The Boulder at Paidge Ave.

Shortly after the election of Barack Obama in November of 2008, I spent two months back in my hometown of St. Cloud Minnesota after four years in Los Angeles. One day in December, I received a group email from a photographer acquaintance in New York City. He was looking for someone to sublet his apartment for the month in January as his family took a vacation. The primary responsibility was to look after their cat Max.​

At the onset of the great recession, and with no other plans on the horizon, I packed my bags and took the Amtrak for New York City, not knowing if it would be a month vacation or a permanent relocation.

Epilogue

A decade passed before I became interested in the significance of the boulder photograph. Fixated on the image, I researched and discovered it marked the entrance to the Newtown Creek Nature Walk, a place I had unknowingly bypassed when taking the photo. Despite countless miles walked in the surrounding neighborhoods, I had missed this intriguing green space in the city. ​

Only after reflection and studying the photograph alongside maps did I realize it symbolically represented the start of a pursuit to explore the parks, trails and pedestrian networks of New York City. Years later, on May 31, 2020, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, I found myself on the abandoned Montauk Cutoff, an anomaly in the city's landscape. While there, I turned south toward Greenpoint, in the direction of that boulder. I feel I was connecting these locations, closing a twelve-year loop in my odyssey exploring the pedestrian infrastructure of New York City.