Fair Hike [EDIT]

Did it.  Walked it.  18 miles.

Will be back to discuss once I've arranged for a new pair of legs.

*

All right, so:

I don’t know why I’ve always wanted to walk Broadway.  Something about it having once been the longest street in the world, going from the southern tip of Manhattan straight through to Albany... not that I’m going to walk to Albany in an afternoon.  But cutting through the city the way it does, it lends some of continuity to bunches of disparate neighborhoods.

And I just like a good walk.

So, here’s what I wanted to do (and I’m sure bazillions of others have done something similar, and have done it better):  Pick a nice day, start down in Battery Park and walk on up until the subway runs out (242nd Street, in the Bronx), keep to one side of the street, and take a photo on every corner.  Then you would have x number of pictures, each of a distinct city Broadway block, that you could throw together to make a single stop-motion video of the street.

So I did that, and crammed six hours of walking into about a minute.  Here:

Walk Broadway (6.3KB .wmv file) 

I realized early on that there were problems.  It was too nice a day: the sunshine provided irreconcilable contrast.  Also, one photo/block only works when the street’s a straight shot and there’s high visibility from block to block; the shorter, curved blocks downtown would require more info to carry the eye from photo to photo.

I realized that there were problems... and decided to do nothing whatsoever to solve them.  It was a lovely day and I was out for a walk, is all.  If I decided to get serious about this, I could consider this a test run.  I really didn’t worry about keeping my horizon, or the light level, or anything else consistent.  I was being so cavalier that about a half-dozen of the shots even have the camera strap in them.  Oh, and 72nd Street is missing because I took that photo from the median.  Whoops.

Most of that, surprisingly, doesn’t matter too much in the video.  Once the street gets straight, your mind does the work for me.  Though it’s a bit frantic and fast – there should probably be a Dramamine warning on the thing – it’s more or less what I figured a test run would produce.

I have no doubt that, someday, every road will be documented like this, and that Mapquest, cars with GPS, etc. will all be able to show you the route you should drive before you drive it.  If you listen very carefully, you can hear the Google folks tinkering at this while we speak.

Ideally, were you to do this properly, you’d have the camera on sticks, mark the LCD to standardize the horizon, shoot on a good overcast day.  Shoot extra pics/street.  That’d solve your video problem.  But really:  Video, you could just mount a camera on the hood of your car.  Drive it (though you can’t drive up Broadway, its first hundred or so blocks), tape it, edit out the bits where you’re waiting in traffic.

But that’s beside the point.  My concern wound up to be a total failure:  Artistically, it’s pretty awful.  Exposure aside, I wound up with a bunch of blah wide angle shots of mostly empty street corners.  Everything’s washed out in the same midday light, everything barely dotted with people and cars.  There’s very little that’s distinctive from block to block to block.

Here’s what I think would be neat:  Do a sort of Day in the Life of Broadway, starting at daybreak down on Bowling Green, stopping with a sunset in the Bronx.  Stage an event on each block; if you want to get really clever, create some sort of throughline, some sort of mystery or plot that’d tie the whole street – the whole city – together.  But the point would be that the camera were there at a point in the day – the influx of suits downtown in the ayem, theater district matinees letting out by the time you get to midtown, etc. – where something representative of each block would be taking place.  You’d need 300 different scenarios, bunches of extras, oodles of planning, and days and days and days to do it, but I think it’d be a pretty nifty thing.  Heck, if you got some $ and did some research, you could make it a big, historically-edumacative time-travel epic.  Like Russian Ark, only w/o the annoying tour guide.

Oh, well.  Blue-skying.  What I’ve got for now is just the work of my feet, a poorly-wielded digital camera, and MS Moviemaker. 

tags: broadway  

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