Who runs New York?
This guy. Or, at least, he did all of Manhattan.
At the end of 2022, Jason Girouard, 28, stepped out of his Lower East Side apartment in his running shoes and, unknown to him at the time, kicked off a personal endeavor to jog every street on the island. About one year and 750 miles later, he all but completed the task on Dec. 19.
That was no coincidence. The date holds special significance in the annals of Manhattan sojourners. A former Navy commander named Thomas Keane finished traversing the grid and untangling the twisted streets of Lower Manhattan on Dec. 19, 1954, according to a New York Times piece from the time.
Fifty years later, on Dec. 19, 2004, Columbia University librarian Caleb Smith completed the same project, which he detailed on his website.
Girouard, 28, says he drew inspiration from his predecessors, but he didn’t initially set out to become a street grid completionist. He said he just got bored trudging up and down the Westside Highway while training for an ultramarathon and decided to start exploring. First came every street in SoHo, followed by the West Village and the East Village.
“Then I thought, you know, I might as well do all of Lower Manhattan,” Girouard said. “And then the rest of Manhattan isn’t too far away, so I might as well do that, too.”
He said he began searching online to see if others had embarked on similar missions, and that’s where he discovered Keane, Smith and a few others who documented their goals.
Girouard tracked his route using location data from the Strava app and logged it in a map he later animated and posted online.
He said he traveled the entire island over 73 runs and 120 hours, not including subway trips uptown. He usually hit the streets early in the day.
“Running in the mornings is really nice because you see people’s morning commutes,” he said. “You see all the people taking their kids to school.”
A running tour through history
He invited Gothamist to accompany him as he…
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