1658, after the Dutch town. Although the name was anglicized when the British took control of New York, Harlem remained a Dutch community as late as 1786, when Manasseh Cutler traveled through the area. Cutler tells us that “ten miles this side of the city is a plain of good land, called Harlem Plain. On this plain, and toward the East River, is a small village called Harlem. The inhabitants are nearly all Dutch, and the houses are built in a Dutch style.” (5) The community remained small and isolated through much of the nineteenth century, and the area remained farmland until the advent of the elevated railroad in the 1880s. As the population of New York swelled, the city expanded in all directions, reaching the northern end of Manhattan. Development exploded around the turn of the century in anticipation of the expansion of the city into Harlem, but a real estate crash occurred, just as many new buildings were completed, which led to the area being settled by groups who could afford the lower prices, particularly Irish and Jews, and African-Americans. Many blacks from the South migrated northwards during and after World War I in search of a better life, and the neighborhood slowly became increasingly black; by 1920 32% of Harlem was African-American, and by 1930 over 70% of the neighborhood was made up of black families.
Unsurprisingly, in a city with such a complex mixture of ethnicity, race, religion, and class, the group with the least power was neglected, and Harlem suffered from a lack of investment by the government. Of 255 parks built under Robert Moses in the city during the Depression, only one was in Harlem After World War II, as New York City began a four decade long population decline, the financial situation of the city became increasingly dire, and the poorest neighborhoods suffered the most as a result. Many wealthier blacks left the increasingly decrepit neighborhood, and the cycle of decline and decay continued unabated for over forty years. In 1950, 237,000 people lived in Harlem, but by 1990 that number had fallen by more than half to 101,000.
Development began again in the 1990s as real estate pressure in the rest of Manhattan finally brought some attention to the housing stock in Harlem. Ironically, as the neighborhood improves, the number of blacks continues to drop as whites return to live in the neighborhood after being virtually absent since the 1940s. In 1990 a mere 672 whites lived in what is considered central Harlem, from 110th to 125th Street between Fifth Avenue and St. Nicholas Avenue, but by 2010 that number had increased to almost 14,000. Much attention has been lavished on the ‘Main Street’ of Harlem, 125th Street, with many major retailers opening stores in the area after ignoring the neighborhood for decades.
For many, the changes in Harlem are bittersweet. I spoke with a gentleman in his sixties distributing pamphlets in front of the Apollo Theater, the world-renowned epicenter of black musical culture on 125th Street, and he expressed happiness that the neighborhood was much more vibrant than it had been in the 1980s. On the other hand, he was unhappy that rents were increasing dramatically, and he also felt a sense of loss because he felt the neighborhood was losing the cultural importance it once held as the center of black culture in America. He told me stories of seeing James Brown at the Apollo, as well as Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, and the Temptations, and was obviously proud of the central role African-American performers hold in the evolution of music worldwide in the last century. His sentiment about change is not dissimilar to that which I often hear expressed by Italians in the North End of Boston or in Little Italy, or by Irish in South Boston. Even my own neighborhood in Boston is claimed by many former residents to have been “lost” to the “yuppies.” Of course the tinted glasses of nostalgia screen the unsavory images of racism, of drugs and violence, of poverty, and of desperation. I noticed some time ago that boxing in America was early dominated by Irish Americans, then by Italians and even a few Jews, then by blacks, and now increasingly by Hispanics. My point is that sports and entertainment are avenues out of poverty; as ethnic and racial groups become more integrated into the economic structure they move out to the suburbs and take on a wider range of jobs. The old neighborhood and the old way of life fade to a misty memory of a better time, but often the bad memories are left behind.
And for all the vaunted development of Harlem, 125th Street is still a bit scruffy, and I see one or two Check Cashing stores, a sure sign that improvements need to continue. However it is definitely bustling with commerce and I have to work my way through the crowds for a block to get to the Apollo Theater from St. Nicholas Avenue. To me, standing in front of the Apollo is like standing in front of the Louvre or Carnegie Hall: it is, in my mind, the most important theater in the world as the hothouse which helped produce a list of stars that staggers the imagination: Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Billy Holiday, Luther Vandross, Stevie Wonder, Billy Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, The Jackson Five, Pearl Bailey, Lionel Hampton, Benny Carter, etc. etc. etc....not for nothing is the Apollo called “The Soul of American Culture.”
Scenes of Harlem: Top row left is Hamilton Grange, Alexander Hamilton’s mansion, built in 1802, on 141st Street in St Nicholas Park. Top right are elegant residences along St Nicholas Avenue at 136th Street. Center left is another picture of the Apollo Theater on 125th Street, “Where stars are born and legends are made.” Center right and bottom left are views down St. Nicholas Avenue. The image at bottom left gives an impression of just how many people live in New York as these large buildings recede into the distance. Bottom right is a monument to the Underground Railroad.
At 124th Street I depart from the route of the ‘A’ Train, which heads due south while I continue the last fifteen blocks down to Central Park on St Nicholas Avenue, which slices through the grid at an acute angle. At about 116th Street is the eight mile marker shown on Colles’s map. The last five blocks to Central Park are, surprisingly, the most rundown areas in Harlem through which I have walked. I would have anticipated a burst of development the closer I get to the park, with its potential for views and the proximity of the park for dog walkers and exercise fiends, but only one or two new buildings at 110th and Lenox are apparent in an otherwise dispiriting neighborhood.
Harlem ends for me at 110th Street, where I enter Central Park. In the next entry I will describe the original route of the old road from Boston, from this point through what is now Central Park and the Upper East Side. Before I head into the park I turn and look back up St Nicholas Avenue and reflect on the incredibly rich cultural legacy left by the people of this neighborhood in the twentieth century, producing some of the most sublime music and some of the most depressing iconic imagery as the prototypical downtrodden urban neighborhood. Things change though, and one thing that has changed is my attitude about visiting Harlem. As I head into Central Park I contemplate returning to Harlem soon. Only next time I will take the ‘A’ train as I want to get there in a hurry.

...

I am standing next to the Subway stop at 155th Street and St. Nicholas, one of the stops in Harlem along the famous ‘A’ train route. (2) The ‘A’ Train, immortalized by Duke Ellington’s Orchestra, is in fact the quickest way to get to Harlem. It is also the quickest way to follow the Old Post Road from 125th Street north to 207th Street in Inwood at the northern tip of Manhattan. The route of the ‘A’ Train takes it up Central Park West, which then becomes Eighth Avenue (Frederick Douglas Boulevard) from 110th to about 125th Street, after which the train follows the route of the old road to Boston, St. Nicholas Avenue to Broadway, along which the train roughly continues through to the end of the line at 207th Street. Of course, as it is underground, the only thing you will learn about the post road is that it curves occasionally. 155th Street is traditionally regarded as the northern border of Harlem, probably the most well-known neighborhood in the city of New York. Well-known it might be, but I myself had never set foot in Harlem until this very moment, despite the fact that I have visited New York on a regular basis since at least 1969. I could pretend that the many wonders of Greenwich Village, The Upper West Side, or Chelsea kept me so occupied that I never could find the time to visit. Or I could just admit up front that I never could get...

New York City! I have finally made it to the city of my final destination. Now all I have to do is walk across New York City, and I will have reached the end of my journey. As the crow flies from the spot where I stand on Bussing Avenue in the Bronx, on the border with the city of Mount Vernon, it is 16 miles to the southern tip of Manhattan. The route I will walk however is about 19 miles to the finish line in Lower Manhattan, the heart of old New York. I have shown the route I will follow across the Bronx in red on the map below, and I have also drawn a straight line from my starting point in New York and the end of the trip in green. Notice that the green line, the most direct route, follows a route that traverses the Bronx in a northeast to southwest line, crossing the East River at a point in East Harlem, then continues along the shoreline of the East Side until it begins to gradually cross the Eastern side of Manhattan to reach Broadway. Near the green line notice Boston Road: this road was built in the late 1790s to meet the new bridge to Manhattan built in 1798 at what is now 129th Street in Harlem. This route, which roughly parallels the green line I have drawn, reduced the travel distance between Mount Vernon and New York City from more than 20 miles...

Marble Hill is the answer to one of the classic trivia questions: what is the only neighborhood in Manhattan that is part of the mainland? The neighborhood, immediately south of West 230th Street, once was part of York, or Manhattan Island and was an area that was crossed by every visitor to New York who traveled by land. This is because the sole bridge connecting the island to the mainland was built here in 1693, across a creek called Spuyten Duyvil, The Devil’s Whirlpool, or “Spitting Devil.” The name, of Dutch origin, refers to the somewhat turbulent waters that characterized this convoluted meeting of the waters of the Harlem and Hudson Rivers. Not surprisingly, it was difficult to cross. As the narrowest crossing to the mainland, however, Spuyten Duyvil was destined to become an important transit area and by the 1690s demand for a bridge to cross the tempestuous waters was high. The local landowner Frederick Philipse (originally Vriedrick Flipsen) took on the project of building a bridge across the creek from Manhattan to his property on the mainland in what is now the Kingsbridge neighborhood of the Bronx in 1693. Philipse did not build the bridge as a magnanimous gesture to the people of New York: as Sarah Knight indicated in 1704, the bridge was a profit-making enterprise: “about 5 we come to Spiting Devil, Else Kings bridge, where we pay three pence for passing over with a horse, which the man that keeps the Gate set up at...

Although most of my entries typically cover on average five miles, I usually walk more than five miles in a day, occasionally as many as twenty miles. In fact, I sat down and calculated how much time I spent actually walking the Post Road, including stops at libraries and restaurants, overnight stays at hotels and bed & breakfast inns, and occasional bird-watching detours. In total I walked about 350 official miles on the Post Road, as well as many, many unofficial miles which I do not include in my calculations. The actual number of days I spent on the road walking from town to town and stopping to smell the roses as it were, comes to about 34 days. Therefore I walked a little over ten miles a day officially, that is, miles I show on the map and record as miles traveled on the Post Road, and probably another five miles unofficially each day. The walking is relatively easy, the writing and the research is much harder. I try to give an honest impression of each place I visit and then to add layers of history and culture to these subjective observations I have made in my admittedly brief encounters with the dozens of towns and cities through which I have passed on the road, and this, along with the interference of something called life, results in entries that take longer to research and write than the time it takes to do the actual walk. The accumulation of information...

From the corner of Mamaroneck Avenue and Boston Post Road in Mamaroneck Village, overlooking the harbor and the Mamaroneck River, it is exactly 7.7 miles to the border of New York City. This relatively short distance obscures the fact that from here to the entrance to the Bronx on Kingsbridge Avenue I will pass through the Village of Mamaroneck, the unincorporated town of Mamaroneck, the Village of Larchmont, the City of New Rochelle, the Village of Pelham Manor and the Village of Pelham, and the town of Mount Vernon. Basically there is a new town, village, or city every mile along the way and most of that distance is actually spent in New Rochelle. Why are they so many little political entities here in Westchester County? A lot of it has to do with the proprietary nature of land ownership in New York, whereby an individual was often given vast amounts of land for little money in exchange for political favors or for a promise to develop a community in the estate. In the case of Mamaroneck, Caleb Heathcote purchased 1000 acres of land in 1698, part of the holdings of Jonathan Richbell, who owned essentially everything west of the Mamaroneck River to the border of the Pell Estate, which today is the border between Larchmont and New Rochelle. Heathcote’s estate eventually formed parts of Scarsdale, Larchmont, and Mamaroneck. Interestingly, while Heathcote lived in his mansion on the hill overlooking Mamaroneck Harbor near the corner where I stand, he also...

Rye, New York is a pleasant town in Westchester County, 31 miles from Federal Hall in Manhattan via the Old Boston Post Road. In the eighteenth century, Rye was a popular place to stop for the evening either traveling to or from New York, as 30 miles was a typical distance that a horse and rider could cover in one day. President George Washington commenced his journey through New England on Thursday, October 15, 1789 and stopped for the night at Mrs. Haviland’s Inn in Rye, as noted above. Stopping the next day in Stamford, he says of Webb’s tavern that it is “a tolerable good house, but not equal in appearance or reality to Mrs. Haviland’s.” (1) High praise indeed from the taciturn First President. Incidentally, Vice President John Adams also mentions stopping at Mrs. Haviland’s in his diary; thus Mrs. Haviland could make the claim that the first two presidents of the United States stayed at her inn. Sadly, the inn came into existence after Sarah Knight made her way through the area in 1703, as I noted in the previous entry; it would be amusing to read what she would have made of the inn. Neither of the other travelers who have contributed so richly to my understanding and appreciation of the old post road, Alexander Hamilton and James Birket, mention Rye in their journals, although both traveled through the area before Mrs. Haviland became the proprietor of the inn in Rye. Mrs. Haviland is, however, mentioned...

Strange and wonderful New York! After over 300 miles of walking in New England I have officially entered a new region of America, complete with its own myths, its own history, and its own quirks. The first quirky thing about New York is that the towns, villages, cities, or whatever political entity in which people find themselves living, are really confusing. A case in point is the “Village” of Port Chester, the first place I find myself in Westchester County. At a mere 2.5 square miles, it is a tiny place befitting its sobriquet of “village”, but the “village” has a population of about 28,000. This density, over 10,000 inhabitants per square mile, is very unlike a village, and the character of the village is distinctly urban as befits a place so densely populated. Port Chester belongs to a larger entity called the Town of Rye, which apparently includes a village north of Port Chester called Rye Brook, as well as part of Mamaroneck Village, but NOT the City of Rye, which borders Port Chester to the south and sits between Port Chester and Mamaroneck. To make matters even more confusing, Mamaroneck village is partly in the town of Rye and partly in the Town of Mamaroneck. Basically I am never quite sure where I am at any given moment for the first few miles I walk in Westchester County. I could be in the Town of Rye or the City of Rye, the Village of Mamaroneck or the Town...

I head west on the last stretch of the road in Connecticut variously known as Old Post Road or King’s Highway or Country Road or Connecticut Turnpike or US Highway 1 or the name it takes here in Greenwich, Putnam Avenue, to the New York border. Strickland Brook widens substantially just south of Putnam Avenue before it empties into Cos Cob Harbor about a half mile south of the road, so it is easy to see why the road passes through at this spot as it is the first narrow part of the brook over which a horse or man could ford or a small bridge could be built. A few yards beyond the brook I reach the first of a series of short detours off Putnam Avenue called Old Post Road that were all part of the main road prior to the reconstruction of US1 in the 1920s, when the road was substantially straightened and the incline up the looming hill ahead was made less steep. This particular segment is called Old Post Road Number 6, so you can probably see how the nomenclature works, and is about 200 yards long before it rejoins Putnam Avenue. I leave the commercial stretch of Cos Cob behind me and pass downhill through a residential area and reach a small creek at the bottom of the hill that is also plainly visible on Colles’s map at mile 37. Before me now looms the infamous Great Hill, more colloquially known as Put’s Hill....

Stamford was settled on the Rippowam River in 1641 by a faction of discontented settlers of the town of Wethersfield, Connecticut who, taking the counsel of John Davenport of New Haven, took up an offer to settle the area recently purchased by the New Haven Colony “in its zeal to maintain an equal footing with the Connecticut Colony.” (1) The inhabitants of the region at the time were Indians belonging to the Lenape (or Delaware) language group, which was spoken from roughly the Hudson River to the Delaware River and thus encompassed the area which today consists of southern New York, New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, and Delaware. The Lenape language group was distinct from those spoken by the Indians of the rest of southern New England, such as Pequot, Mohegan, Quiripi, Massachusett, and Narragansett. All the languages spoken by Indians living on the northeastern coast of North America (from Labrador south to Virginia) however, were part of the Eastern Algonquian subgroup of the Algonquian language family, which is reputed to have been the most widely spoken language group in North America. As the boundary between two major Algonquian language groups, what is today Stamford and the adjacent town of Greenwich, which together make up the western half of that small piece of Connecticut that juts into New York state, marked the end of what we think of today as New England even in pre-Columbian times. Language barriers, however, are not rigid for the most part, and there was significant intercourse...

The residents of some towns take pride in preserving their history while others seem to relish the idea of progress regardless of the effects it has on the character of the town. This entry takes in two towns, each of which represents one of these positions. The post road or Old King’s Highway in Darien, Connecticut has the look and feel of a nineteenth-century road. With the exception of the ten minute stretch where I crossed Interstate 95 and then passed within a few yards of US 1, passing behind the Trader Joe’s and a small shopping mall, I encountered few modern structures and little commercial activity. The road is lined with pleasant houses, many from the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Historical plaques are scattered throughout the town, even commemorating the longevity of a tree along the King’s Highway that dates to the Revolutionary War (see photo above). The motto of the city of Stamford, on the other hand, is “The City That Works!” and it appears by work they mean knocking down anything more than a few decades old and replacing it with large, mind-numbingly boring office buildings. I had to look very hard to find anything of historical interest in Stamford related to the post road; it seems the city leaders have, on more than one occasion as I will show, made a conscious effort to ablate the center of town and replace it with a modern version that “works.” Whether the city works or not is...

The distance between Norwalk and Stamford is given in Prince’s 1732 almanac as 10 miles. This is also the distance in Tulley’s 1698 almanac as well as in Low’s 1767 almanac. Birket says he traveled 10 miles from Norwalk to Stamford while Hamilton “left Norwalk att 7 in the morning and rid 10 miles of stonny road, crossing several brooks and rivulets that run into the Sound, till I came to Stanford (sic).” (1) A few almanacs list a tavern or two in between these points, but the general consensus is that there are ten miles between Stamford, Connecticut and Norwalk, Connecticut. My expert guide for this segment of my journey, Christopher Colles, whose map of the area was drawn starting in 1789, shows the “Presbyterian” church in Norwalk at about the location it can be seen today, on Norwalk Green, at a little under 52 miles from New York City. The “Presbyterian,” or Congregational Church as it is referred to by New Englanders, in Stamford is also shown on Colles’s map in Stamford Center, at just about the 42 mile mark. Hence, by the most accurate early American gauge we have, the distance on Colles’s map between the two churches is calculated to be a little under ten miles. As my eye follows the road outlined on Colles’s map I note the taverns he has shown along this stretch of the route (seven by my count: Betts’s on Norwalk Green; Reed’s on the west bank of the Norwalk River;...

Samuel Penfield was the innkeeper of what was known as the Sun Tavern in Fairfield, from at least as early as 1750, until his death a half century later in 1811. On Christopher Colles’s map of the road from New York to Stratford, Connecticut, Penfield’s Tavern is clearly labelled in the center of Fairfield, behind the Town House and opposite the “Presbyterian” church, next to a small pond on Fairfield Green. Benjamin Low lists Penfield’s tavern in Fairfield in his 1790 list of taverns, and on the morning of October 11, 1750, James Birket “breakfasted at one Penfield’s & had chocolate and plenty of toast.”(1) A long and illustrious career indeed for an innkeeper (George Washington stopped in Fairfield, but his diary does not mention the tavern’s name or the owner, although local histories of Fairfield claim it was Penfield’s), and an even longer life for the actual building which still sits in the same location, behind the town hall and near the church on the town green in Fairfield. The tavern was burned down by British troops in 1779 but Samuel Penfield rebuilt the tavern in 1784 and the building remains in the same place today, part of and adjacent to the Fairfield Museum and History Center, probably the best museum dedicated to a town this size I have ever visited. Within its brand new but harmoniously designed building are well-designed displays covering the history of this small but important Connecticut town from precolonial times to the present, including,...

The rate of travel from Boston to New York has changed dramatically in the past four centuries. I am sure the reader will be stunned by this information, but this is an appropriate moment to spend a little time looking at the actual data and comparing both modes of travel and rates of travel from the settlement of New England by Europeans in the seventeenth century to the present day. As the first couple of miles in Fairfield, Connecticut are fairly dull, and I find myself passing a couple of shopping malls along US1, then under Interstate 95, and once more across the railroad tracks in the space of two miles, with nary a site of interest in view, my thoughts turn to the time it takes for people to travel from one point to another. I follow the road once again called King’s Highway in Fairfield (but still US1) southwest for a mile through a large rotary at Interstate 95, where I leave US1 when it becomes the King’s Highway Cutoff, and continue behind the office park and the Best Western on King’s Highway until I reach the railroad tracks, where a new station is being constructed in East Fairfield. This forlorn and uninteresting area is redeemed by the appearance of a milestone marking the distance to New Haven at the northwest corner of Vermont Avenue and King’s Highway. The top of the stone has has broken off, but I find a photograph of the stone from the 1930s...

Borders are funny things. Sometimes they are completely invisible, and yet you know you have crossed from one place to another place. Crossing into Mexico from El Paso to Ciudad Juarez or from San Ysidro to Tijuana, the border is obvious, even in the pre-911 world: there are gates, customs agents, the language changes. Even if there were no border guards or gates between Mexico and the United States, and there was no change from English to Spanish it would still be easy to tell the difference between the one place and the other because the poverty in Mexico is more apparent and more immediate. Houses are more ramshackle and buildings are more run down in the Mexican border towns than in the American border towns, an indication of the relative difference in living standards between the two nations. While there are plenty of wealthy Mexicans, few live near the border, and the majority of Mexicans still toil for what Americans would consider to be low wages. The only overt indication that I have crossed from Stratford into Bridgeport is the colorful sign welcoming me to Bridgeport, “Park City” as it styles itself, Bill Finch Mayor. The houses are similar to the ones I just passed in Stratford; there is a Dunkin Donuts, a Burger King, a gas station, even a local diner along this stretch of Boston Avenue (US1). Yet I am immediately aware of the fact that I am no longer in Stratford, because very few people look...

From where I stand in Stratford, Connecticut I am 14 miles from New Haven, and there are precisely 73 miles remaining to reach Federal Hall in Lower Manhattan. I know this because I have found the “Rosetta Stone” that allows me to recreate the road in its entirety from this point on as it ran in 1789. I have used local histories, diaries of earlier travelers along the old post road from New York to Boston, careful study of maps, and intuition to figure out the road thus far. Now I have an explicit guide to the road in front of me thanks to the heroic efforts of the surveyor Christopher Colles, who in 1789 embarked upon a project to map out all the roads in the country and compile an atlas to display his maps in a strip style, with approximately 12 miles of road on each plate. Below is a copy of the final strip of the road from New York to Stratford. Unfortunately, subscriptions to his atlas were insufficient to support this project, which he abandoned in 1792, having mapped about 1,000 miles of roads from Williamsburg, Virginia as far north as Albany, New York and as far northeast as Stratford, Connecticut. On the other hand, the maps he did leave behind are of a very high quality and indicate the locations of churches, taverns, the houses of prominent citizens, and blacksmith shops. The maps also mark off the miles to New York along the road, and,...

Roads, like celebrities, diet fads, and clothes, fall out of fashion and into obscurity more frequently than is supposed. The Old Post Road, King’s Highway, Pequot Trail, Stage Coach Route, whatever you want to call the various incarnations of the coastal road from Boston to New York, has changed over time as certain parts were bypassed in favor of newer, straighter roads, or were rerouted as bridges were built in more convenient places, or simply were neglected when a newer route proved more economically viable. Often the oldest roads are still present near or even directly adjacent to the newer road. Sometimes parts of the older roads were utilized in the construction of the newer “model.” And sometimes the old road has literally remained a dirt path in the woods. Although parts of the old road have been obliterated by the construction of a housing development (in Sharon, MA) or broken up by the addition of a parking lot to the back of a building facing US 1 (in Norwalk, CT), most of the oldest sections of the old road from Boston to New York still survive. The difficulty sometimes lies in finding out where the old road is, and sometimes in figuring out which description of the old road is the most accurate. There are often many red herrings and misleading names, some of which continue to confuse people about the true nature of the post road from Boston to New York. Perhaps the biggest misleading name is the...

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Puente La Reina (or Queen’s Bridge) is a small town in the Navarre region of Spain. This town of 2500 inhabitants sits on the bank of the Arga River, which is crossed by a romanesque bridge dating to the eleventh century. Every pilgrim making the journey to Santiago de Compostela, whether they come on the Camino Navarro from France or from the Mediterranean seacoast via the Camino Aragonés, must cross this bridge in order to continue on the westward journey across northern Spain. For Puente La Reina is the place where the divergent roads leading to Santiago from points north and east in Europe converge; After crossing this bridge there is but one road to Santiago. I am standing at the Post Road equivalent of Puente La Reina, New Haven Green. No matter whether you travel via Springfield, Providence, or points in between, all roads converge here in New Haven. From this point forward there is but one road to New York. While there may be small detours here and there that resulted from changes in the road over time, the route is solitary and indisputable--the Post Road leaves New Haven and traverses approximately eighty-eight miles through the coastal towns of New Haven and Fairfield County, meanders through the coastal towns of Westchester County in New York, cuts across the Bronx and, at Spuyten Duyvil, heads over the Kingsbridge to reach the northern extreme of Manhattan. The road then follows a winding path for fourteen miles south through the island...

I have less than one hundred miles to go on my journey to New York. Sometime during today’s walk from Branford to New Haven I crossed the magical line where I no longer count how many miles I have traveled but rather how many miles I have remaining to reach my destination, the southern tip of Manhattan. According to the various Almanacs I have examined the distance from New Haven to New York is listed as: 84 miles (Bicknell, 1697), 94 miles (Tulley, 1698), 90 miles (Prince, 1732). The distance from Branford to New Haven Green is listed as anywhere from 10-12 miles. Thus, at some point during the walk from here in Branford Center to my destination today I will cross under the century threshold no matter which almanac writer I follow. The distance on Google maps for walking from Branford to New York is about 84 miles, but this is the most direct modern way to walk to New York and includes shortcuts that did not exist in colonial America. In 1789 an Irish-born surveyor and engineer named Christopher Colles began drawing an atlas of roads in the new country of the United States of America. The individual plates were made up of two or three adjacent “strip maps,” usually totaling about twelve miles of road per plate with detailed information about taverns, houses along the route, bridges, churches, even blacksmiths, the eighteenth century auto mechanic. Colles funded his work by subscription and had covered about one thousand...

The straight line distance from Guilford to Branford is almost exactly 7.0 miles. But the day’s walk, like most of this trip, is anything but straightforward. This more mundane entry will document the types of decisions I make when planning and executing my walks. The route I eventually travel to go from Guilford to Branford is 8.73 miles. This is 25% longer than the direct route and adds more than half an hour to what would be a walk of 2.5 hours were I able to travel directly to Branford on a level plain. And therein lies the problem: the land between Guilford and Branford is not a level plain. It is in fact quite hilly and although these hills do not pose a problem in the slightest for a car and represent a small but interesting challenge to a cyclist, to a walker, to someone on horseback, or to someone pulling a cart with a donkey, the hills would have posed a considerable obstacle for the eighteenth-century traveler and were best skirted. A quick look at a topographical map (look at today’s map in “terrain” mode on Google maps as opposed to the normal street mode) shows that the route that was followed from an early date headed around some steep inclines. Although the highest hills barely reach 250 feet, if you magnify the map you will see that the bunching of contour lines indicates that the climb is sharp if one follows the direct route. The northernmost part...

As I stroll across Madison Green I reflect that I am now in New Haven County, which comprises most of the territory that originally made up the Quinnipiac, or “New Haven,” Colony. The New Haven Colony was founded by a group of individuals who believed that even the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony at Boston were too liberal in their religious practices. The New Haven Colony favored religious rule over English Common Law and brooked no dissent from the prevailing orthodox religious attitude. Upon the restoration to the throne of the Stuart line in Britain and the reestablishment of control of the Colonies by the monarchy, the New Haven Colony was the first to pay a price for its overzealous support of the Cromwellian Interregnum, particularly after three of the judges who sentenced Charles I to death were hidden in various places in the colony from the royal authorities. In 1662 the New Haven Colony was dissolved, and by 1665 had become part of the Connecticut Colony established around Hartford. ***** What if New Haven had remained a separate colony, then a separate province, and ultimately had become a state? If we speculate that present-day New Haven and Fairfield Counties became the state of New Haven, what would that state look like today? The 1,232 square mile state (larger than Rhode Island, but smaller than Delaware) would have 1,706,575 inhabitants, according to the 2000 Census, and a density of 1,385 people per square mile, more densely populated than New Jersey...

Today I start by seeing butterflies and end by seeing parakeets. Standing on the bridge of the Indian River in Clinton, Connecticut on a balmy chilly fall morning, I watch migrating Monarchs fly by as they reach Long Island Sound. I wonder what they do when they reach this point, cross the sound and travel the length of Long Island, or travel along the coast of Connecticut? Long Island Sound is one of a host of obstacles these butterflies must negotiate on their annual journey to their overwintering site high in the mountains of Michoacán in central Mexico. The tiny size of these butterflies, the tremendous distance they travel, and the fact that the butterflies I see making their way south are not the same ones that return in the spring, makes this migration one of the most amazing of any organism. I suppose I am like these butterflies, traveling to places I have never seen, negotiating obstacles, making decisions about the direction to take. But I am not traveling to Mexico and I plan on returning home. And yet there does seem to be some sort of biological imperative that impels people like me to head out on the road. October is a time of transition symbolized by the migrating Monarchs. The leaves are changing and soon the cold weather will be here to stay for six months in New England. Summer has ended and the resort towns of the Connecticut coast are entering a period of dormancy, cafes...

Take a look at the map of today’s walk, which takes me from Old Saybrook, Connecticut to Clinton. To me it resembles a river meandering along, as Thoreau says, “sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.” In my case I am following the oldest roads, which also followed the shortest way to a destination, but avoided any difficult obstacles such as wide rivers or large hills if possible. As time passed bridges were built and roads were straightened, sometimes by removing obstacles in the way such as hills, with the brute force that was more readily available after the Industrial Revolution. Thoreau would not have approved of the development of the Interstate: he was offended by the train to Concord and Fitchburg from Boston which still passes the shore of his beloved Walden Pond. Today trains seem old-fashioned and have a romantic aura about them, but to Thoreau they were part of the problem-- they allowed people to do things “faster” which caused them to miss the small details which to Thoreau were what made life worth living: “I have learned that the swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot.” (1) Most eighteenth and nineteenth century travelers were probably unswayed by Thoreau’s glorification of the journey itself, as travel was a dirty, slow, and sometimes dangerous business best done with as quickly as possible. Sarah Knight certainly was in a hurry to get to her destination, do her business, and get home. Alexander Hamilton and James Birket, on the...

I begin today’s journey on the post road on a chain bridge over the raging Sarapiquí River in the Tirimbina Rainforest Center deep in the lowland rainforest of Costa Rica. My wife and I were visiting this lush tropical reserve filled with fantastic birds, insects, plants, and animals in March 2009. We happened to be staying at the simple but comfortable lodge recently built to attract more ecotourists but, at that time, occupied primarily by scientists doing research. A group of three scientists from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst were each researching different aspects of the forest related to bats, insects, and fish. As we passed over the bridge straight out of an Indiana Jones movie that separated the research facilities and lodging from the primary rainforest on the opposite shore of the river, we got into a conversation about fish in the river that turned into a conversation about something closer to home: fish runs and the role of dams. The Connecticut River, which I crossed the night before today’s walk by a much sturdier bridge (with a view quite different from that of Tirimbina, though spectacular in it’s own way), and its tributaries are studded with dozens of dams which are known to impede fish runs. One solution has been to build fish ladders that allow anadramous fish (fish that breed in freshwater but live their adult lives at sea) to surmount the dam and continue upriver to spawning grounds as far north as Vermont and New...

It is raining in Niantic as I head out the door of the Niantic Inn after a fitful night’s sleep. Maybe it was the giant plate of fried clams I ate at Skipper’s Seafood, a popular, typically New England summer seafood restaurant on the road coming off the bridge over the “rope ferry.” Cesar, the manager, was reading the paper when I came in close to seven last night as the place was empty. A few weeks ago it was mobbed with vacationers but once Labor Day passes the resort towns of coastal Connecticut become more like normal towns and Skipper’s on a Tuesday in October is as quiet as can be. The clams are great- Cesar made them fresh for me and then shut down the restaurant a little while after making my dinner as it was obvious I would be the last customer. How is it that a man from Ecuador is making my New England fried clams in Connecticut? Cesar originally moved to Spain but realized from the stories of relatives in the United States that he could make more money here so he came to work as he had relatives in Connecticut. The only complaint he had was that he had no idea there were four seasons as his image of the US was primarily one of California, so he was quite surprised when winter arrived that first year. Now he has been here twelve years and has two kids and no plans to go back....

I have an “app” on my iPhone called Star Walk that is pretty amazing. If you allow it to locate your position you can face the screen of the phone in any direction, and it will present to you a detailed map of the night sky within the field of the screen. For example, as I stand on the banks of the Thames River in New London, Connecticut and look across to the sky over the eastern shore I can see a very bright object near the moon. I know it is a planet, but which one? I place the phone between my face and the object in the sky and the screen indicates that the bright object in that area is the planet Jupiter. A simple click on the image of Jupiter and I can find all the information I desire about the largest planet in our solar system. I attract a bit of attention because of my eccentric behavior but a couple of kids who boldly ask what I am doing are rewarded for their curiosity and are so impressed they want to download the app onto their own phone. Although it is hard to see because of the light pollution generated by the lights of New London and the surrounding area, the star map on the iPhone also indicates that the Milky Way passes overhead in what from Earth looks like an east to west direction. The Romans referred to the hazy, milky streak of stars that...

Coming soon. sorry. Please read previous entry which I published Thursday Sept 30. read full article ...

I do not tend to stay in Bed & Breakfast establishments on this trip. It is not because I dislike them, ( I have a friend who says he won’t stay in any place with fewer than eight rooms and/or has lots of tchotchkes) but rather that I think they (the owners that is) dislike me. Not personally you understand, but the prospect of a lone, sweaty, male on foot showing up unannounced at their door at 7 o’clock in the evening does not excite many of them, and who can blame them? Unfortunately I learned how to walk in the United Kingdom, where such practices are much more common. I don’t think most people in the U.S. have really got the B&B concept worked out. In the UK the places can often be pretty mundane but they do what they advertise--they offer a bed and breakfast-- and most of the hosts don’t bat an eyelash when some bedraggled American bangs on the door of their cottage in the Cotswolds, or on the outskirts of Norwich, or even in the center of Edinburgh, while here the idea of a B&B often revolves around people who are house proud and want to show their property off to appreciative people while sipping an afternoon glass of Chardonnay and discussing thread counts. Breakfast often involves hand-picked poached peacock eggs garnished with a Kunlun dandelion chiffonade served with hand-sliced Venezuelan capybara bacon and house-blended Fair Trade Certified coffee picked by gorillas trained by Dian...

The Post Road from Charlestown to Westerly sweeps first in a southwesterly direction then curves to the northwest in a great twelve-mile arc in the southwestern corner of Rhode Island, in order to avoid the ponds and swamps to the north that are the source of the Pawcatuck River, the boundary between Rhode Island and Connecticut. Today I head to the border and tomorrow I will be in Connecticut. Another phase of the journey will be complete as a second state will be behind me and two states will be left to reach New York City. Westerly is like a star beckoning to me from the west, drawing me toward it as the Magi were drawn to Bethlehem or as prospectors or settlers headed west in search of fame and fortune, heeding the advice of Horace Greeley to “Go west young man, and grow up with the country.” There is a magnetic pull to the west in America, a need for us to head out into the wilderness, to explore the boundless expanses of mountains, prairies, farms, and forests, as well as the towns and cities that make up this vast nation. I have tried to reproduce the sense of adventure that travelers in an earlier period would have felt traveling what today is the safe and anodyne trip from Boston to New York. This trip would have engendered some of the same emotion that the myth of the west evoked in later generations of travelers. It is only when...

On the corner of High Street and Main Street in Wakefield, Rhode Island is a Rhode island Public transit Authority (RIPTA) bus stop. Route 66, which originates in Kennedy Plaza in Providence stops at Kingston Amtrak Station and the University of Rhode Island, then passes this spot on the way to Galilee in Narragansett, where the bus meets the Block Island Ferry. The bus stops here in Wakefield roughly once per hour in each direction. There are no bus routes west of this bus stop in Rhode Island until Westerly, on the Connecticut border, where a commuter express bus makes the journey along Interstate 95 to and from Providence daily. Some of the Amtrak trains that ply the Northeast Corridor Route between Boston and Washington make stops at Kingston and Westerly. South of the train tracks there is no regularly scheduled public transit service at all from here to the Connecticut border. As I walk west from the bus stop at Main Street in Wakefield I will no longer have the safety net of a public transit system to bail me out in the event of inclement weather, fatigue, or boredom. I am heading “into the wild” for the next twenty miles. This section of the post road passes in a southwesterly direction through the rest of the massive town of South Kingstown, then passes through Charlestown, through an area of farmland, forest, wildlife refuges, and Indian Reservations. Then the road turns to the northwest as it heads through Westerly...

The term “village” in Rhode Island must be translated into American English for the rest of us. My walk through the Ocean State has taught me to be on the lookout for any place that is referred to as a village. These places are often the tranquil, pretty, and interesting parts of the walk as opposed to the noisy, ugly, and uninteresting sections, which are never in an area called a village. Village means old architecture; village means time to eat; village means art galleries; smart shops, cafes with ocean views, and air-conditioned libraries where I can take a break while I do “research” for this project, which includes using the free wifi to check the soccer scores and my email (The fact that I have no car does not mean I am a complete Luddite, or else I would not have a blog would I?). In short, village means oasis. I must take a moment here to explain something about the nomenclature of Rhode Island towns. Especially here in the “Providence Plantations” section of Rhode Island, the cities and towns are often massive physical entities relative to the those in Massachusetts. For instance, Warwick, the city I am currently walking through, has an area of 35.5 square miles. Other towns through which I will pass are even larger. North Kingstown, for example, has an area of 43.6 square miles, while South Kingstown has an area of 57.1 square miles. By comparison none of the towns I walked through in...

Rhode Island, with barely 1,000 square miles, is the smallest state in the Union in terms of area. It is surprising to discover that most of the territory south of the Pawtuxet River, where I stand, was considered to be wild territory, what was referred to as Narragansett Country. It is also surprising to discover that much of the early history of Rhode Island involved a great deal of territorial wrangling with both the Massachusetts and Connecticut colonies. Indeed the expansion of the original Providence Plantation into southern Rhode Island not only occurred under dubious legal circumstances, but also engaged the avid interest and participation of leaders of all three colonies, each one eager to grab whatever territory it could from the Narragansett Indians who lived there. This despite the fact that, on the whole, the Narragansett Indians maintained friendly relations with the English, especially with Roger Williams. There is no honor among thieves. Any beliefs I might once have held about the mostly honorable intentions of the English settlers and their attempts to treat with the Indians on an equal footing have certainly been destroyed once and for all by the research I have undertaken during the course of this project. ***** Sometimes a map can hold information which can be enlightening. Let me explain. For years I have had in my possession a map drawn by William Carlton in 1940 showing the journey made by John Winthrop, Jr., who became the first Governor of Connecticut, in late 1645....

When Madame Knight traveled to Connecticut in October 1704 she was in a hurry as she had business interests in New Haven. The fact that she was a woman traveling alone and was unfamiliar with the territory made it expedient to acquire a guide to accompany her. The postal riders in the seventeenth century, in addition to carrying the mail as speedily as possible, were often engaged by travelers as guides. Having missed the postal rider in Dedham, Knight caught up with him in Attleboro and proceeded on the most direct route to Connecticut, through Providence, crossing the Providence River and then following the Narragansett Trail south down the western shore of Narragansett Bay. Thus Knight bypassed Newport entirely. According to the Rhode Island historian Charles Chapin, the official route of the post road was changed on a number of occasions. The road traveled through Providence in Knight’s day, but by 1715 officially ran to Newport, then across Narragansett Bay. Chapin also indicates that “the post rider followed this route in 1743, but the mails must have, a little later, been diverted through Providence, for the post road is described as running through Greenwich and Tower Hill in the almanacs of 1765 to 1772. It was then returned to Newport and Conanicut, for in 1773 John Carter, the postmaster in Providence, complained ‘that the mails from the westward by a late alteration in the Post route now cross five ferries between Narragansett and Providence, whereas by the old route there’s...

Conanicut Island is the second largest island in Narragansett Bay, after Rhode Island. The entire 9.7 square-mile island comprises one town, Jamestown, which approximately 5600 people call home. The actual town center is in the southern half of the island, and it has one main street running east to west called Narragansett Avenue, along which are lovely cottages, the town hall, the fire department, various other town offices, churches, pleasant shops, cafes, and restaurants, and a marker at the corner of Narragansett and the main north to south artery (conveniently called North Road), which tells me that Jamestown was founded in 1678 and named for King James II. Narragansett Avenue is almost exactly one mile long and extends from the harbor facing east towards Newport to the pier that faces west towards South County, or “from sea to sea,” as the General Assembly termed it in their 1709 order to improve the road.(1) Maps of eighteenth-century Jamestown show only the two roads I have mentioned and two ferry landings, called East Ferry and West Ferry, which are located at each end of Narragansett Avenue. I am sitting at a table at the eastern end of Narragansett Avenue in front of the East Ferry Market and Deli in Jamestown, Rhode Island wolfing down a chicken salad sandwich while taking a last look back across the bay at Newport before I hop on RIPTA Bus #66 which will transport me over the Verrazano Jamestown Bridge and deposit me at the University of...

There is nothing like a roadside ice cream stand in summer to pull at the heartstrings of a true New Englander. The mere sight of the Hill-Top Creamery sign on the Post Road as I enter another commercial stretch of US Route 1 near the East Greenwich/ North Kingstown line is sufficient to induce me to delay my entry into North Kingstown for a few moments in order to fortify myself for the upcoming segment of my journey. The place is crowded with people on this very hot afternoon. School has recently started, and packs of kids have been brought by their parents to engage in a last ritual of summer before the school year truly gets going. A couple on a Harley pull in for a quick ice cream break, sitting in their leather biking outfits under an umbrella at one of the picnic tables set up in the parking lot in an effort to cool off. An elderly couple in a Lincoln pull into the parking lot, the wife driving. The husband stays in the car while the wife waits in line at the window of the stand. She comes back a couple of minutes later with two tasting spoons for her husband, who I at first thought was just hot or lazy, but now realize is incapable of getting out of the car without some difficulty. She goes back after he has made his selection, and they sit placidly eating their cups of ice cream in their...

 College Hill in Providence is littered with libraries, from the Athenaeum, to the Hay Library, to the Rhode Island Historical Society, and as I wandered through the exhibits of sixteenth-century books about America at the refreshingly cool John Carter Brown Library, I contemplated the many books that I have used to research my project on the Post Road.  The publication of a new book, The King's Best Highway: The Lost History of the Boston Post Road, the Route That Made America by Eric Jaffe, gives me an opportunity both to review the literature on the Post Road and to give the reader a rundown of books that I have used in my project in the event that I have sparked an interest in King Philip, the Boston Jazz scene in the 1950s, or roadside weeds.

“In his own time he was the public enemy whom any should slay; in ours he is considered a martyr to the idea of liberty not differing from that of Tell and Toussaint, whom we call heroes.” 

--Samuel Adams Drake, speaking of Philip or Metacom, Sachem of the Wampanoag, killed at Montaup, August 12, 1676.

 

Water is all around me as I walk through the towns of Bristol County, Rhode Island. A series of peninsulas are separated by the watery fingers of Narragansett Bay. First is the town of Barrington, made up of the lower portions of two distinct peninsulas separated by the Barrington River. Warren is reached by crossing the Warren River, and this town is also comprised of land on two peninsulas separated by the Kickemuit River. Bristol makes up the southern portion of the peninsula on which the main center of Warren sits.  Bristol has three fingers of land stretching out into the Bay, the longest one ending at a point from which the Mount Hope Bridge ferries passengers across the water to Aquidneck Island, at the southern tip of which is the town of Newport. All these towns have a long and firm connection to the sea, and much of their historical development was tied to their position alongside the water. Walking from town to town here will require crossing the water, and, prior to the construction of bridges, ferries were necessary to make one’s way to Newport; the final one was the Bristol Ferry at the southern tip of Bristol crossing Mount Hope Bay. My walk today will take in beautiful ocean views but will also require me to walk, if not on water, at least over it, multiple times. 

The Post Road in the area around Providence can be quite confusing.There seem to be roads spinning off in multiple directions, some of which do not seem as though they are getting me any closer to New York. If one digs back in time the present situation becomes a little clearer. The Indians, as I have mentioned previously, took the path of least resistance to get from point A to point B as their only land-based option was to walk. They avoided hills and swamps and crossed rivers at narrow points or where the water was shallow. Pawtucket Falls was the narrowest point in a direct line from Massachusetts Bay to the Narragansett country of southern Rhode Island and thus a crossing was established here. A trail then led into what is now Providence where another crossing, this time of the Providence River, allowed a continuation down the western shore of Narragansett Bay. A second crossing of the Blackstone/Pawtucket/Seekonk River (all the same water, just different names in different sections), at what was called the “narrow passage” of the Seekonk River, presently located at Henderson Bridge, allowed for a boat crossing of about 600 feet, from where the trail crossed over the Eastside of Providence to the Providence River, which was forded as mentioned above.(2)     

Travel to Newport, located on an island, also required a ferry crossing. In this case most travelers from Boston followed a trail across the plains east of the Seekonk River in what is now Pawtucket and East Providence. Those traveling to Providence turned west at the “narrow passage” while the Newport bound continued south to another ferry, between what are now the towns of Barrington and Warren in Rhode Island. A second ferry crossing at the tip of the peninsula at Bristol brought travelers to the island of Aquidneck, and a 12 mile jaunt down the island brought them into Newport. Those journeying  from Providence to Newport also had the option of crossing at India Ferry as I discussed last time.  A bridge crossing the Pawtucket Falls was built in 1713, and travelers to Providence switched from the “narrow passage” crossing back to the Pawtucket crossing.
        To summarize, Newport travelers stayed on the east side of the Seekonk River, bypassing Providence, while travelers heading directly to New York went through Providence one way or another, depending on whether the bridge had been built at Pawtucket.

    Two Hundred Miles to go until I reach New York. A day of wandering like the one I describe below will not get me there very fast. I had fun though, and I learned quite a bit about Providence and Rhode Island. I will be there ere long in the words of the song, but I plan on taking my time and savoring the sites, sounds, flavors, and smells along the way. Thus far I have averaged about 3 miles per entry. Although I suspect that average will increase, I estimate that I am about a quarter of the way through my journey. As I move further from home, I slowly leave behind the links that allow me to stay connected such as the commuter rail and the buses. The homes of most of my friends have been left behind, and as I meander through the city of Providence I feel I am entering a new phase in this project. Thus far I have been able to travel for a few miles and then write up my entries at leisure in my office. But the commuter rail does not extend beyond Providence so day trips become an increasingly difficult option to pursue. I will have to spend longer stretches of time on the road, and I worry that the entries will be of a lower quality as I spend more time walking than writing. On the other hand, if I continue at the current pace I may not get to Broadway before the first snowfall, one of my main objectives. Life is so full of compromises, and I am not much of a compromiser. But compromise I must, and here is where the rubber (in this case my Keens) hits the road. But today I will have one day of indulgence.

      Entry #3: Mile 1, Boston Gate. Transitions     Transitions           It is often difficult to imagine what a place must have been like in a different time. Even in a town as steeped in history as Boston, it can be difficult to envision the lay of the land in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Most of the buildings have long since disappeared or been destroyed by one of the many fires that have devastated the city since its founding in 1630. The roads have changed too, but less than one might imagine. The original road out of town down to the Neck still exists, although it has been completely transformed by development of almost four centuries.  I aim to walk to the original entrance to the town of Boston, the gate on Boston Neck, which was first built in 1631. This gate is only a little more than a mile from where I stand in front of the Old State House, but  this is one of the most historically dense miles in all of the United States. I aim to walk back and forth in time as well, attempting to recall what was and to examine what is. The gate is long gone, much of the area formerly under water has been reclaimed by landfill, the inhabitants have changed dramatically over time, both in number and in provenance, but the road still exists and there are many stones that still speak of another time.  ...

“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people upon us.” 

--John Winthrop

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to understanding is familiarity. I do not mean by familiarity intimate knowledge but rather that pleasing sense of comprehension merely owing to long acquaintance. So for instance the all too familiar pattern of living in close proximity to a famous monument that in fact one never visits. I once worked at the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown and virtually every day someone would come in and tell me that they had lived in Boston their whole life but this was their first visit to the monument.  We know it so we do not visit and thus, ironically, we do not know it at all.

The Boston Post Road fits into this category, familiar yet unknown. Many people can tell you where it is and what it means and most of them are wrong. It is not what people think it is, it does not go where people think it goes. Signs for Post Roads abound, especially in New England. The Boston Post Road is in Attleborough, Massachusetts, on the border with Rhode Island. The Boston Post Road is in Marlborough, Massachusetts, 20 miles west of Boston. It is found on the Southern Connecticut coast and in the hills of Northeastern Connecticut, and in Hartford. It is in the Bronx. All of these are in fact the Boston Post Roads.

The Post Road exists in many forms and permutations but there is the original road and it is hidden away; sometimes buried under a strip mall or condo development, sometimes a lost track in the woods. Sometimes it is right under your feet if you are walking in downtown Boston, although it is not called by that name. The first Post Road still exists under the clutter of familiarity, and underneath the many layers of more modern roads, like the lost City of Troy, sits the path taken by the Wampanoag and the Narragansett, Pequot and puritans from Boston to Maine and from Boston to Maryland and even beyond, through the wilderness to the urban oases of New York, Philadelphia, Annapolis, New Haven, Newport, and Charleston.

I have decided to walk from Boston to New York. I could, of course, choose a more exotic setting for a long-distance perambulation such as the Camino de Santiago (of which more later) in Spain and France or the Via Appia in Italy or the Silk Road or the Karakoram Highway in Asia or the overland route from Cairo to Capetown or, closer to home, the Appalachian Trail, or I simply could walk across America. Instead I choose to walk out my front door, turn left at the crossroads and keep going for 230 or so miles until I get to the Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan.

The non-walker might suggest more rapid forms of transportation in the interest of time. I could drive, fly, take a bus, or take the train (though it is debatable at times whether any of these modes of transportation are, indeed, faster).  What is the point of wandering through busy towns and past suburban shopping malls? What is the point of walking on an old road when you could take the highway? Isn’t this just a waste of time and energy?

The reasons for deciding to make this trip are manifold. First, I am cheap. I figured my feet were a less expensive way to go. Second, I like walking. I also enjoy bumping into things I had not anticipated. I like the voyage itself sometimes as much as or more than the destination. I also enjoy collecting information and processing it, and walking gives me more time to both collect and process many facts about small towns, about the landscape of New England, about the historical significance of the road and of the houses, the  fields, and the towns it passes. I am a birdwatcher and it is quite difficult to watch birds at 65 miles per hour, but quite enjoyable at a walking pace.

Here is where I pull out the big guns, namely, one Henry David Thoreau, who wrote an essay entitled Walking, in which he describes the pleasures, purposes, and advantages of walking.  He also believes that people do not walk properly: “I have met but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of walking.” (1)  Thoreau did most of his travels on foot or in a canoe, observing small details as he went, building from the seemingly trivial the arguments and essays for which he is justifiably world-renowned.  I want to be one of those one or two to whom he might be referring.  Life on Earth might be a good sight more enjoyable if everyone read a little Thoreau instead of sticking Thoreau quotations on the bumpers of their Toyota SUVs.

     There is an underlying goal and a concrete starting point for this madness. In the mid 1980s I watched La Voie Lactee (a movie by the Spanish director Luis Bunuel). In this film, two “pilgrims” travel to the holy site of Santiago de Compostela, a city in Galicia. This allegorical film has our heroes meet with a variety of adventures and characters. The film itself is interesting in its own right, and I will discuss it in detail later. What it did for me however, was to help me generate an idea which has percolated for a quarter of a century. I became obsessed with the idea of walking from Paris to Santiago on the ancient trail, le Chemin de Saint Jacques in France and, after passing through Roncevalles in the Pyrenees, el Camino de Santiago.

    Anyone who knows me realizes that it was not a religious obsession. Richard Dawkins is the type of saint I worship. Rather, I was captivated by the idea of wandering roads that had been traveled by many people over long periods of time. It also occurred to me that people once walked great distances to get someplace because they had no other choice. One might argue that Homo sapiens evolved specifically with a capacity, born of necessity, to walk long distances.  The upshot is that I began to walk more and to maintain an obsession with Santiago.

    There are a number of problems with walking to Santiago which I could describe in detail, but the fact remains that twenty-five years went by, and, except for a day or two now and then, I have not walked the Santiago trail.