WALK ON.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 03-JAN-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Last summer, Caleb Smith, a thirty-four-year-old librarian at Columbia, came across an old Times story with the headline "navy officer near the end of 4-year project of walking in every street on manhattan." The article, from December, 1954, was about an eccentric sixty-five-year-old named Thomas J. Keane, who, in the course of taking carefully planned weekend strolls, had managed to traverse some three thousand blocks and five hundred miles of Manhattan terrain. Smith, himself an inveterate walker, was then a little more than two years into his own all-encompassing Manhattan project--and, he estimated, about three-quarters of the way done. Why not pick up the pace and aim at finishing on the fiftieth anniversary of his predecessor's achievement?

That was two Sundays ago, and...

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