Try walking a mile — or 640 of them — in her shoes!
An “urban hiker” completed her mission to walk every street in Manhattan, a years-long odyssey that took hours each morning as she weaved in and out of streets from Battery Park to Inwood.
“My daily average was between 10 and 20 miles … but I did 34 miles the day I walked the perimeter of Manhattan,” said Maya Gonzales Berry, who began her quest in October 2018 and completed it early last month.
Each morning, Gonzales Berry, 56, would study a map she got from a tourist stand and set out from her apartment in the Financial District with her fitness watch, a water bottle, and snack, a mini first aid kit in case of blisters, and her iPad, which has a tracking app called LiveTrekker.
She doesn’t own a cellphone.
When she got home, she would trace the completed streets on her paper map with a black Sharpie marker.
“If I skipped a block, I’d circle it and say ‘OK, I gotta go back,’” Gonzales Berry said.
She paused the project during the pandemic but continued her regular walking to run errands, clocking a total of over 3,000 miles each year.
Gonzales Berry set back out in November to complete the project, which was inspired by a friend reminding her of the late Caleb Smith, a Columbia University employee and student who walked and photographed every street of Manhattan — and attended the same New Mexico high school as Gonzales Berry.
She couldn’t pick a favorite part of the city, she said. “I loved each and every step … I was reminded that there’s so much to see when you start looking up.”
She noticed hand-knit decorations wrapped around trees and gargoyles carved out of stone, snapping photos on a digital camera to share on social media.
On Thanksgiving, Gonzales Berry and her husband took in the scents and sounds of people frying turkeys near St. Nicholas Park in Harlem.
He accompanied her on some walks through deserted, industrial areas for protection but Gonzales Berry, who has walked through the Australian Outback alone, said she wasn’t intimidated by much.
One unpleasant encounter was a bloodied man on 125th Street in Harlem receiving aid from paramedics.
That’s not a street she would walk at night, she said.
Gonzales Berry, a former teacher, is a “trailing spouse,” moving with her husband for his job as an engineer.
Before moving here in 2016, they lived in Australia and before that Spain.
Her backpacking has prepared her for any conditions.
“There’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad gear,” said Gonzales Berry, who has worn through many pairs of shoes over the years.
She orders new ones to her parent’s home in Oregon where there is no sales tax. “My parents laugh and ask, ‘How many pairs do you need?’ and I’m like, ‘Well, I just threw away two.’”
But they understand. In 1971, when Gonzales Berry was 4 years old, her dad biked 47 days from San Francisco to Boston.
Gonzales Berry plans to celebrate the completion of her feat with a visit to the Empire State Building or One World Observatory. “I’ve been saving it so that I can go and see Manhattan from a bird’s eye view after walking it.”
She says she is not interested in walking other boroughs like Matt Green, who the documentary “The World Before Your Feet” followed, but she has other ideas in mind.
She plans to walk every bridge in Manhattan and map out a path linking each of the city’s parks to traverse.
“That would be my next big project — if we stay in New York,” she said.
