IN NEW YORK MY WIFE AND I SPEND HOURS IN CENTRAL PARK
If San Francisco is my idea of the best walking city around, just for sheer beauty and variety, not to mention that great feeling of taking in a lung full of fresh sea air blowing in off the bay, I’d have to put New York right behind it. I’m not sure I’d want to walk through Manhattan every day. I might get a little tired of all the commotion. But for a few days at a time, especially when the weather is right, Kim and I just love our trips to New York. What a great city to walk in and take in the sites and the people. It’s a little challenging, because you’re running into so many people, it’s so busy everywhere you turn, but at the same time you just can’t beat walking as a way to get an experience of a city. It’s funny. I tend to fall into a little bit of a routine at home in San Francisco with my walks. I have my favorite routes I take, like walking along the Embarcadero to the Pier 23 Café for crab and turning around and walking back, or climbing the steps up to Coit Tower, or doing the big one and walking all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge. But in New York I have a different mind-set. I like to let the walks take me where they will. We never go the same way twice.
Kim and I start out from the team hotel, just a few blocks south of Central Park South, and usually walk up Sixth Avenue toward the park. It kind of feels like home, in a way, we’ve made the walk so many times and enjoyed it so much. Even just walking through the city blocks, you see all kinds of places you know well from other visits. As you come up toward the intersection on 57th Street, you see the red awnings of Rue 57 lining the sidewalk and you know you’re close to the park. You pass your little delis, your luggage shops, all of that stuff stays pretty much the same over the years. Then you come up to 59th Street, with the big blue banner pointing you to the Ritz Carlton Central Park looming off to your right, and the green of the trees opening up in front of you and yellow taxis all sprinting past you to try to get through that intersection before the light changes.
As soon as you cross the street and set foot in the park, it’s like the atmosphere changes. You’re still in Manhattan. You still feel all that activity and all those people and all that raw energy around you. But at least for visitors like Kim and me, Central Park always feels a little like a special kind of adventure. It’s like a carnival in there. Right there on the corner you’ll see horses and carriages stopping to pick up passengers, and next to them the pedicabs. Directly across from the Ritz is a giant statue of Simón Bolívar on his horse, which is pretty hard to miss. You can hit one of those little stands there for a hot dog or an ice cream or an iced tea, but I’m there to try to get in a good workout, so I’m not thinking about stopping. If I’m going to keep up with Kim, I’ve got to work at it, because she’s a walker. In fact, when I’m off at the ballpark with the team, she’ll keep right on walking most of the day.
“I love New York,” she says. “There’s so much to see. One time last year I left the hotel at one o’clock and didn’t come back until nine. I walked across the whole park. I was in stores some of that time, but I didn’t sit down for more than fifteen minutes the whole day.”
Once Kim and I cross 59th Street, we generally walk right on up into the park through that area by the Pond. When Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were designing Central Park after winning a contest in 1858, they made a point of landscaping the area and surrounding the Pond with trees to help give you the feeling that you’ve plunged into the middle of the wilderness. What they called “the Promontory,” now the Hallett Nature Sanctuary, wraps around the Pond and makes you think you’ve been swallowed up in some unknown woodlands. We keep moving and head past the Trump Ice Rink there, trying to imagine for a minute that it’s wintertime, with snow on the trees and people sliding around on the ice in skates.
We walk past the rink there, picking up the long, gradual arc of East Drive, which takes you past a complex of buildings on the right, including the Central Park Zoo, and cut over on the 65th Street Transverse, heading back across the park now toward the Upper West Side. That takes us to the Central Park Carousel, which is always good for a smile. You hear that funny music sounding out, calliope they call it, even before you see the brightly painted horses. I always do enjoy a little history and I get a kick out of knowing that there has been a carousel there in the park dating back all the way to 1871. This is the fourth they’ve had, the last two having been destroyed by fire, and here’s a good detail: The current carousel, originally built in 1908, was restored and brought over from Coney Island, where it had been left abandoned at an old trolley terminal. Our boys Greg and Brett are thirty-five and twenty-seven now and Kim took them on that carousel when they were small.
I said we like to be able to take a different path every time, and that’s true, but there’s a feeling of being pulled forward by the way in front of you, and sometimes we just keep going right along the edge of Sheep Meadow, maybe cutting across it a little, and walk up West Drive past Tavern on the Green with its big picture-glass windows. It starts to veer a little bit east as you get up toward Strawberry Fields, near the Dakota apartment building where John Lennon was shot, and we walk along Terrace Drive, past the Lake, to that area where they’ve got red brick all over the place and a whole bunch of steps leading down to the Bethesda Fountain, surrounded by a big round pool and topped off with an eight-foot bronze Angel of the Waters statue. Past there we’re back on East Drive heading north through the park again, and that’s an especially nice stretch. Over on the right is another pond where they have model sailboats and on the left is the Loeb Boathouse at the edge of the Lake. Then it’s not far to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the right, looking out on the Great Lawn to your left with its complex of softball fields, always a game going on there.
That’s our basic walk, with variations, and it never gets old. I’ll do that with Kim or sometimes I’ll go out there on my own. In New York I’m usually focused on getting in a good workout, since everything in New York is a little intense and you want to make sure you have that release, but some days I’ll say to myself: You know what? This isn’t going to be a power-walk thing, we’re just going on a casual walk here. We’re going to stop anyplace we want to stop. On those days you’re liable to find me anywhere. I’ll keep on walking out the side of the park, down whatever street looks good to me that day, and if I see a little Irish pub along the way, which you always do walking around in New York, I might just duck in there and pull up a stool at the bar and order myself a beer. Those little Irish places are fun. Out on the street, in New York like in a lot of cities, there will be Giants fans and they’ll call out, “Hey Boch.” It’s kind of amazing, how wide our fan base spreads. But most of the time in New York when I pop into a little neighborhood bar, they have no idea. We might talk about the weather or hunting or fishing or most anything. I’m just some guy stopping in to take a load off and rest my feet a little, cold beer in hand, a regular guy like anyone else. I like that.