Walking Manhattan From Top to Bottom

*The David N. Dinkins Manhattan Municipal Building, designed by McKim, Mead & White, completed in 1914.*

In April 2025, my friend's mom and I coincidentally had separate surgeries scheduled during the same week, several states apart. Hers was much more serious and complicated than mine, and they unfortunately had drastically different outcomes. My friend's mom never made it out of surgery.

Before she died, she professed optimism that the procedure would help her walk long distances again, something she hadn't been able to do for years. In her honor, my friend committed to walking for her, and on Memorial Day she recruited a group of us to walk from the top of Manhattan to the bottom (about 13 miles as the crow flies) in memory of her mother.

My surgery was to repair a torn labrum in my left hip joint. It was supposed to be a relatively simple procedure, but when I woke up, I was told by my surgeon that my piece of tissue was "mutilated." I had agreed to an easy, arthroscopic repair but awoke from a gnarly reconstruction. I had lost some bone (shaved down to prevent further impingement) and gained several metal clips, an unwieldy brace, and a new-to-me tissue graft. When I asked where the graft came from, I was told it was from a cadaver.

It took months for me to learn how to walk properly again, but I have been grateful every (baby) step of my longer-than-expected recoverythat someone (or their family) gave me this incredible gift from beyond the grave. The donation may have been small and anonymous, but the tiny piece of tissue is truly a gift that will keep on giving, helping me walk for the rest of my life (or at least until, or if, I need a full hip replacement).

I have always loved walking long distances especially in New York, a hobby that has quite obviously contributed to the wear and tear on my joints. But I had never done a walk like this and always wanted to. Just a little more than a year after my surgery, I was still nervous about my ability to keep up and/or complete such a trek—but committed to trying my best. In the interest of saving a few hundred steps, and because I now live so close to the northern edge of Manhattan and routinely run errands in Inwood, I opted to join the group when they reached my neighborhood.

In the end, I surprised myself by not only making it the entire way—from W 184th and Broadway to Battery Park—but also by how good I felt doing so. I took ibuprofen every few hours, made sure to stay hydrated, and stretched when I could. But I mostly felt better walking 33,000+ steps than I normally do walking just a fraction of that in my every day life.

Maybe it was the mission, or the company, or the perfect weather, or the holiday, or the adrenaline that comes from doing something that once felt completely out of reach. Or maybe it was just the magic and novelty of traversing Manhattan from top to bottom all at once, going through diverse and disparate neighborhoods such as Washington Heights, Harlem, the Upper West Side, Midtown, Flatiron, Soho, Little Italy, Chinatown, and Lower Manhattan in less than 12 hours (with breaks for lunch, snacks, dinner, and celebratory Manhattans at Fraunces Tavern, the city's oldest bar).

Below is a map of our route followed by some of the highlights.