A Walker in the City

by Ray Levine

For most of my life, I was a walker in New York, where I have lived my whole life. Growing up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, I always walked nearly everywhere. I think that the day I had my tonsils removed was one of the only times I rode in a car. Occasionally I would take the subway to Coney Island. Much of Brownsville was still rural in those days, so if you walked far enough in any direction, you would come to a field; in the summertime you would find wildflowers and all sorts of caterpillars, hairy ones and smooth ones.

When I entered Thomas Jefferson High School, I resolved to save my nickel subway fare to buy myself a tennis racket, which cost $5. So every day I walked many, many blocks to school and back--at least four or five subway stops. What did I think about during all those long walks? I wish I could remember!

After my marriage, in 1934, my husband and I became a pair of walkers; nobody in our circle of friends owned a car. My husband and I did not own a car until the late 1950s, when we bought a 1948 Pontiac. The car had a manual shift and, of course, no power steering; with enormous effort I learned to drive, and after four tries I got my driver's license. I never drove much, though; mostly, I would move the car from one side of the street to the other, after alternate-side parking was started. I never took the car to shop.

My husband built a shopping cart for me out of wooden boxes and the frame and wheels of a baby carriage, and that's what I used for many years to haul home my groceries from our local shopping street, on Jerome Avenue, several long blocks to my building. My youngest daughter never told me until she became an adult that she always felt horribly embarrassed to walk with me when I was pushing that wagon, because she thought that every child would laugh at us behind our backs when they saw such a peculiar cart.

After my husband died, in 1961, I sold our car to a friend and never drove again. I got a job at Bronx Community College and took a bus to work when the college was near Fordham Road. At lunchtime I would walk to Alexander's, a department store. For some years I had a terrifically egotistical boss, and every lunch hour, no matter what the weather, he would send me out to buy an apple for him, so I always got some walking in at lunchtime. When the college moved to what had been New York University's Bronx campus, I had quite a long walk from the Burnside Avenue station of the #4 Woodlawn-Jerome train to the college and back again after work, and from the Woodlawn stop to my home.

By the time our senior center opened, I had retired and moved to Riverdale. For years I would walk from my apartment on 232nd Street to the senior center and back. I walked at a fast pace, too. Then, when I was about 80, an undiagnosed blood disorder caused me to have a stroke--a mild stroke, but bad enough to weaken my legs a lot, and I never walked to the center after that; I took the bus, instead. Gradually, through the years, I have walk less and less. Now, I'm happy if I can walk up and down my hallway to get a little exercise.