The morning I meet Michael Schneider at a quaint espresso store in Glendale, it shortly turns into clear that he walked right here. His sneakers are the primary clue — worn, white Nike trainers smudged with dust. It’s uncharacteristically heat out this morning and his sweat-speckled brow provides the second clue. His lean, exercised body cinches my suspicion.
L.A. actually is a strolling metropolis. Discover our ground-level information to the folks and locations retaining our sidewalks alive.
“I’ve probably walked more than 10,000 steps already today,” he tells me proudly, checking the well being information on his telephone to make sure — and it’s solely 10:30 a.m.
In a metropolis constructed for automobiles, Schneider is dedicated to exploring town on foot, usually heading out from his Adams Hill residence at 11 p.m., at nighttime, to get his steps in after the day’s work is completed. In reality, over the past twenty years, Schneider, 51, has traversed the size of Los Angeles on foot 18 instances, masking practically 300 miles in all throughout these journeys. However he didn’t do it alone.
Schneider is the founding father of the Nice Los Angeles Stroll, an annual citywide occasion he began in 2006 to mark his tenth anniversary of shifting to town from Chicago. What started as a DIY, cell celebration of L.A. — with simply his spouse, a handful of mates and several other dozen readers of his weblog, Franklin Avenue — has morphed into an area custom, drawing as much as 500 contributors each November on the Saturday earlier than Thanksgiving. Every stroll spans the size of an iconic L.A. boulevard, trekking about 14 to 16 miles and stopping alongside the way in which to discover its sun-scorched sidewalks and light public murals, its high-end furnishings boutiques, low cost motels and historic church buildings, its meals carts piled excessive with contemporary fruit and its buzzing freeway overpasses — from beneath.
The very first Nice Stroll, impressed by journalist Kevin Roderick’s 2005 e-book, “Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles,” had contributors hoofing your entire 15-plus miles of Wilshire, from downtown L.A. to the ocean. The one advertising and marketing Schneider did for the occasion was a easy weblog submit asserting the trek. About 40 folks attended.
(Courtesy of Michael Schneider)
(Courtesy of Michael Schneider)
(Courtesy of Michael Schneider)
(Courtesy of Michael Schneider)
“It was almost a lark,” says Schneider, the tv editor at commerce publication Selection. “I had no idea how many people would show up.”
On high of being a terrific pre-holiday exercise, the Nice Stroll debunks the ever-persistent beliefs that L.A. is just not a strolling metropolis and that its bodily sprawl impedes the flexibility to construct neighborhood. Scores of people have met throughout the Nice Stroll, together with Westwood residents Cat and Steve Whalen, who ended up getting married in 2023. They nonetheless do the stroll yearly.
“I remember bonding over the architecture of this old Public Storage facility,” Cat Whalen stated of assembly her husband in 2016. “It’s an event that combines our love of walking and urban landscapes and architecture — and, of course, there’s the social component.”
Through the years, contributors have ranged from stroller-bound infants to residents of their late 80s. Attendees arrive alone or with a neighborhood group. Since 2017, long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad has include members of her EverWalk nonprofit, which inspires strolling for well being and human connection. Walkers have traveled from so far as Amsterdam and Japan to affix the festivities; one man journeys from Santa Fe, N.M., yearly to take part — barefoot. He’s develop into a part of the colourful material of the occasion.
“I always run into him about midway through the walk,” Schneider says. “He’s got his camera and he’s barefoot. That’s just what he does.”
Michael Schneider together with his canine, Jacks. Schneider based the Nice Los Angeles Stroll in 2006.
(Robert Hanashiro/For The Occasions)
Sitting on the espresso store, Schneider appears to be like each bit the suburban dad. He wears a trim salt-and-pepper goatee and a zip-up hoodie, and takes each alternative to boast about his two sons, 19 and 15, who’ve joined the stroll practically yearly of their lives. His eldest first took half at age 1½ and his youngest at 3 months outdated.
However Schneider’s normcore exterior belies an undercurrent of depth: There’s a selected, obsessive mindset required to conceive of and execute such an bold public expedition yearly over twenty years. (The Nice Stroll even continued throughout the pandemic.) To not point out chronicling these journeys in detailed weblog posts, that are meticulously archived on-line. It requires a ardour for cities, city historical past and, maybe, cartography; an affinity for structure and concrete design; a love of neighborhood; and a knack for numbers. Throughout our interview, Schneider repeatedly referred to statistical data from his Noom weight-loss app, his cornflower blue eyes glimmering as he spoke of caloric consumption versus train expenditure in steps and miles.
In sum, he’s a collector. Of miles and well being stats, of vinyl data, of books about L.A. — and of individuals. He first developed the behavior as an “Air Force brat” child rising up, shifting together with his household between the Philippines, Oklahoma and Hawaii, when he started obsessively accumulating details about the tv enterprise.
“I was that kid, at 7, who knew who Ted Turner was,” Schneider says, chuckling. “I collected TV Guides from whatever city we’d travel through on vacation.”
(Courtesy of Michael Schneider)
(Courtesy of Michael Schneider)
(Courtesy of Michael Schneider)
(Courtesy of Michael Schneider)
After faculty at Northwestern and a yr working between Chicago and Washington, D.C., Schneider moved to L.A. in 1996 with the TV commerce publication Digital Media. In ’99, he landed a job as a reporter at Selection and met his spouse, Maria. He wasn’t a lot of an exerciser, however she preferred to stroll. Their early dates have been spent exploring town on foot, together with taking Los Angeles Conservancy strolling excursions downtown and climbing in Griffith Park. Schneider fell in love with L.A. historical past and located that strolling its concrete stretches helped him really feel extra rooted within the metropolis.
“When I first came to L.A., I was like: Where is the core?” he says. “I didn’t understand why people didn’t know where to congregate. Now I get it. It’s all these different cores.”
Schneider additionally has collected handfuls of strange, serendipitous moments from the Nice Stroll. The occasion has handed weddings in progress, movie crews taking pictures, even buildings on fireplace. As soon as, in 2009, the group streamed previous the Nate Holden Performing Arts Middle on Washington Boulevard and Magic Johnson appeared within the window to cheer them on. Two years earlier, on Pico Boulevard, a crane holding a billboard toppled over and chaos ensued.
“Traffic stopped, police were everywhere, no one could get through,” Schneider recollects. “But here we were, just walking on by.”
Schneider doesn’t make any cash off of the Nice Stroll; it’s free to contributors and he doesn’t pay to promote the occasion. In recent times, there have been sponsors, together with The Occasions, who may give him free adverts, say, or go out water in change for a point out on the weblog.
“But there’s no business model,” Schneider says. “We’re not an official organization. This is just a grassroots group of people getting together to walk.”
Nineteen years of crisscrossing L.A. on foot has given Schneider a uncommon, chicken’s-eye-view of town, from a boots-on-the-ground perspective. And he’s needed to alter the stroll as town round it has morphed.
“In recent years, obviously, there’s been a lot more homelessness on the streets, along with more trash,” he says. “So I’ve been mindful of trying to choose streets where it’s less of an issue.”
Town’s development growth additionally has been notably noticeable, he says.
“Just the amount of change that we’ve seen in recent years in development — that’s a positive. More housing, more buildings. But it’s also sad when you walk by and that historic building, like the Ambassador [Hotel], is no longer there — that’s a negative,” he says.
Schneider kicks off every Nice Stroll at a landmark, resembling Walt Disney Live performance Corridor, the Shrine Auditorium or the Exposition Park Rose Backyard, the place there’s sometimes a visitor speaker giving a pep speak. Roderick and Nyad have taken the megaphone, as have performer-urban explorer Charles Phoenix and journalist-historic preservationist Chris Nichols. And there’s all the time an “afterparty” at a venue close to the end line.
2023 photograph of Michael Schneider with long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad.
(Michael Schneider)
This yr’s stroll pays homage to Schneider’s household. He has one son at UCLA and a nephew at USC. So the stroll will begin downtown on the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in Exposition Park close to USC’s campus and finish on UCLA’s campus on the Bruin Statue. Between these factors, the 14.2-mile trek will traverse components of Vermont Avenue, Washington Boulevard, Culver Boulevard, Overland Avenue, Pico Boulevard and Westwood Boulevard.
“It just so happens, in recent years, that Saturday before Thanksgiving is the day of the USC-UCLA game,” Schneider says. “I was like: OK, this is too good. We have to do it.”
The place will the Nice Stroll happen subsequent yr, for its milestone twentieth anniversary?
“Back to Wilshire,” Schneider says with out pause. “It’s gonna have to be the OG.”
Whereas the Nice L.A. Stroll could also be related to train, Schnieder repeatedly reminds contributors that the purpose is to go sluggish.
“It’s about taking your time,” he says. “Go into a store you’ve never seen, take the time to look at a sculpture, stop at that church. The key is to feel like you’ve learned more about Los Angeles. I still learn things. I still see things I’ve never seen before.”
When our dialog ends, Schneider does what he’s all the time accomplished. He heads out the door and begins strolling.
