Walking Broadway – New York City
Sunday, 3 May 2015In New York recently I set out to walk Broadway, it’s the one street which runs the entire length of Manhattan.
▲ So I took the subway down to South Ferry.
◄ It was an expensive trip, I put my credit card into a Columbus Circle subway station Metro Card machine, it charged my card US$10, but no Metro Card came out. So I put in US$10 in cash and got a receipt to say the machine had taken my 10 bucks and wasn’t going to give me anything. Twenty bucks down and I hadn’t even started walking.
◄ From the South Ferry stop I looked across to the Statue of Liberty, turned round and headed north.
▲ First pause, Number One Broadway. Only a few steps north and I’m passing Wall Street’s charging bull statue.
▲ And a few mores steps and there’s Wall St itself.
◄ To my left is the new World Trade Center building.
▲ Then there’s Bleecker St as I pass Greenwich Village
◄ Union Square and one of New York’s most iconic buildings, the Flatiron Building, as I reach Madison Square Park. There are glimpses of the Empire State Building as well …
▲ … before the neon bling of Times Square. From where Broadway clips the souith-west corner of Central Park at Columbus Circle. Then it’s on past the Lincoln Centre and the glitzier streets of the Upper West Side, sandwiched between Central Park and the Hudson River.
▲ Broadway runs through Columbia University towards the end of the Upper West Side before running into Harlem, where the language switches from English to Spanish with shops like this one at the corner of Broadway and 163rd.
Further north Broadway skirts by Fort Tryon Park with its wonderful Cloisters Museum which I enjoyed on an earlier visit. The museum features a superb collection of medieval European art.
▲ Finally just before 225th St the Broadway Bridge crosses to the Bronx, it’s a kind of disappointing finale, this is absolutely not one of New York’s iconic bridges. My Manhattan end-to-end stroll covered a bit over 13 miles (22km) although Broadway continues for another 20 miles (32km) before it ends in Sleepy Hollow.
