The late afternoon sun shone through the Javits Center as I walked my last stretch of Manhattan, down 11th Avenue to the Gansevoort Peninsula beach.

This could have been a beautiful day of pure absurdity, biking across Brooklyn just to walk the missing 20ish feet of a single block. But I ruined it by deciding to walk some bonus park and public housing paths while I was in the area. Oh well, what can I say? I'm a weak man and I couldn't resist their sweet siren call.

Pictured above is the short stretch of Vandalia Avenue that was holding me back from having walked all of Brooklyn. The final non-Staten Island steps of this journey have now been taken.

Today I walked my final blocks of Staten Island, the only borough I had left to complete. I was quite surprised to find the sign below waiting for me at the finish line, 4300 Amboy Road, which was the randomly selected point where I started the walk back on the last day of 2011. After spending 12+ years reading every dinky little plaque or marker I found across the city, I became genuinely emotional when I saw my own name on one of them.



I'll need to finalize a number of recent walks on my progress map before I have an official mileage count, but, using the rough versions of the routes I draw for my planning purposes, I've calculated a provisional total of 9,954 miles walked as part of this project. I expect that number will be within a mile or two of the final tally, which I should have within a couple of weeks once I've fully updated the progress map.



I passed by this menagerie shortly after finishing the walk, on a celebratory stroll to the beach in Staten Island. I have many thousands of other photos to post on this site in the months ahead. Once I'm done with the progress map, I'll turn my attention to that daunting task.