Reflection on Walking in New York City

Dedicated to Professor Brendan O’Flaherty for helping me apply to Columbia as an undergraduate. The following video lecture contains paintings and photos I compiled while walking in New York.

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Learn more about my New York walks in this collection of photos and drawings. They are organized into ten urban walks, with each day in a different Manhattan neighborhood.

Strolling in New York City is a world tour. The street fairs of Spanish Harlem mesh into college town Columbia. Columbia gives way to the shabby chic of Harlem. A few blocks farther and I am drowned by the tourists of Times Square. Further still and I reach the bustle of Wall Street brokers. I stroll and try to identify the passing languages. Spanish in the outer boroughs. Polish in Greenpoint. Russian in Brighton Beach. Cantonese in Chinatown. French and German shoppers in SoHo. There could be no more fitting a place for the United Nations.

Reading Here is New York by E.B. White, I realizethat  some aspects of New York have changed little in the past seventy years. The streets, cars, and tenements are different, but the essential spirit of dynamic and diverse urbanism remains. Here is New York.