The New York Times Salutes Boulevardiers

While, alas, it does not salute Your Boulevardier, the Great Grey Lady has published a paean to walking and Boulevardiers. Readers might enjoy this snippet:

The 19th century was the age of the flaneur and the boulevardier, figures who made strolling down Fifth Avenue or Broadway, often vividly attired, a fashionable activity worthy of their counterparts in Paris or London.

Walking city streets played the same role for some New Yorkers as rambling through the forests and streams did for Henry David Thoreau. In a famous 1851 lecture and subsequent essay, titled simply “Walking,” Thoreau declared: “I cannot preserve my health and spirits unless I spend four hours a day at least — and it is commonly more than that — sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields absolutely free from all worldly engagements.”

During those years, the journalist Walter Whitman, who as a poet would later go by the name Walt Whitman, could be found mining the streets on foot for stories for The Brooklyn Daily Eagle and other newspapers. “Duding himself up,” Mike Wallace and Edwin G. Burrows wrote in “Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898,” Whitman “strolled around town, sporting a polished cane, absorbing scenes and characters.” The account continues: “Whitman particularly explored the plebeian world of popular culture, visiting fire companies, gambling dens, whorehouses, and theaters, and he wrote up richly detailed sketches of newsboys, pawnbrokers, stage drivers, salesclerks and butchers.”

The complete article -- entitled "The Extreme Boulevardier" by one Alex Marshall -- can be found here.