Capturing the Heart of the City One Story at a Time

This is a love story. Ten years ago, Betsy Bober Polivy returned to the city and started walking – from east to west, back and forth along Manhattan’s original grid from 1st Street to 155th Street – talking to business owners, “hearing their stories.” She did this for six years.

It was not for fame or profit that Bober Polivy took on this challenging endeavor that she eventually documented in two books: “Walking Manhattan Sideways” in 2020 and now, “The Art of Walking Manhattan Sideways: Hidden Gems on the Side Streets,” highlighting the “arts in all its forms” that she discovered along the way. As a former owner of a children’s bookstore, she really just wanted to check in on the city’s small businesses on the side streets of Manhattan during those early days of 2011.

“What mattered most to me was just meeting the people and hearing their stories,” Bober Polivy said. “I wanted to tell their stories.” And she has. The response has overwhelmed her at times.

“Some people cried,” she said, when she called to read the profile of their businesses to them before the books were published. “They were just so touched and happy” to be seen and featured as part of the city’s fabric.

Bober Polivy’s own story of this venture of the heart itself reads as a touching movie script, and maybe it will become one someday. For now, she is immersed in the very real demands of what she calls “a passion project” that has grown to include promoting more than 150 establishments whose owners, managers or directors were interviewed for “The Art of Walking” – from hair salons to tiny neighborhood bakeries and hidden museums, galleries, small theaters and dance schools and nonprofits tucked away on upper floors off major avenues and high-traffic street areas.

“To Give Back”

Her husband, Paul, who trekked with her on many of her side street explorations – and now does so again, accompanying her to personally deliver books – has been her biggest supporter from the beginning.

They had moved back to the city from Westchester, their children now grown, and she was trying to figure out what she wanted to do, “something creative, but also something worthwhile, to give back.” Meantime, she started walking the side streets, exploring, collecting business cards, then taking notes as she discovered unique shops, restaurants, arts venues and “magnificent places of worship” that most people didn’t know existed.

She wanted to share these treasures with New Yorkers and visitors alike, shine a light on them that would lead to increased patronage of these businesses and venues. She had found her creative and worthwhile project.

Her husband encouraged her. Her children built her a website – one so good that it won “Best of Manhattan” in the local NYC Best of the Boroughs website competition in 2017.

Then the work began. The investment in time, physical energy and out-of-pocket expense is staggering. Being New York, she has had some skeptics trying to prod her motive for helping without a visible business angle. “So many times people said to me ‘What am I not understanding here? Why do you want to write about me and take photos and you’re not charging me?” she said. Most places she walked into, however, graciously accepted her attention and intent to only help, and responded with gratitude and willing cooperation in telling their stories and making their spaces accessible to photographers on subsequent visits.

Bober Polivy always dreamed of writing a book to permanently document these businesses, but when COVID happened she knew that was the time to do so. The outpouring of support she received from the first book published in November of 2020, encouraged her to work on the just-released art version.

“The Art of Walking” is filled with stunning photography – over 200 pages of artists performing, dishes that seem to leap off the pages from restaurants; fashion, art, interior views of cathedrals and synagogues that transport you to another time. Flip to any page and there is a beautiful story, accompanying photo and the address of the business right at the bottom of the page. Several nonprofits are also featured throughout. Bober Polivy spoke about the work they do and that she “had to celebrate these people who have dedicated their lives to helping others.”

“The Art of Walking Manhattan Sideways” seems on track to be as successful, or more so, as the first with many more businesses who are featured reaching out to order dozens of copies to sell in their storefronts, restaurants and shops.

Hammacher Schlemmer, a favorite gadget store for generations of New Yorkers, is having not one, but two book signings in early December of the new book. Pen & Brush, an organization “dedicated to supporting women in the visual arts and literature” is also having a signing in mid-November. Bober Polivy’s excitement is not for the usual reasons of a published author.

“Every book that gets into someone’s hands means these business are going to have another person coming to see them,” she said. “And that’s why I want to sell the books, I want people to go to them.”

To order the books or learn more about the businesses that make up Manhattan’s side streets visit: https://www.gosideways.nyc/books.