Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll meet a man who walked all the way from the Bronx to San Francisco. We’ll also get details on the $800 million sex abuse settlement that has been finalized by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York and 1,300 people who said they had been sexually abused by clergy and lay leaders.
By some accounts, you should walk 10,000 steps a day.
That would take you about five miles — a little less if your strides are shorter than most people’s, a little farther if yours are longer. It’s like going from Times Square to Barclays Center in Brooklyn, if you could walk there in a straight line.
Some experts — and a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and two other federal agencies — say you don’t have to walk that much to get the benefits.
Some days Karl Bushby and Chantz Rivera have walked more than that, but not for health reasons.
Bushby walked around the world. The trip across four continents took him nearly 28 years, with timeouts for the pandemic and wars in places he wanted to go through. “The first years, you’re living the boys’ adventure dream and it’s great,” he told my colleague Jonathan Wolfe, “and then it really becomes a grind.”
Rivera hasn’t been putting one foot in front of the other for nearly as long as Bushby has. Rivera just set out in the spring. He was going only as far as the West Coast. He walked 20 to 25 miles a day.
It took him 149 days to go from New York to San Francisco.
My colleague Dodai Stewart says that people usually go to New York for fame, but Rivera found it by leaving. He posted on social media as he went along. People who followed his posts offered him money. At first he resisted, but he eventually started a GoFundMe account and took in more than $10,000.
In New York he had worked at a warehouse and as a door-to-door salesman, and as a dishwasher for a catering company at $20 an hour with no benefits and no prospects for a promotion. He tried to join the Army, but the recruiter turned him down. He has a record — “weed charges, disorderly conduct, a bunch of misdemeanors,” he said.
By April, Rivera was wandering around New York, wondering what to do. He bought a tent, a sleeping bag and a backpack, along with a foldable cart to carry it all and bear spray and a machete to fend off trouble. He also stocked up on supplies, including portable chargers and a first-aid survival kit.
He was a newbie at walking long distances: He had never hiked or gone camping, and he wasn’t in great shape. “In the beginning, everything was hurting,” Rivera said. “I was so cramped and sore and my knees hurt.”
“I was literally limping for, like, a week,” he said.
There were moments when he talked himself out of turning back.
Dodai caught up with him after flying to Reno, Nev., and driving to Carson City. She and our photographer Mark Abramson found his tent before dawn — a few miles away, in a town called Mound House — and waited for him to wake up and get going.
She walked with him for only a few minutes, because it was hard to interview Rivera as he trudged toward California. The noise from the road made talking almost impossible, and with the traffic and a blustery wind, walking felt dangerous. They had time to chat when he stopped for lunch. The next day, Rivera crossed the state line into California, and he arrived in San Francisco a couple of weeks later.
His portable chargers and survival kit were stolen from his cart while he was using the restroom at a McDonald’s on Fillmore Street. Whoever made off with those items also took a memory card and a flash drive with videos he had shot.
He is spending a few weeks in California. He plans to return to New York, but not the way he left; he will fly back. And he is already thinking of another big walk, maybe across Europe, if he can figure out how to overcome the language barrier.
Weather
Expect rain, a possible thunderstorm and high near 68. Rain is expected to continue into the night before the sky clears. The low will be around 56.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Sunday (Diwali).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“From Day 1, those with the most have attempted to use every legal avenue available to shield their wealth and avoid contributing more to our city.” — Mayor Zohran Mamdani, on an appellate court ruling that said the city can collect the second-home tax he wants.
The latest New York news
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The city’s deadliest fire this year: Six people were killed and seven others injured when a fire engulfed a two-story building in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The cause of the fire is not yet clear, but Mayor Zohran Mamdani raised concerns about electric bikes.
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Deed theft conviction: Victor Quimis became the first person to be convicted under a New York State law targeting deed theft. He admitted to stealing the home of a dying older woman who had dementia. He faces up to four and a half years in prison.
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Transgender athlete ban is struck down: An appeals court struck down a ban to remove transgender athletes from sports facilities in Nassau County. The decision was a blow to the county executive, Bruce Blakeman, who lost the governor’s race to Kathy Hochul on Tuesday.
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The Strand Bookstore to pay $1.5 million: The store agreed to reimburse the federal government nearly $1.5 million, resolving a claim that it took a pandemic relief loan it was not eligible for.
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F.B.I. agent struck pedestrian and drove off, U.S. says: The agent, Andrew Reyes, was arrested and charged with violating the man’s constitutional rights and making false statements to investigators. He faces 10 years in prison.
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What we’re watching: On “The New York Times Close Up,” Sam Roberts returns to the host’s chair for an election update. Then the tables turn as Eleanor Randolph, a former Times editorial board member, interviews him about his new book. The program is broadcast on CUNY TV at 7:30 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.
Archdiocese finalizes $800 million sex abuse settlement
“It has always been our desire to bring a fair and just resolution for victim-survivors,” Ronald Hicks, the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, said in a letter to Catholics under his jurisdiction, “and to promote healing and reconciliation among those who have been hurt.”
He said that the $800 million settlement that was formally agreed to on Thursday “achieves that goal.”
The settlement was finalized in the two weeks since an agreement was reached between the archdiocese and lawyers representing 1,300 people who said they had been sexually abused by its clergy and lay leaders. It brings an end to years of litigation and could help the archdiocese avoid bankruptcy.
The settlement is one of the largest in church history. The Archdiocese of Los Angeles settled similar sexual abuse claims for $880 million in 2024. The Archdiocese of San Francisco agreed in June to pay $395 million to settle claims from around 530 people.
The 1,300 people covered by the New York settlement now have the option of receiving a lump-sum payment of at least $250,000 or a larger payout after an examination of the extent of their abuse claims.
To fund the payments, the archdiocese sliced its operating budget by 10 percent and sold off some of its real estate holdings, including the land it owned beneath the Palace Hotel on Manhattan’s East Side and its First Avenue headquarters.
The archdiocese also asked parishes to help. Hicks — in his letter to Catholics in Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island and a handful of communities in the Hudson Valley — thanked parishes for what he called “voluntary contributions” as he acknowledged that they had sold property or dipped into reserves to add to the fund.
METROPOLITAN diary
4 train twins
Dear Diary:
I was grabbing onto the overhead bar on a downtown 4 train on a Monday morning, which is not easy for me to to do since I am barely 5-foot-2.
I was wearing a blue, knee-length work dress. A woman sitting directly in front of me was wearing an almost identical dress. I chuckled to myself. She didn’t notice.
At the next stop, a seat opened up next to her, so I sat down. She still didn’t notice.
Another woman in the car reached over, tapped her on the knee and pointed to me. It wasn’t just the dresses. We both had on white sneakers and chain-link necklaces, and we both had brown, shoulder-length hair.
I thought about asking for a selfie but decided that would have been weird, even in New York City. All three of us laughed, and when the train pulled into the station, we all got off.
— Melissa Pollack
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you Monday. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post The Walker Who Found Fame by Leaving New York appeared first on New York Times.
