MF

Run the full length of every street in Brooklyn to the greatest reasonable extent, seeing them a collection of individual threads that together become the fabric we recognize as Brooklyn.

To be consistent with the threads/fabric analogy, I can’t just run around and color in everywhere I’ve been until I happen to have no more left to do. Instead I intend to run each street individually from end to end, weaving them together one at a time. There’s no prescribed order for this, except for the arbitrary decision that Brooklyn Avenue must be last. It feels only right.

I prefer to run each street all at once and not split them up over multiple runs, but I am allowing it. In these cases all legs must still be intentional and sequential, i.e., the first leg completed must include a terminus, and subsequent legs must connect to the previously completed leg. Threads.

This all may strike some people as terribly inefficient and I don’t disagree, but efficiency is not the goal. As I crisscross to and from and between each run’s intended leg(s), I will end up running along a lot of the same blocks more than once and some perhaps many times; doing it this way lets me appreciate each street once as a whole, and also incidentally again and again at different points as the city and I both change and grow over time. That for me is what continues to make this endeavor so infinitely interesting and beautiful and deeply human.

What counts as a “street in Brooklyn”?

Given the personal and imperfect nature of this whole thing as described above, the criteria are intuitive: generally any thoroughfare with a name and suffix (St, Ave, Ln, Pl, Ct, etc) that is consistent across multiple different maps, and the buildings along it get their mail addressed to “Brooklyn, NY”

All blocks and segments with the same street name and suffix constitute a single complete street, regardless of any discontinuity. When a street is interrupted by a park, superblock, highway, railway, topography, or anything else, I still have to run all the pieces in order as described above to count it as complete.

“What about _____?”

□ The part of any street that continues beyond Brooklyn? No

□ Highways, tunnels, and other roadways unfit for pedestrian use? No

■ Bridges (with a sidewalk or publicly accessible pedestrian pathway)? Yes

□ Bridges (without… )? No

■ Public housing walks, malls, etc with building addresses? Yes

□ Driveways and unnamed alleys? No

□ Inside construction sites, private, official, industrial, and otherwise generally restricted areas? No

■ Park drives? Yes

□ Park paths and trails? No

□ Inside cemeteries? No

□ Honorary co-named streets are not listed or counted separately. For example, different sections of MacDonough St in Bed-Stuy are co-named “Jackie Robinson Way” and “Rev. Dr. William A. Jones Way” — only MacDonough St is counted.

Questions like these are frequent and usually evaporate just as quickly as they appear. But on one particularly dreary late December evening in 2017 during the black hole between Christmas and New Year’s I was cold and sad and in need of direction and purpose, so I indulged for a moment and then slept on it. Long distance running was nothing new to me so the idea wasn’t completely insane — just a little bit inane. The next day I woke up still intrigued, and so I ran with it… for a little more than 3/4 of Fulton Street. I started in the middle of it and ran to the farther end in Cypress Hills, took the J train back, and that was enough for one day.

Day one and I’d already left a loose end — a sign of things to come as over time I would come to understand incompleteness to be a defining characteristic of the project as a whole. The next day I ran the rest of Fulton St and then looped around to hit three more, now leaving two of those streets incomplete. The next day I started (and finished) four more streets, then two more, then eleven the day after that — in 8 short days I completed 21 streets end to end and had left only one more that needed finishing up. I was on a roll… until suddenly three full years had gone by with no further progress. I still ran during that time, but inexplicably pretty much just forgot about that whole all-the-streets thing until one day I stumbled on the list I’d started back then and suddenly it was new and shiny again. By the end of that year I had completed 121 more streets, and another 189 more the year after that, bringing the total to 331 at the close of 2022. But… then only 34 in 2023, and 2024? 10.

At the time of this writing at the end of January my 2025 total is already past that (15) so right now it looks like this might end up a bigger year again, but who knows? The periods where I let this lapse were never planned, and as long as I’m on my feet, by definition they are never permanent. Brooklyn is really big. It has a lot of streets. A lot of them are really long, and even more are very very short and sprinkled all over the place- it will be a feat just to find all of them let alone run them. Parts of some are behind locked gates or have been closed off for construction when I’ve run by, allowing a purist to contend that the premise is inherently unachievable so why bother?

But I’m not a purist, I’m just a guy who lives in Brooklyn and likes both running and keeping things interesting. It is possible that some day I’ll find no lines left to draw on my map and that I have completed this project to some reasonably satisfying standard, but I’m not focused on the achievement. Rather, I see this as something that will always (or at least for a long time) be there ready for me to keep chipping away at it. No matter how long I live and run in Brooklyn, with each new street is a guarantee that I'll see a face of it that I never have before.

“All the streets in Brooklyn (I’ve run so far)” is directly inspired by James Gulliver Hancock's All The Buildings In New York (that I've drawn so far). Check it out!