Empire State Building → Times Square

This is the shortest famous walk in Manhattan, and the one most visitors do without realising they are doing it. You leave the Empire State Building at 34th and Fifth, and roughly twelve minutes later the buildings stop having facades and start having screens. There is no scenic detour to speak of, no river to follow, no park to cut through. It is nine blocks and one avenue, and the whole appeal is watching midtown change character block by block.

The route

The efficient version runs west along 34th Street to Broadway, then north-west up Broadway to 42nd. Broadway is the only street in the Manhattan grid that runs diagonally, a survival of the pre-colonial Wickquasgeck trail that followed the natural spine of the island, and it is the reason Times Square is a triangle rather than a rectangle. Following it means you cut across the grid instead of stepping through it, which saves perhaps a hundred steps over the strict right-angle alternative up Sixth Avenue and across 42nd.

Sidewalks are wide, crossings are frequent, and the surface is flat the entire way — midtown Manhattan sits on a shelf of Manhattan schist with almost no gradient between 34th and 42nd. The practical constraint is not distance but density. Between Herald Square and Times Square you pass through two of the most congested pedestrian corridors in the United States, and at midday the crowd, not your legs, sets your pace.

What the number is made of

The walking distance is about 0.6 miles, or just under a kilometre. Straight-line, the two landmarks sit roughly 0.5 miles apart; the small difference is the grid tax, and it is unusually low here because Broadway's diagonal happens to point almost exactly where you are going. Most city walks pay a much larger detour penalty.

Why these two landmarks are eight blocks apart

The Empire State Building went up on the site of the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, which was demolished in 1929. Construction ran through the worst months of the Great Depression and finished in roughly thirteen months, an ahead-of-schedule pace that has never been matched by a building of that height in New York. It then spent more than a decade largely empty — nicknamed the "Empty State Building" by brokers who could not fill it — because the office demand that justified it evaporated before the steel was topped out.

Times Square was Longacre Square until 1904, named for the London district associated with carriage-makers, and it was the city's horse-trading quarter. It was renamed when The New York Times moved its headquarters into the newly built tower at the south end of the triangle, and the paper marked the occasion with a New Year's Eve fireworks display. The fireworks were banned three years later for dropping hot ash on the crowd, which is why the replacement — a lowered illuminated ball — exists at all.

The two buildings are, in other words, monuments to the same instinct: put your name on the skyline and the neighbourhood will rearrange itself around you. Both worked.

Walking it well

Go early. Before about nine in the morning the sidewalks along Broadway are close to empty, the pedestrian plazas between 42nd and 47th are usable rather than theoretical, and the screens are still on, which is most of the point. Between noon and eight the same nine blocks can take twice as long, and the step count does not change but the experience does considerably.

If you want the walk to be longer and better, take Fifth Avenue north to 42nd Street instead, turn west, and pass the New York Public Library and Bryant Park on your way in. That version runs closer to 0.9 miles and about 1,930 steps, and it swaps two blocks of chain retail for the best small park in midtown.

Your step count, by height

Step length varies with height by more than 25 per cent across the adult range, so the single figure at the top of this page will not be right for everyone. Here is the same distance for a range of heights, using the standard estimate of 0.414 × height.

Your height	Est. step length	Steps for this route
1.55 m	0.64 m	1,504
1.65 m	0.68 m	1,414
1.75 m	0.72 m	1,332
1.85 m	0.77 m	1,261
1.95 m	0.81 m	1,197

These are estimates. If you want a figure that matches your own gait, our guide to measuring your stride length takes about five minutes.

Common questions

Is it faster to walk or take the subway?

Walk. The N, Q, R and W trains connect 34th Street–Herald Square to Times Square in about three minutes of running time, but with stairs, waiting and platform transit the door-to-door total is usually close to twelve minutes — the same as walking, without the daylight.

How long does the walk take?

About 11 to 12 minutes at a comfortable pace of roughly 115 steps a minute. Add three to five minutes at peak crowd times, when crossing signals and foot traffic dictate your speed.

Is the route accessible?

Yes. The entire route is flat, paved, and served by curb cuts at every intersection. The pedestrian plazas north of 42nd Street are level with the sidewalk.

Try your own route

Enter any two places into the step calculator to get a figure for a walk of your own, or browse all twenty routes and eight articles.