11 February 2005
12:57 pm to 1:57 pm
Heads: 51
Tails: 57
Total intersections: 35
Ending point: Corner of Wall Street and Front Street
Latitude/longitude: 40:42:17.37N/74:00:24.81W
Distance from home: 0.3567 miles
Literature received: None
Coin: 1967 quarter

Going in circles in the financial district again, I passed by a woman with a Jamaican accent, saying “Everybody babblin’, babblin’, babblin’.”

My nose was running in the winter cold, so I ducked into a McDonald’s on Broadway to grab some napkins. This was the famed Wall Street McDonald’s: lots of marble, plus a man playing a grand piano in the entryway.

I whipsawed between grimy back alleys and polished corporate offices, sometimes just by going around the corner and seeing different sides of the same building.

Exactly thirty minutes into my walk, I passed by a post office and popped in to mail a bill. There was a FedEx box in the entryway, which I found slightly mind-boggling: isn’t that the competition?

I wandered around the Chase Manhattan Plaza for a while, looping in a narrow holding pattern, enjoying being in the shadow of the big Dubuffet sculpture. I overheard a snippet of conversation–“He was sitting on the back of the boat, watching the sunset….”–and had to keep walking without ever learning the conclusion.

I drifted further southeast, and watched catering workers pushing big deli trays through the streets on trolleys. A guy with a Snapple in one hand and a bag of diapers in the other was looking through the window of a newsstand, peering at the covers of Men’s Fitness and Yoga.