How’s
this for irony? The day my book comes out—a book celebrating the
streets of New York—I am run down in the streets of New York. Crossing
the street around noon last Thursday, I was struck and knocked over by
a minivan. The worst appears to have been averted: The X-rays in the
emergency room didn’t show any breaks. But I won’t take up space
discussing my injuries and aches, since I’m here to write about the
aforementioned book: Walking Brooklyn.

Because of the accident, it was Saturday before I went out and finally
got to see it in a bookstore. Unfortunately, it wasn’t in Brooklyn, as
the first bookstore I passed that day was the Borders at Penn
Station—where I was thrilled to see not only that Walking Brooklyn
is centrally displayed on a wall of NYC travel books and that it’s a
display you can see through the window when you’re outside the store.
This is my first book, so that was indeed a thrill! So there’s Walking Brooklyn
on the shelves—twenty months after I received an email from an editor
at Berkeley, Calif.-based Wilderness Press, who’d gotten my name from a
mutual friend after he heard Wilderness was looking for an author for
the next destination in their urban walking tour series, Brooklyn.

The
email said they were looking for a writer who is “an active walker and
urban explorer, who’s curious and appreciative of the urban
environment…” Sounds like a personal ad I might have written! After
submitting proposals for the book, I was hired and my journey to get to
know Brooklyn better than ever commenced. By then, it was early 2006.
That winter I did book research, and in April began the legwork.

Now,
just over a year later, the result is in the stores. Thirty walking
tours, each created by me. In all, over forty neighborhoods are
represented. It’s the only guidebook I know of that covers such places
as Bushwick and Cypress Hills and Mill Island—places that guidebooks
would call “off the beaten path”—in such depth. All the old favorites
are there too, like Brooklyn Heights, Prospect Park, Fort Greene and,
of course, the Slope. There are walks across bridges, along the bay and
ocean, into cemeteries, and through streets lined with posh residences
of the late 1800s and the early 2000s. It’s a book I hope Brooklynites
and other New Yorkers will enjoy as much as tourists.

To be continued….