On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Horowitz Alexandra

Author:Horowitz, Alexandra [Horowitz, Alexandra]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2013-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

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1 By contrast, there are now thousands of surveillance cameras in Manhattan set to constantly monitor the behavior of persons in their view. In some areas of downtown, there are nearly as many cameras per acre as there are residents per acre in Denver, the city nearest to where I grew up. But it is an open question whether anyone watches the video they record. While many have bemoaned the lack of privacy that cameras seem to impose, I find myself tickled that all of my walks undertaken for this project were recorded and registered in the aggregate of superintendents’, police, and store owners’ tapes.

2 Six and one half feet per second is the high end of comfortable fast walking: it is around 4.5 miles an hour, or, in New York City, ninety blocks an hour, an incredibly brisk pace. More people walk around five feet per second. This holds for the average healthy adult, though, not for the very old or very young. (On my walk with my son, we might have managed five feet per minute.) Until recently, the recommended time allotted for pedestrian travel across a street on the walk sign was based on the assumption that people can cover four feet every second. Even this conservative estimation almost certainly excludes most disabled and elderly walkers, whose pace leaves them barely halfway across the street by the time the light turns. With the latest walk-signal revision, they have been granted an extra couple of seconds.

3 Until the 1980s, the “copper” penny was around 95 percent copper and 5 percent other metals; not since the nineteenth century has the penny been fully copper. Pennies currently produced are mostly zinc, a less expensive metal, though the cost of production of one penny is, as of this writing, 2.41 pennies.

4 More than one thousand lightweight chairs now dot the block-long Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan, and nearly all of them are regularly warmed by Manhattan behinds. Kent’s PPS contributed to the park’s renovation in the early nineties; it is a wildly successful public space.

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