Wanderlust: A History of Walking (46 page)

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“What distinguishes the city”: Moretti, quoted in Peter Jukes,
A Shout in the Street: An Excursion into the Modern City
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 184.

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little more than outdoor salons and ballrooms:
Cities and People
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 166–68, 237–38.

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“Earlier in the [nineteenth] century,” “I hear that pedestrians”: Ray Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar,
The Park and the People: A History of Central Park
(Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1992), 27, 223.

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“It simply never occurs to us”: Bernard Rudofsky,
Streets for People: A Primer for Americans
(New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982), epigraph quoting his own
Architecture without Architects.

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“In ancient Italian towns the narrow main street”: Edwin Denby,
Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets,
introduction by Frank O'Hara (New York: Horizon Press, 1965), 183.

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“When I am in a serious Humour”: Addison in Joseph Addison and Richard Steele,
The Spectator, Vol. 1
(London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1907), 96, from
Spectator,
no. 26 (March 30, 1711).

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“Though you through cleaner allies”: John Gay, “Trivia; or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London,” book 3, line 126, in
The Abbey Classics: Poems by John Gay
(London: Chapman and Dodd, n.d.), 88.

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“Here I remark”: Ibid., ll. 275–82, 78.

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“goes forward with the crowd”: Wordsworth,
Prelude,
286.

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“each charter'd street”: The famous opening of William Blake's “London,” in
William Blake,
ed. J. Bronowski (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1958), 52.

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one of those desperate London walkers: See Richard Holmes,
Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage
(New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 44, quoting Sir John Hawkins in the chapter on these walks: “Johnson has told me, that whole nights have been spent by him and Savage in conversations of this kind, not under the hospitable roof of a tavern, where warmth might have invigorated their spirits, and wine dispelled their care; but in a perambulation round the squares of Westminster, St. James's in particular, when all the money they could both raise was less than sufficient to purchase for them the shelter and sordid comforts of a night cellar.”

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“I should have been”: James Boswell,
Boswell's London Journal,
ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York: Signet, 1956), 235.

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50,000 [prostitutes in London] in 1793: Henry Mayhew,
London Labour and the London Poor,
vol. 4 (1861–62; reprint, New York: Dover Books, 1968), 211, citing Mr. Colquhoun, a police magistrate, and his “tedious investigations.”

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“the circulating harlotry of the Haymarket and Regent Street”: Ibid., 213. On 217, “They [the streetwalkers] are to be seen between three and five o'clock in the Burlington Arcade, which is a well known resort of cyprians of the better sort. They are well acquainted with its Paphian intricacies, and will, if their signals are responded to, glide into a friendly bonnet shop, the stairs of which leading to the co-enacula or upper chambers are not innocent of their well formed ‘bien chaussee' feet. The park is also, as we have said, a favorite promenade, where assignations may be made or acquaintances formed.”

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“Prostitution streetscapes are composed of
strolls
”
:
Richard Symanski
, The Immoral Landscape: Female Prostitution in Western Societies
(Toronto: Butterworths, 1981), 175–76.

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“think that women who work in whorehouses”: Dolores French with Linda Lee,
Working: My Life as a Prostitute
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1988), 43.

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“Perception of the new qualities of the modern city”: Raymond Williams,
The Country and the City
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 233.

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“Being myself at that time, of necessity, a peripatetic” and following: De Quincey,
Confessions of an English Opium Eater
(New York: Signet Books, 1966), 42–43.

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“And this kind of realism,” “Few of us understand the street”: G. K. Chesterton,
Charles Dickens, a Critical Study
(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1906), 47, 44.

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“If I couldn't walk fast and far”: Dickens to John Forster, cited in Ned Lukacher,
Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 288.

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“I am both a town traveller”: Charles Dickens,
The Uncommercial Traveller and Reprinted Pieces Etc.
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 1.

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“So much of my travelling is done on foot,” “My walking is of two kinds”: Dickens, “Shy Neighborhoods,” ibid., 94, 95.

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“It is one of my fancies”: Dickens, “On an Amateur Beat,” ibid., 345.

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“Whenever I think I deserve particularly well of myself”: Dickens, “The City of the Absent,” ibid., 233.

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“Some years ago, a temporary inability to sleep”: Dickens, “Night Walks,” ibid., 127.

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“I would roam the streets”: Patti Smith, when asked what she did to prepare to go onstage,
Fresh Air,
National Public Radio, Oct. 3, 1997.

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“How could I think mountains and climbing romantic?”:
The Letters of Virginia Woolf,
vol. 3,
A Change of Perspective,
ed. Nigel Nicholson (London: Hogarth Press, 1975–80), letter to V. Sackville-West, Aug. 19, 1924, 126.

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“enforce the memories of our own experience”: Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” in
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays
(Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1961), 23.

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“As we step out of the house,” “the shell-like covering”: Ibid., 23–24.

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Two-thirds of all journeys . . . still made on foot: Tony Hiss, editorial,
New York Times,
January 30, 1998.

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“On the whole North America's Anglo-Saxomania has had a withering effect”: Rudofsky,
Streets for People,
19.

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“Who often walk'd lonesome walks”: Walt Whitman, “Recorders Ages Hence,”
Leaves of Grass
(New York: Bantam Books, 1983), 99.

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“City of orgies, walks and joys”: Ibid., 102.

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“Passing stranger!”: Ibid., 103.

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“the fruited plain”: Ken Gonzales-Day, “The Fruited Plain: A History of Queer Space,”
Art Issues,
September/October 1997, 17.

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“dragging themselves through the negro streets,” “shoes full of blood”: Allen Ginsberg, “Howl,” in
The New American Poetry,
ed. Donald M. Allen (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 182, 186.

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“Strange now to think of you, gone”: Allen Ginsberg,
Kaddish and Other Poems, 1958–1960
(San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1961), 7.

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“where you walked 50 years ago”: Ibid., 8.

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“It was the most extraordinary thing”: Brad Gooch,
City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 217.

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“I can't even enjoy a blade of grass”: Frank O'Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency,” in
The Selected Poems
(New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 87.

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“I'm becoming”: O'Hara, “Walking to Work,” ibid., 57.

ref “I'm getting tired of not wearing”: O'Hara, “F. (Missive and Walk) I. #53,” ibid., 194.

192–94 “Some nights we'd walk seven or eight hundred blocks”: David Wojnarowicz,
Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration
(New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 5; “long legs
and spiky boots,” 182; “I had almost died three times,” 228; “I'm walking through these hallways,” 64; “I walked for hours,” 67; “man on second avenue,” 70; “I walk this hallway twenty-seven times,” 79.

 

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“Now a landscape, now a room”: Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in
Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings
(New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 156.

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“Not to find one's way in a city,” “it had to be in Paris”: Walter Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle,” in
Reflections,
8, 9.

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holding an alpenstock before some painted Alps: On mountains, alpenstocks and Benjamin, see his letters of September 13, 1913; July 6–7, 1914; November 8, 1918; and July 20, 1921; and Monme Brodersen,
Walter Benjamin: A Biography
(London: Verso, 1996): “finally a crudely daubed backdrop of the Alps was brought for me. I stand there, bareheaded, with a tortuous smile on my lips, my right hand clasping a walking stick” (12), and “Another taken-for-granted feature of the boy's day-to-day life were the frequent lengthy journeys with the whole family: to the North Sea and the Baltic, to the high peaks of the Risengebirge between Bohemia and Silesia, to Freudenstadt in the Black Forest, and to Switzerland” (13).

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“I don't think I ever saw him walk”: Gershom Sholem, cited in Frederic V. Grunfeld,
Prophets without Honor: A Background to Freud, Kafka, Einstein and Their World
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1979), 233.

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“old Scandinavian”: Priscilla Park Ferguson, “The Flâneur: Urbanization and Its Discontents,” in
From Exile to Vagrancy: Home and Its Dislocations in 19th Century France,
ed. Suzanne Nash (Albany: State University of New York, 1993), 60, n. 1. See also her
Paris as Revolution
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

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“Irish word for ‘libertine' ”: Elizabeth Wilson, “The Invisible Flâneur,”
New Left Review
191 (1992): 93–94.

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“The crowd is his domain”: Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,”
Selected Writings on Art and Artists
(Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1972), 399.

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“goes botanizing on the asphalt”: Walter Benjamin,
Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism,
trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1973), 36.

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“Arcades,” “The flâneurs liked to have the turtles”: Ibid., 53–54.

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he did not exist: On the nonexistence of the flâneur, see Rob Shields, who, in “Fancy Footwork: Walter Benjamin's Notes on the Flâneur,” in
The Flâneur,
ed. Keith Tester (London: Routledge, 1994), remarks, “In truth, it must be acknowledged that nineteenth-century visitors and travelogues do not appear to reference flânerie other than as an urban myth. The principal habitat of the flâneur is the novels of Honore de Balzac, Eugene Sue, and Alexandre Dumas.”

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Gerard de Nerval famously took a lobster on walks: Richard Holmes,
Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer
(New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 213.

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“Narrow crevices”: Victor Hugo,
Les Misérables,
trans. Charles E. Wilbour (New York: Modern Library, 1992), bk. 12,
Corinth,
chap. 1, 939–40. See also Girouard,
Cities and People,
200–201: “All visitors commented on these streets, which had no sidewalks, so that pedestrians were constantly in danger of being run down or spattered with mud by fast-moving traffic. ‘Walking,' wrote Arthur Young in 1787, ‘which in London is so pleasant and so clean, that ladies do it every day, is here a toil and a fatigue to a man, and an impossibility to a well-dress woman.' ‘The renowned Tournefort,' according to the Russian traveller Karamzin writing in 1790, ‘who had travelled almost the entire world, was crushed to death by a fiacre on his return to Paris because on his travels he had forgotten how to leap in the streets, like a chamois.' In this ambience, browsing in shop windows was not likely to flourish.”

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“which I reached without any other adventure” and following: Frances Trollope,
Paris and the Parisians in 1835
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1836), 370.

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“In Paris there are places where people take walks”: Muhammed Saffar,
Disorienting Encounters: Travels of a Moroccan Scholar in France, 1845–46,
trans. and ed. Susan Gilson Miller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 136–37.

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“long walks and constant affection!”: Baudelaire to his mother, May 6, 1861, in Claude Pichois,
Baudelaire
(New York: Viking, 1989), 21.

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“Whenever I had stopped”: Nicholas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne,
Les Nuits de Paris or the Nocturnal Spectator (A Selection),
trans. Linda Asher and Ellen Fertig, introduction by Jacques Barzun (New York: Random House, 1964), 176.

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“virgin forest”: Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering,”
New German Critique
39 (1986): 119: “The popular literature of flanerie may have referred to Paris as a ‘virgin forest' (V, 551), but no woman found roaming there alone was expected to be one.”

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“What are the dangers”: Benjamin,
Baudelaire,
39.

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“Mohicans in spencer jackets”: Ibid., 42.

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“on the Paris pavement”: George Sand,
My Life,
trans. Dan Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon, 1979), 203–4.

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“Multitude, solitude”: Baudelaire, “Crowds,” in
Paris Spleen,
trans. Louis Varese (New York: New Directions, 1947), 20.