A WALK DOWN BROADWAY

Start at the top. For kicks, Cara and I decided on Sunday to walk Broadway from 207th all the way down to Battery Park. The impetus was I wanted to see all the places the subway passes by on the way home. Short of having a car or taking a taxi, or riding a bike if I had one, walking seemed to be the way to see all the changes through the boroughs, from lower class to the stinkin’ rich. The big surprise was how nice it was at the top. The area around 207th is a sweet little neighborhood with Fort Tryon Park giving the city edge a nice greenbelt to smooth itself out against. There’s a gentle melding into the barrio near where we live, that turns into a full-on Latin event for about the next 50 blocks complete with smells, sounds, street vendors, men playing checkers and more roasted chicken than you could ever want (we’re getting into the roasted-chicken thing these days). Once you get to about 125th things get a bit more sterile, sidewalks have more room, food gets more expensive, and by the time you hit Columbia University it’s full-on whitebread (except for the crappy street fair we passed). From there it’s boutiques and cafes via the Upper West Side (and time for a break in the median), all the way to Mid-town with its gauntlet of fat-ass tourists and hellish Broadway show marquees that meld nicely with the bible thumping freak show and the aroma of simmering sewage everyone is breathing in like invisible shit. Into the gayness of Chelsea and the Haute couture of Soho where we briefly met up with Cara’s friends Dusty and Sean and their dog Jeaque Pierre, then onto a darkened Wall Street with a stumble onto the WTC site, all aglow like some construction site where nothing’s happening. Took us seven hours. We road the subway home.