Manhattan: A Day Trip Walk

One of the benefits of living on Manhattan's Upper West Side is you can turn a simple walk into a destination trip to hundreds of sites. A great day trip for Manhattan is to start walking from West 86th down Central Park West (CPW) to midtown Manhattan.

[b]Baby Jogger[/b]

CPW is a particularly interesting street as you have Central Park's tree line on one side of the street and large apartment buildings lining the other. You can see people in their LLBean wear walking their labradors and you can see the homeless waking up on benches after sleeping through the night. Joggers and mothers pushing baby carriages leisurely move under tree boughs that reach over from the park. Building doormen can be kind or they can push you out of the way as they assist one of the apartment owners with a large load from a car doubled parked in front of a building. Everything is at a premium in Manhattan including time and space. As one Rabbi told me the cheapest real estate in Manhattan is sitting at Starbucks over a .50 latte. If you spent an hour nursing that coffee it is a real bargain.

CPW ends at Columbus Circle on 59th Street. The new Time Warner Center and the general development in this area provides a very clean commercial feel for Manhattan. The Whole Foods store on the bottom floor of Time Warner Center is always packed with health minded people willing to pay a premium for organic peanut butter. From Columbus Circle you cross 59th into midtown. The ambience changes from leisure to business and people are generally rushing from one building to another. When you look up at the sky each tower mountains upwards making you feel small in a large valley. There are great stores and restaurants in midtown and if you have pedestrian taste you will feel right at home with the gyro and kabob stands that dot the midtown corners. The international food selection in midtown gives you an idea how diverse the city is: from Kosher to indian to Thai, to Portuguese, there is something from everyone's old country.

By the time you reach midtown you have seen hundreds of sites and passed thousands of people. At the end of your day trip it is time to head back where you came from. But instead of taking the scenic route you go underground taking the uptown train back home.

Manhattan: A Day Trip Walk

Barry Schechter