TO STEP OUT IN MANHATTAN IS TO ENTER INTO SYMBIOSIS with hundreds of thousands of other pedestrians who share the grid of streets imposed on this chaotic island.
This city, more than most, presents a drumbeat repetition of challenges that must be faced in connection with your fellow walkers. It becomes a form of spontaneous and connected dance — like schooling fish or flocking birds — with rules, and codes, and moments of breathtaking primal skill.
It’s the most basic form of society. A masterpiece of tolerance and civility that is all the more profound for the fact that it has happened for decades with no tedious hectoring.
Jane Jacobs, the preeminent philosopher of urban life, developed the ideas in her 1961 book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” while looking out of her window at the corner of Hudson and Perry streets in the West Village. She’d recognize it today.
But I’ve discovered a recent change in the way the city manages the crossings at the end of every block. I confirmed it using some creative measuring, and I believe it has the potential to gradually change the rhythm of the city until it’s more like every other place.
Before that happens, I want to document the phenomenon in more detail.
Manhattan is, with some exceptions, a planned system of streets. Avenues, generally bigger, go up the vertical axis. Streets cross them every 100 yards or so on the horizontal axis.
This means that every block ends in the same meeting of four streets. Those intersections act like diffused hearts, gathering and dispatching clumps of walkers. To walk, even in a straight line, is to adventure rhythmically, block by block, through video-game-esque obstacles.
Any city walker instinctively keeps their distance from the doors of buildings. But in New York many of those buildings also have a cellar entrance, two person-sized metal doors set into the sidewalk over a ladder. Some of these will be open, and others will be closed but poorly maintained, with raised edges and rusted padlocks to trip over.
There is no refuge to be found away from the buildings, by the curb. Manhattan cannot efficiently dispose of the quantity of refuse it generates. So every sidewalk is edged with sagging piles of garbage bags, often oozing a liquid that smells appallingly chemical and appallingly organic at the same time. And in winter the manhole covers just beyond that pile — 250 pounds or so of cast iron — sometimes spontaneously explode far into the air, as melting snow mixes alchemically with road salt, or corrodes wiring, underneath them.
Because the city is constantly under construction, every other block is clad in scaffolding that narrows the flow of human traffic further. Every fourth block hosts an outlandish obstacle that hints at a larger drama — an occasional table, a mattress, a vast mound of rotting avocados, a discarded painting, a piano — jutting out at an odd angle. Every tenth block hosts a snaking line of people willing to wait hours to try a food they read about online.
These constrained walkways would be hard if the city were static. But the sidewalks are subject not just to people moving up and down them but also a regular flow of traffic across them — from the street to the stores, restaurants, art galleries, frozen yogurt emporiums and other businesses that require a constant flow of things to come in and out.
On any block, at virtually any time, there will be one slow-moving obstacle — a courier with a large cart, movers transporting an armoire, construction workers crossing the sidewalk with sheets of plywood. This obstacle grabs the attention.
But the real hazard, an impossible-to-predict fast-moving one, is behind it, and will jag out just as you think you’re clear and can relax. A delivery guy going 30 mph on an eerily silent electric bicycle. A chair stuck in a tree with a puzzled crowd gathered beneath. An oily rat scurrying through the sunlight because it ran out of darker options. A pack of dogs, in the care of a walker, that erupts into a web of tensed leashes on the basis of internecine warfare. A desiccated Christmas tree disposed of in July.
To walk down any block, at any time, requires full focus, and not a small measure of athletic instinct. An ibex would raise its eyebrows and tense its core. The aim is to become a raumdeuter, or interpreter of space, able to track people and obstacles moving at different speeds, and anticipate their trajectories.
Those adept at it learn to read body language, and social cues, and how to scan just the right distance ahead. They understand that people drift in an elongated S-shape when they walk, and that the direction their heads face is where they are about to walk. They can tell who is going somewhere, and who has nowhere to go. Who is about to cry, and who is about to shout. Who is just shouting, and who will start a fight. Who stole the package they are holding, and who is furiously returning it via UPS.
When walking alone, you’ll see these expert New Yorkers examine the scene in front of them, then slow or speed up to avoid a knot of humanity, or a strange hazard, that was not there when they made the decision. One of the unspoken joys of the city is the solidarity you feel if you do this alongside someone.
When they walk in groups, they adopt two distinct formations and move fluidly, and wordlessly, between them. One, when it is quiet and they want to be sociable, can be whatever is most comfortable. But if the street gets busy, they immediately fall back into a peloton to occupy the least possible lateral space.
Visitors need only understand a few basic rules in order to take part in the dance. Do not walk in a spaced horizontal line like you’re in a search party. If you must text or consult a map, or seek a dopamine hit in the endless scroll, step aside, out of the flow of people, to do it. If you’re on any kind of stairs, move quickly. If you’re a person for whom leisurely and artfully composed selfies are important, visit the scenic Gobi Desert instead.
Until pretty recently, the golden rule overarching all of this, for everyone, was that to cease moving was a moral failure. This was possible because the city’s crosswalks — its connective tissue — were timed so that you could pretty much always cross the street either uptown or crosstown. Unless your journey happened to be directly up an avenue, or along one street, there was never a reason to do anything but zigzag endlessly onward.
Recently that changed in a way that I fear will have a profound impact on walking here, but that nobody (as far as I can tell) has noted. In fact, to confirm my suspicions required real forensic work.
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Because, at least since the pandemic, I had begun to notice a new delay at crossings. An absolutely horrible moment when the lights for both crosswalks, uptown and crosstown, were red for an extended period. As I stood, fuming, I began to realize this was not a minor change, but one that had the potential to profoundly alter the speed, and therefore the feeling, of the city.
It bothered me, so I began to research it. Crossings, it turns out, are quite complex. Philosophically they’re beautiful. Everyone allows themselves to be inconvenienced in the name of the greater good. Logistically there’s a relationship between traffic moving in different directions, a relationship between pedestrians moving in different directions, and a high-stakes interaction between the two.
If you mess up the timings you get people who are frustrated to the point of nihilism, and the potential for actual death. (The challenge cyclists face is that they defy this agreement by being pedestrians when they choose, and traffic when they choose.)
I asked the city’s Department of Transportation whether there had, in fact, been a change. They told me that in 2017, as part of a plan to reduce traffic deaths, traffic lights had been changed to give pedestrians more time. But that targeted only the timings between the lights for cars and the lights for pedestrians. They had no information on the relationship between two pedestrian crosswalks. Perhaps they just didn’t think about it. Or perhaps I was imagining things.
So I decided to go out into the street and time the lights. (For ease of reference, I’m calling the white signal WALK and the red signal DON’T WALK.) First, I timed the current double DON’T WALK duration — the length of time that, if you were standing on a corner, you’d be unable to cross in either direction. At a variety of intersections (Prince and Mercer, 11th and 26th, Bank and Greenwich) it was four seconds.
I asked the DOT again, and they said this must just be standard, and unchanged across history. And for a while, there it lay, because how could I possibly prove otherwise. Until I remembered the wonderful people who just post lengthy, hyperspecific footage of things online. Specifically, walking and driving videos from Manhattan prior to 2017 that include crosswalks.
After several days of viewing, I got what I was looking for. Footage of a crosswalk in a video labeled June 1998. I watched it with a stopwatch. At six minutes and two seconds, a crosswalk is visible, showing DON’T WALK. I couldn’t see when that light turned on, but a car is still pulling to a halt, which indicates it was a recent change.
At six minutes and four seconds, a man standing underneath that sign, waiting to cross in the other direction, lifts his foot to begin crossing, and a WALK sign is later visible. The stopwatch indicated 1.35 seconds. Even if I add a second to be conservative, it still represents a big change from the four seconds I’d recorded.
I conjured with what this might mean. Since the pandemic lockdowns, New York has already become the city that sometimes sleeps, as more things open late and close early. Would this mean that it slowed too, until it was just like every other global city, safe and sensible, and welcoming to leisurely walkers?
It was a horrible thought, and it preoccupied me as I myself walked the city, scanning and pausing, adjusting an angle here, or a cadence there, to better navigate. Eventually I reached the river.
Manhattan tries desperately to pretend it’s a drab industrial facility in the middle of a Midwestern plain. It’s really a savage island at the mouth of two rivers, on the same latitude, with the same magical light, as the French Riviera.
But where the grid ends, nature can no longer be denied. I watched bobbing logs, a dead cat — bloated, hairless and white — two soccer balls and dozens of bottle caps drift past in clumps, one piece of debris circling and eddying around another, and felt better. Change is not apocalypse. A fear is not a prediction.
Jacobs would still recognize her city more than six decades later. For one thing, there are still neighbors here who remember her. And she’d find that her ideas about how to coexist in crowded and tense places apply as well to an online life she could never have conceived of as they did to the West Village she loved.
The river changes constantly. Every molecule of water is different from what it was. But in some sense, it remains the same.
RAVI SOMAIYA is the founder of Bungalow. You can email him here.