Although most of my entries typically cover on average five miles, I usually walk more than five miles in a day, occasionally as many as twenty miles. In fact, I sat down and calculated how much time I spent actually walking the Post Road, including stops at libraries and restaurants, overnight stays at hotels and bed & breakfast inns, and occasional bird-watching detours.  In total I walked about 350 official miles on the Post Road, as well as many, many unofficial miles which I do not include in my calculations. The actual number of days I spent on the road walking from town to town and stopping to smell the roses as it were, comes to about 34 days.  Therefore I walked a little over ten miles a day officially, that is, miles I show on the map and record as miles traveled on the Post Road, and probably another five miles unofficially each day. The walking is relatively easy, the writing and the research is much harder.  I try to give an honest impression of each place I visit and then to add layers of history and culture to these subjective observations I have made in my admittedly brief encounters with the dozens of towns and cities through which I have passed on the road, and this, along with the interference of something called life, results in entries that take longer to research and write than the time it takes to do the actual walk.  The accumulation of information about the history of the road in each locale and my natural tendency to want to include everything I discover in these essays, as well as my interest in trying to say something about each town I visit, leads me to write entries that cover fewer miles than I actually cover in a day.

*****

        The word traveler derives from the Old French ‘travailler’ which meant to labor, or toil, a reflection perhaps of the difficulty of travel in Medieval Europe.  Sarah Knight continually refers to her journey as a ‘travail,’ perhaps indicating that even in the early eighteenth century the word still had the connotation of a ‘difficult passage.’  Ironically, it is the many hours I spend reading the tiny print of old histories or typing on my computer, which frequently leaves me with bloodshot eyes and a sore back, that is the ‘travail,’ while walking along the road is actually much more calming and simultaneously exciting and enervating.  Perhaps this is what Thoreau was trying to describe when he speaks of those “who had a genius for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived ‘from the idle people who roved about the country in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre,’  to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, ‘there goes a Saint-Terrer,’ a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander.” (1)

        Thoreau goes on to say that perhaps the word may actually derive from the French sans terre, “without land or home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere.  For this is the secret of successful sauntering.”  I have previously quoted extensively from this passage in Thoreau to allow the eminent philosopher from Concord try to explain more eloquently than I can what I am trying to do on this walk of mine.  Although it is ‘work’ I do not try to make it onerous and it is quite the opposite; I actually enjoy the walking, even through the seemingly endless sea of shopping malls, the ubiquitous highway underpasses, and the ceaseless traffic, because the nice parts more than make up for the uncomfortable and irritating sections.  I also enjoy the walk because there is something about traveling at a leisurely pace on foot that opens my mind up to both the external world and allows me to think more clearly about the connections between the seemingly disparate threads of thought that ceaselessly course through my mind.  This project is about the road first and foremost, but it is also a quixotic search for some insight into the metaphysical connections between the act of walking and the quest for enlightenment that has frequently been linked with walking through the course of history throughout the world.  From the ‘Saint-Terrers’ on the way to Santiago, to the Parivrajakas of India, wandering from place to place in quest of the truth, to the Aboriginal Walkabouts of Australia, to the pilgrims who circle Mount Kailas in Tibet to accrue merit, to Jack Kerouac’s Ray Smith climbing Matterhorn Peak in The Dharma Bums, to American Indian ‘vision quests,’ the history of mankind is filled with ceremonial walks designed to cleanse or purify the spirit or soul, to make the walker a better or more enlightened person, to cure the walker of his ailments.  The success of mankind in establishing a foothold at the pinnacle of the ecological chain in every continent is due, in no small part, to the fact that our earliest forbears literally walked out of Africa, ultimately to every continent and every corner of the globe.  Walking is a part of our biological makeup.  We are hard-wired to walk.  It is good for us, even if we don’t know why.

*****

        The Post Road is a thread like the threads of thought to which I referred above, and like any thread, its connection to other threads is what allows it to become part of a tapestry.  Thirty years ago I read a book called Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture by the historian Carl Schorske, which tried to relate the various histories of politics and culture of a specific time and place, Vienna around 1900, weaving the disparate and seemingly unrelated threads into a tapestry that resembled the specific locale at a precise moment in time.  I enjoyed the book immensely, but what has always stuck in my mind is a passage in which he tries to explain his goal in writing the book, which I quote at length:

“The historian seeks rather to locate and interpret the artifact temporally in a field where two lines intersect.  One line is vertical, or diachronic, by which he establishes the relation of a text or a system of thought to previous expressions in the same branch of cultural activity (painting, politics, etc.). The other is horizontal, or synchronic; by it he assesses the relation of the content of the intellectual object to what is appearing in other branches or aspects of the culture at the same time.  The diachronic thread is the warp, the synchronic one is the woof in the fabric of cultural history.  The historian is the weaver, but the quality of his cloth depends on the strength and color of his thread...he should spin yarn serviceable enough for the kind of bold-patterned fabric he is called upon to produce.” (2)

        It has been my goal to take a single thread, in this case the 350 miles of the Post Road (itself made up of a few disparate threads that I have combined for my purpose), and to follow it both in time and space, commenting upon the contemporary scene through my own eyes, while exploring the changes to the thread over time along its entire length. I have also tried to connect the threads of the stories along the road with the physical road itself, by walking it and feeling the contours and trying to compare my own observations to those of travelers in whose footsteps I follow.  Thus my goal has been to create a tapestry that covers the long history of the road itself and connects the places along the road, as well as leaving a snapshot of the road as I perceive it as I saunter along the entire length of this 350 thread.  Into this tapestry I have also attempted to introduce a few fibers of a more metaphysical nature, weaving in the philosophical, physical, and biological threads that connect walking to pilgrimage and spiritual enlightenment.  I am not sure whether I have succeeded in achieving anything resembling a tapestry; perhaps all I have left here is a multicolored knot of hopelessly tangled threads.  Maybe this is why I rely on Thoreau for my rationalization; he at least can say in one or two sentences what I have had difficulty conveying in almost 400 pages of single-spaced 10-point Helvetica font.

*****

        No wonder it takes me so long to write these entries. I have written two pages of text and I have yet to walk a single step along the road in this entry.  Back to the road then, where we last left our hero in the Post Road Ale House in New Rochelle, New York some 324 miles along the road from its origin at the intersection of State Street and Washington Street in downtown Boston, and a mere 24 miles from the terminus of the Boston to New York road at the Bowling Green at the foot of Broadway in Lower Manhattan.

*****

       

        New Rochelle is mentioned by virtually every almanac and most travelers, as it was one of the few settlements with any population from Rye to New York City.  Most almanacs list a tavern in Rye, occasionally mention Mamaroneck, always mention New Rochelle, and from there mention only East Chester and Kingsbridge before New York.  No mention of Pelham, Mount Vernon, or the Bronx.  Clearly there is some research to be done here to sort out why a place that essentially does not exist is mentioned but not the three major areas between New Rochelle and Manhattan.

        As I mentioned in the previous entry, New Rochelle was a settlement of French Huguenot refugees on territory sold “for the French church erected, or to be erected by the said inhabitants of the land” by John Pell, proprietor of the Pell estate, which was composed of a large section of the land in the aforementioned areas leading to Manhattan, the remaining unsold part of which today is the town of Pelham. (3)  Sarah Knight is the earliest of the travelers I have been following who mentions New Rochelle,  and her review is curiously the most positive. Happily leaving Mr. Strang’s tavern in Rye after a miserable night she arrived in New Rochelle at about seven o’clock on a cold December morning, “where we had a Good breakfast. And in the strength of that about an how’r before sunsett we got to York.” (4)   On her return she again stops in New Rochelle, where she arrived after another “sick and weary night,” this time in the village of East Chester, “where being come we had good entertainment and recruited ourselves very well.” (5)   Her description of New Rochelle may be the single most positive review of any of the many towns and establishments which felt the sting of her quill. She refers to the town as “ a very pretty place well compact, and good handsome houses, Clean, good, and passable Rodes, and situated on a navigable river, abundance of land well fined and Cleered all along as wee passed, which caused in mee a love to the place, wch I could have been content to live in it...Here are three fine Taverns within call of each other, very good provisions for Travailers.”  Hamilton only mentions stopping at a tavern in New Rochelle, owned by “one Le Compte, a Frenchman, who has a daughter that is a sprightly, sensible girl.” (6)

        The Frenchman Brissot de Warville spends a lot of time discussing one of New Rochelle’s native sons, John Jay, but says remarkably little about the town itself, only that it was “ a colony founded the last century by some French emigrants, which appears not to have prospered.” (7)   He does offer some mitigating comments to his critique, allowing that “ perhaps this appearance results from the last war; for this place suffered much from the neighborhood of the English, whose head-quarters were at New York.”  The Reverend Manasseh Cutler, making his way through the area in 1786, found that in Mamaroneck and New Rochelle “ the houses in both places are scattered, the land rocky, and the roads bad, but the soil is rich.  The road is, however, much better than before we passed Byram River,” an obvious dig at the execrable roads of Connecticut. (8)

        James Birkett, in his diary of 1750, skips over the area from Mamaroneck to Kingsbridge entirely, mentioning only that he traveled twelve miles, while George Washington, who was in a hurry to get back to his home, “left Mrs Haviland’s as soon as we could see the road...and between two and three o’clock arrived at my house at New York, where I found Mrs. Washington and the rest of the family all well.” (9)   He mentions the towns on the way out all in one sentence, preferring to discuss the general aspect of the land in the area that now makes up the Bronx and southern Westchester County, which he found, as Sarah Knight did, “strong, well covered with grass and a luxuriant crop of Indian Corn intermixed with Pompions [pumpkins] (which were yet ungathered) in the fields.  We met four droves of Beef Cattle for the New York market, some of which were very fine-also a flock of sheep in the same place.  We scarcely passed a farm that did not abound in Geese.” (10)   Of the houses he passed on the road from Kingsbridge to Rye, he says “No dwelling house is seen without a stone or brick chimney, and rarely without a shingled roof-generally the sides are of shingles also.”   It seems that the consensus opinion of the area is that it was good for farming and that the towns were lousy and of little consequence. Ouch.

*****

       

        There are certainly no farms along the last three or four miles of Westchester County before I officially enter the City of New York.  The first stretch of Huguenot Street from my hotel room in New Rochelle is disappointing to say the least.  The road curves gently up a hill and has clearly suffered from the ravages of redevelopment.  I don’t know what was there before this canyon of uniformly ugly modern condominiums with “cool” names like “The Lofts at New Roc,” but this stretch of the road is just plain old dull.  At the top of the hill, the road levels out, and in the center of town I pass the nineteenth-century St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, located at roughly the spot the French Protestant Church was erected as stipulated in the sale of the land by John Pell.  There is a small cemetery in the churchyard but I find no evidence of a milestone here.

        The next section of Huguenot Street has many substantial old buildings but here they are mostly falling apart and little used.  I now begin to see why they started building all the Trump style buildings on the other side of downtown, although I still maintain that redevelopment could also be accomplished by renovating these old buildings and reestablishing a community in the center of town with shops and restaurants instead of the sterile windswept canyon that passes for a residential neighborhood on the east side of town.  After a few minutes Main Street and Huguenot Street merge and become Boston Post Road. Here the street has a distinctly Hispanic vibe, and there is much activity, unlike almost the entire length of Huguenot Street. As the road leaves the center of town the usual transition to malls occurs, and soon I reach a Home Depot near the junction with Interstate 95.

        Luckily for me the old road branches away from US 1 ONCE AND FOR ALL (!!) here as King’s Highway, where it crosses under the railroad tracks and under Interstate 95 before emerging on the other side in a residential neighborhood.  It is at this point that the old Westchester Turnpike, also known as Boston Road (US 1) was built in a more direct path through the Bronx where it crossed into Manhattan over the Harlem Bridge in 1794.  Boston Road in the Bronx was laid out in 1795 and the Westchester Turnpike was built as a continuation of that road in the following decade. This is the altered route that resulted in all the milestones I have described that do not match the distances provided by Colles in his 1789 map, which preceded the building of the new road by only a couple of years.The timing of Colles’s work was very fortunate for me as it is the last record of the old road before it was altered forever as New York was on the cusp of emerging as the dominant metropolis it is today.  Colles’s map shows the old road as it crosses the Bronx from east to west not as the newer road does from north to south.

        I cross under Interstate 95 for the penultimate time a few yards along King’s Highway; the next time I meet the contemporary main north-south thoroughfare on the east coast will be near the George Washington Bridge in Manhattan.  I also cross under the main railroad line from Boston to New York, also for the penultimate time; the next and last time will be when I cross the Bronx River in the center of the Bronx.  Incidentally, there is a marker on the railroad bridge that says “M.P.18.75 King’s Highway” which I interpret as 18.75 mile post at King’s Highway, indicating the railroad distance to Grand Central Station in midtown Manhattan.

        On the other side of the transportation corridor I pass a large cemetery before I encounter another of the curious welcoming signs (I showed this one in the previous entry).  In Pelham the road changes name again, this time to Colonial Avenue.  It seems as though every road that branches off of Colonial Avenue is a “Private Road,” and the town is certainly wealthy (per capita income $52,000), because the sidewalk disappears as it frequently does when I visit these types of towns, almost as if the town is saying “walkers unwelcome.”  The sidewalk does reappear after a few minutes, and the houses along this stretch of road are quite nice to look at.  The road in Pelham is only about 0.8 miles long as it crosses completely across the town, which is the smallest in Westchester County at 2.2 square miles.  About 12,000 people live in this small area, divided between two villages, Pelham to the north of Colonial Avenue and Pelham Manor, to the south of Colonial Avenue. Apparently they share the school system but I realize that they do not share the same police when I see a curious site ahead on Colonial Avenue.  A car had been pulled over on Colonial Avenue for a traffic violation of some sort. Behind the car were two police cars, a white one and a black one.  One car had Pelham Police Department stenciled on the door, while the other belonged to the  Pelham Manor Police Department.  It struck me that this was the height of absurdity to have two cars giving the guy in the Honda what appeared to be a speeding ticket and furthermore, that the village police are so determined to maintain a separate identity that they have completely opposite colored cars.  A librarian in Larchmont had bemoaned the overlapping and seemingly pointless duplication of bureaucracy that plagued the town of Mamaroneck, but here in the flesh was a clear example of taxpayer’s dollars being wasted owing to what appears to me a wasteful duplication of public services.

        A little further on is a plaque on a boulder in the field of Pelham High School commemorating the Boston Post Road, noting that it was once an Indian trail and indicating that the British regiments encamped here during the Battle of Pelham in October 1776.  I cross the street and pass under the Hutchinson River Parkway, named for the sad little river that runs alongside the road, in turn named for Anne Hutchinson whom we have encountered in Boston and in Rhode Island previously.  Just south of here was Hutchinson’s final resting place as she was killed by Indians shortly after her arrival in 1643.  The Hutchinson River was once navigable as far as this point but today it looks like you could not navigate it if you were in a tiny kayak. (11)

        Pelham turns out to be the last of the wealthy suburban enclaves I will visit on this project.  The next town across the Hutchinson River is Mount Vernon, whose quaint echo of George Washington’s estate belies the fact that it has a somewhat poor reputation among the inhabitants of neighboring towns. One individual in Mamaroneck told me he didn’t like “kids with attitude--You know all ‘gangsta,’ --like the punks over in Mount Vernon.”  I guess I was expecting him to say the Bronx but no, he specifically singled out the youth of Mount Vernon, which does border the Bronx, as the town with all the ‘gangsta punks.’  He must have a specific beef with the town because the only thing I can figure is that the town has a higher proportion of blacks than any other town in Westchester, but surely the kids in Brooklyn or the Bronx are more ‘gangsta,’ and at the very least, there are a lot more of them in New York City.

     

      On Colles’s map, the Hutchinson River is the site of the mile 21 marker, while at mile 20 is the mysterious town of East Chester, with a church and a few houses, including another Guion’s residence. On the original route the road took a sharp turn north before turning south again. The road must have been substantially altered because I can find no road that might correspond to the shape of the old road. However, I do know that in a few yards the road will head south, following Columbus Avenue.  The mile along this route is pretty dispiriting.  Colonial Avenue becomes Sandford Boulevard in Mount Vernon, and at first there is a nice old high school football stadium, but immediately beyond is a Target, followed by a Best Buy and so on.  I climb a short hill away from the river, turn left on Colonial Place which turns into Columbus Avenue, which I follow past an ugly succession of sheet metal factories and auto-parts shop.  After twenty minutes in Mount Vernon I reach one of the most pleasantly surprising sites along the entire road, mainly perhaps because of the stark contrast between its beauty and the surrounding blighted industrial landscape.  Ahead of me rises the brown stone steeple of St. Paul’s Church, an eighteenth-century church surrounded by a lovely green space and an old cemetery.  The site is run by the National Park Service, and once again I am treated to a tour-de-force show of knowledgeable enthusiasm by the ranger on duty, Mike Callahan.

        This church is the one shown on Colles’s map at mile 20 in East Chester. The original settlement of East Chester was in the location here around St. Paul’s Church, which was first built in the 1690s construction of a new building started in 1763 and was finished after the war by 1787.  Eastchester still exists as a town in Westchester County but it is located north of Mount Vernon and Pelham, and this territory once was a part of that town until becoming a town in its own right in 1851. The village slowly declined as the area became more industrialized and settlement moved further north until there were virtually no parishioners left here, and the church was in serious jeopardy of being destroyed. The restoration of the church was undertaken by a committee of concerned citizens chaired by Franklin Roosevelt’s mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt.  After the restoration of the church and grounds the church was declared a National Historic Site, but ultimately the parishioners dwindled to a handful, and  in 1980 the National Park Service assumed control of the the property.

        I spend an hour and a half at the site, where I learn that this site is not merely important as an old church that has managed to survive the predations of modern industrial development.  I learn from Ranger Callahan that it was on the Green in front of this church that an important provincial assembly election took place which resulted in the affirmation of one of the bedrock principles of American liberty, freedom of the press.  The story is somewhat complicated so I will direct you to a Wikipedia Page that discusses it in more detail, but briefly I will say that the election pitted two factions against each other who proceeded to utilize defamatory newspaper articles to attack each other. One party in the dispute decided to sue the publisher of some of these articles, Peter Zenger, for libel. In a landmark court case that challenged the laws of sedition, the Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton managed to exonerate Zenger by convincing the jury that a publisher cannot be convicted of libel for publishing an article that is defamatory if it is true.

        A new church building was begun in 1763, but was not completed by the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, and the unfinished new church building and grounds served during the War as a hospital, supply depot, and barracks.  Located in the “neutral ground” it was controlled by neither side for long periods and, as many of the parishioners fled the area during the war, the building was not finished until after the war ended.  The church is lovely, composed of stone and brick and has an appearance very different from that of Colonial New England churches, and I spend a little while wandering the grounds and inside the church itself. But finally I pull myself away and dive back into the industrial wasteland surrounding it.

        I walk to the end of the street and turn left past a Salvation Army Thrift Store and follow South 3rd Avenue for a block past more buildings housing places such as Bridge Metal Industries and Precision Auto-Body.  When I reach East Kingsbridge Road I turn right and head sharply uphill.  It was here on the corner that the Guion house shown on Colles’s  map was once located. Manasseh Cutler in 1787 describes his visit to the area: “came to East Chester, and made our stage at Guion’s tavern, eleven miles from Mrs. Haviland’s  Here is a stone church, greatly injured by the British troops.  The windows, remarkable for their size, were taken out and destroyed, and have not since been repaired...Guion’s is a tolerable tavern. Bill, 1s.” (12)   Today it is a place to be passed through with haste.

         Fortunately Kingsbridge Road is a residential neighborhood. I am surprised by how many well-known people were born and raised in Mount Vernon: the list includes Dick Clark, Art Carney, E.B. White, Sean Combs (Diddy, P.Diddy, Puffy, Puff Daddy, Sean John, or whatever monicker he utilizes these days), the famous baseball players Ralph Branca and Ken Singleton (who grew up in the house previously owned by the Brancas!), the well-known basketball players Ben Gordon and the Williams brothers, Gus and Ray, and Denzel Washington. 

        The preponderance of well known African-American celebrities and athletes is perhaps unsurprising in light of the fact that the city is over 60% black, a transformation that occurred as many middle-class black families left New York City for the suburbs in much the same way that Italians, Jews, Irish, and others left the city when they acquired some money and wanted more space, better schools, and a house of their own. Over time the city became essentially split into a white area north of the railroad tracks of the New Haven Line and a black area south of the railroad tracks.  Unfortunately, many of the urban problems familiar to residents of New York City have appeared in Mount Vernon.  Sadly the homicide rate in Mount Vernon is actually higher (14.6 per 100,000) than it is in the infamous Bronx (11.0 per 100,000).

         Kingsbridge Road runs through the Southside, very close to the border with Bronx. The neighborhood is composed of modest homes that are well-cared for.  They are no different than the type of housing I might find in parts of Dorchester or even Jamaica Plain, where I live.  And, like those neighborhoods, it seems hard to believe how many kids are killed in what seem to be otherwise typical working-class neighborhoods. But the data do not lie and the problem is very real. I, however, am perfectly comfortable wandering around.  As I approach the border with the Bronx, I realize that if the neighborhoods there are like this one, all the irrational fears I have harbored almost since I began this project about the potential trouble in the big bad Bronx will turn out to be absurdly off the mark.

        Suddenly, without even realizing it, I enter New York City.  There is no sign welcoming me, no sudden transition to a gritty urban environment, no appearance of crazy gangs of toughs lying in waiting to prey upon middle-aged white men walking along the Post Road.  No, it seems just like the neighborhood I was in a minute ago; except for the change in the shape and color of the street signs, I would be hard pressed to tell you whether I had indeed not just remained in Mount Vernon. Kingsbridge Avenue becomes Bussing Avenue in the Bronx and is rather unorthodox for a city street in that it follows the contours of the landscape, arcing north then south and twisting here and there, unlike the surrounding streets which are part of a uniform grid.  A sure indication that this is the Post Road.  On Colles’s map the border between Mount Vernon and the Bronx is at roughly mile 19.  Nineteen miles left to walk and all of it is in New York City. After 328.2 miles of walking on Post Road I have finally reached the Big Apple.  I am about to find out just how big it is as I saunter along one of the countless threads that make up the fabric of the most important city on the planet. This might take a while: not the walk, thinking about New York, researching and writing it up. But first, the walk and later the ‘Travail.’