Around 4 a.m. on a recent Saturday, Greg Miller, a 37-year-old software engineer, left his apartment in Astoria, Queens, and headed to Borough Park, Brooklyn, for an early start on his weeklong 20-mile walk. As the sun rose in the sky, everything was largely quiet. Birds could be heard chirping. Occasionally, the beeps of a garbage truck broke the silence, as did the rumble of a subway train.
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Many New Yorkers find being a pedestrian a challenge. So much noise. So much traffic. Sidewalks can be an obstacle course. And then there’s Miller, who walks not just to get to his destination or for fresh air, but to achieve an ambitious goal: walking every street in every borough. All 7,800 miles.
“It’s almost like being a tourist over and over again,” Miller said. “But you’re not going to the tourist traps, you’re going to some really quaint streets in the middle of the district.”
Miller, a San Francisco native, made a goal to walk more during the pandemic. He initially walked the entire subway system — above ground, of course. That took him six months. At first, he walked just five miles a week. Eventually, he was able to cover 20 miles. Then he made it a point to walk long streets, including Bedford Avenue, the longest in Brooklyn.
“Then I ran out of long streets to walk on,” Miller said. He began using Google Maps, zigzagging through districts to find unusual routes on streets he had never seen before.
Since 2021, he has traveled more than 3,800 kilometers of the city’s streets. Now he travels 32 kilometers every Saturday, starting at dawn, as long as it is not raining.
Miller plans to walk in Brooklyn during the summer, after spending the spring in Staten Island and the winter in the Bronx.
“I’m trying to cover the whole city in one go, which is really fun,” said Miller, who wears a cap with a propeller on it and New Balance sneakers during his tours. “As I explore more parts, I can now just throw a dart at the map and remember what that neighborhood feels like and what I saw there.”
Sometimes Miller listens to audiobooks or podcasts, but more often he is alone with his thoughts and the landscape.
She enjoys walking around Brooklyn, which she described as “just more stimulating; there’s just more interesting architecture, more businesses to discover,” than other boroughs. Staten Island, she said, was “more hostile” toward pedestrians, with cars zooming by and paying no attention to those on foot.
On his recent walk, Miller passed police cars parked illegally on the sidewalk. He had to wade through bags of trash. Outside a window-shop, large piles of plywood and metal bars narrowed the walkable path on the sidewalk.
But that’s the bread and butter of it. Miller shares what he sees on and around the streets with like-minded walkers on Reddit.
On Miller’s recent outing, after walking through Sunset Park and admiring the unobstructed skyline and then heading to Industry City, he concluded his hike around 12:30 p.m., about 22 miles in total.
“Overall it was nice to see Brooklyn again,” he said.
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