Eleanor Burke on Walking Manhattan’s Neighborhoods

Eleanor Burke, author of A Walker’s Sketchbook of San Francisco, discusses her new book Walking Manhattan’s Neighborhoods.

About Walking Manhattan’s Neighborhoods

Walking Manhattan’s Neighborhoods is a chronicle, with sketches and commentary, by local artist Eleanor Burke, who brought us Sketching San Francisco’s Neighborhoods and Walker’s Sketchbook of San Francisco.  Here is her description of the creative process behind her latest book:

“I’ve walked the streets of Manhattan (not as ambitiously as I did in SF, where I walked every step of every street…in NY I think I walked every street but not every inch of every one) with my notebook and my camera and noted what I saw.  I did it over time, but the heaviest walking was in the past year and a half.  Walking, especially in New York, has become popular – one fellow is walking all 5 boroughs, I think 5 or 8,000 miles in all, and will be at it for a while longer, but a movie has been made about him.  No one has hounded me for movie rights, but I had a great time walking and got a lot of terrific exercise.  I met lots of wonderful and generous people, never came close to getting mugged, stopped at dozens of wonderful local cafes, and explored neighborhoods I knew nothing or next to nothing about, like Inwood, Harlem, Washington Heights.  These three were particularly delightful:  Inwood, a chic neighborhood lined with parks and children playing in them, has single family homes amid the greenery.  Harlem has become trendy over the years and not is downright lovely, and yet still with its own history.  Lin-Manuel Miranda lived in Washington Heights and in Inwood, so I was drawn to those neighborhoods much as I was determined to see Hamilton, which I did three times!  Manhattan is like a gift – you start exploring and you find much more than you thought you would.”