Thirty blocks | The New Republic

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Jay Wickersham/

June 19, 2025

Thirty blocks

As the train slid north from the city, somewhere between the tunnel and the Hell Gate bridge, I fell asleep. I’d stayed up late the night before. After the reception and the restaurant, C. and I had walked south for thirty blocks, Manhattan glimmering around us, every surface, pavement and plate glass and car hood, misted by the rain that wasn’t falling any longer, just hanging suspended, glints and veils in midair, while our wariness dissolved and we talked about the ones who’d made it, on Wall Street or TV or making hats, and remembered the day we’d cut sports and walked the same thirty blocks, right past this corner, 53rd and Park, where C. showed me for the first time what modern architecture was all about, Mies and SOM volleying pure geometries back and forth across the avenue, and we talked about the ones who hadn’t made it, who overdosed or jumped or wound up on the street or swam out to sea after the diagnosis, and remembered how the night after we graduated from eighth grade we’d gone to see Let It Be in the movie theatre, but were confused and sad that they were all fighting with each other, and I stayed over at his apartment and we went through his sister’s copy of Portnoy’s Complaint looking for the good parts, and talked and talked, and thought we’d never not stay up all night like this. I woke up in Connecticut. The train was running through a thrashing green-gold woodland, the trees not buffeted by the wind, but tossing back and forth in their own power and delight, every leaf an expansion of itself. Connecticut, Connecticut, you misery, why are you so fucking beautiful?

Jay Wickersham is the co-author of Henry Hobson Richardson: Drawings from the Collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University.