Lifestyle
L.A. isn't a walking city? The man behind Great Los Angeles Walk would like a word
The morning I meet Michael Schneider at a quaint coffee shop in Glendale, it quickly becomes clear that he walked here. His sneakers are the first clue — worn, white Nike trainers smudged with dirt. It’s uncharacteristically warm out this morning and his sweat-speckled forehead offers the second clue. His lean, exercised frame cinches my suspicion.
L.A. really is a walking city.
Explore our ground-level guide to the people and places keeping our sidewalks alive.
“I’ve probably walked more than 10,000 steps already today,” he tells me proudly, checking the health data on his phone to be sure — and it’s only 10:30 a.m.
In a city built for cars, Schneider is committed to exploring the city on foot, often heading out from his Adams Hill home at 11 p.m., in the dark, to get his steps in after the day’s work is done. In fact, over the last two decades, Schneider, 51, has traversed the length of Los Angeles on foot 18 times, covering nearly 300 miles in all during those journeys. But he didn’t do it alone.
Schneider is the founder of the Great Los Angeles Walk, an annual citywide event he started in 2006 to mark his 10th anniversary of moving to the city from Chicago. What began as a DIY, mobile celebration of L.A. — with just his wife, a handful of friends and several dozen readers of his blog, Franklin Avenue — has morphed into a local tradition, drawing up to 500 participants every November on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Each walk spans the length of an iconic L.A. boulevard, trekking about 14 to 16 miles and stopping along the way to explore its sun-scorched sidewalks and faded public murals, its high-end furniture boutiques, cheap motels and historic churches, its food carts piled high with fresh fruit and its buzzing freeway overpasses — from below.
The very first Great Walk, inspired by journalist Kevin Roderick’s 2005 book, “Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles,” had participants hoofing the entire 15-plus miles of Wilshire, from downtown L.A. to the ocean. The only marketing Schneider did for the event was a simple blog post announcing the trek. About 40 people attended.
“It was almost a lark,” says Schneider, the television editor at trade publication Variety. “I had no idea how many people would show up.”
The second walk, which drew 100 people, took place on Pico Boulevard, inspired by Times food critic Jonathan Gold, who famously ate his way down the street in his early 20s. Gold emailed Schneider food-stop recommendations at the time. The event has since tackled Santa Monica Boulevard, Beverly Boulevard, Melrose Avenue, Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard, among many others.
On top of being a terrific pre-holiday workout, the Great Walk debunks the ever-persistent beliefs that L.A. is not a walking city and that its physical sprawl impedes the ability to build community. Scores of individuals have met during the Great Walk, including Westwood residents Cat and Steve Whalen, who ended up getting married in 2023. They still do the walk every year.
“I remember bonding over the architecture of this old Public Storage facility,” Cat Whalen said of meeting 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.”
Over the years, participants have ranged from stroller-bound babies to residents in their late 80s. Attendees arrive alone or with a community group. Since 2017, long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad has come with members of her EverWalk nonprofit, which encourages walking for health and human connection. Walkers have traveled from as far as Amsterdam and Japan to join the festivities; one man journeys from Santa Fe, N.M., every year to participate — barefoot. He’s become part of the colorful fabric of the event.
“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 with his dog, Jacks. Schneider founded the Great Los Angeles Walk in 2006.
(Robert Hanashiro/For The Times)
The Great Walk has been covered by local blogs, television stations and newspapers, including The Times. But less has been written about Schneider himself, who has amassed nearly 20 years’ worth of looky-loo knowledge while strolling through the peaks and valleys of the city.
Sitting at the coffee shop, Schneider looks every bit the suburban dad. He wears a trim salt-and-pepper goatee and a zip-up hoodie, and takes every opportunity to boast about his two sons, 19 and 15, who have joined the walk nearly every year of their lives. His eldest first took part at age 1½ and his youngest at 3 months old.
But Schneider’s normcore exterior belies an undercurrent of intensity: There’s a particular, obsessive mindset required to conceive of and execute such an ambitious public expedition every year over two decades. (The Great Walk even continued during the pandemic.) Not to mention chronicling those journeys in detailed blog posts, which are meticulously archived online. It requires a passion for cities, urban history and, perhaps, cartography; an affinity for architecture and urban design; a love of community; and a knack for numbers. During our interview, Schneider repeatedly referred to stats from his Noom weight-loss app, his cornflower blue eyes glimmering as he spoke of caloric intake versus exercise expenditure in steps and miles.
In sum, he’s a collector. Of miles and health stats, of vinyl records, of books about L.A. — and of people. He first developed the habit as an “Air Force brat” kid growing up, moving with his family between the Philippines, Oklahoma and Hawaii, when he began obsessively accumulating information about the television business.
“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.”
After college at Northwestern and a year working between Chicago and Washington, D.C., Schneider moved to L.A. in 1996 with the TV trade publication Electronic Media. In ’99, he landed a job as a reporter at Variety and met his wife, Maria. He wasn’t much of an exerciser, but she liked to walk. Their early dates were spent exploring the city on foot, including taking Los Angeles Conservancy walking tours downtown and hiking in Griffith Park. Schneider fell in love with L.A. history and found that walking its concrete stretches helped him feel more rooted in the city.
“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 also has collected handfuls of odd, serendipitous moments from the Great Walk. The event has passed weddings in progress, film crews shooting, even buildings on fire. Once, in 2009, the group streamed past the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center on Washington Boulevard and Magic Johnson appeared in 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 recalls. “But here we were, just walking on by.”
Schneider doesn’t make any money off of the Great Walk; it’s free to participants and he doesn’t pay to advertise the event. In recent years, there have been sponsors, including The Times, who might give him free ads, say, or pass out water in exchange for a mention on the blog.
“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 rare, bird’s-eye-view of the city, from a boots-on-the-ground perspective. And he’s had to alter the walk as the city around 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.”
The city’s construction boom also has been particularly 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 each Great Walk at a landmark, such as Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Shrine Auditorium or the Exposition Park Rose Garden, where there’s typically a guest speaker giving a pep talk. Roderick and Nyad have taken the megaphone, as have performer-urban explorer Charles Phoenix and journalist-historic preservationist Chris Nichols. And there’s always an “afterparty” at a venue near the finish line.
2023 photo of Michael Schneider with long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad.
(Michael Schneider)
This year’s walk will pay homage to Schneider’s family. He has one son at UCLA and a nephew at USC. So the walk will start downtown at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in Exposition Park near USC’s campus and end on UCLA’s campus at the Bruin Statue. Between those points, the 14.2-mile trek will traverse parts 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.”
Where will the Great Walk take place next year, for its milestone 20th anniversary?
“Back to Wilshire,” Schneider says without pause. “It’s gonna have to be the OG.”
While the Great L.A. Walk may be associated with exercise, Schnieder repeatedly reminds participants that the goal is to go slow.
“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 conversation ends, Schneider does what he’s always done. He heads out the door and starts walking.
When Marian Sherry Lurio and Jonathan Buffington Nguyen met at a mutual friend’s wedding at Higgins Lake, Mich., in July 2022, both felt an immediate chemistry. As the evening progressed, they sat on the shore of the lake in Adirondack chairs under the stars, where they had their first kiss before joining others for a midnight plunge.
The two learned that the following weekend Ms. Lurio planned to attend a wedding in Philadelphia, where Mr. Nguyen lives, and before they had even exchanged numbers, they already had a first date on the books.
“I have a vivid memory of after we first met,” Mr. Nguyen said, “just feeling like I really better not screw this up.”
Before long, they were commuting between Philadelphia and New York City, where Ms. Lurio lives, spending weekends and the odd remote work days in one another’s apartments in Philadelphia and Manhattan. Within the first six months of dating, Mr. Nguyen joined Ms. Lurio’s family for Thanksgiving in Villanova, Pa., and, the following month, she met his family in Beavercreek, Ohio, at a surprise birthday party for Mr. Nguyen’s mother.
Ms. Lurio, 32, who grew up in Merion Station outside Philadelphia, works in investor relations administration at Flexpoint Ford, a private equity firm. She graduated from Dartmouth College with a bachelor’s degree in history and psychology.
Mr. Nguyen, also 32, was born in Knoxville, Tenn., and raised in Beavercreek, Ohio, from the age of 7. He graduated from Haverford College with a bachelor’s degree in political science and is now a director at Doyle Real Estate Advisors in Philadelphia.
Their long-distance relationship continued for the next few years. There were dates in Manhattan, vacations and beach trips to the Jersey Shore. They attended sporting events and discovered their shared appreciation of the 2003 film, “Love Actually.”
One evening, Mr. Nguyen recalled looking around Ms. Lurio’s small New York studio — strewed with clothes and the takeout meal they had ordered — and feeling “so comfortable and safe.” “I knew that this was something different than just sort of a fling,” he said.
It was an open question when they would move in together. In 2024, Ms. Lurio began the process of moving into Mr. Nguyen’s home in Philadelphia — even bringing her cat, Scott — but her plans changed midway when an opportunity arose to expand her role with her current employer.
Mr. Nguyen was on board with her decision. “It almost feels like stolen valor to call it ‘long distance,’ because it’s so easy from Philadelphia to New York,” Mr. Nguyen said. “The joke is, it’s easier to get to Philly from New York than to get to some parts of Brooklyn from Manhattan, right?”
In January 2025, Mr. Nguyen visited Ms. Lurio in New York with more up his sleeve than spending the weekend. Together they had discussed marriage and bespoke rings, but when Mr. Nguyen left Ms. Lurio and an unfinished cheese plate at the bar of the Chelsea Hotel that Friday evening, she had no idea what was coming next.
“I remember texting Jonathan,” Ms. Lurio said, bewildered: “‘You didn’t go toward the bathroom!’” When a Lobby Bar server came and asked her to come outside, Ms. Lurio still didn’t realize what was happening until she was standing in the hallway, where Mr. Nguyen stood recreating a key moment from the film “Love Actually,” in which one character silently professes his love for another in writing by flashing a series of cue cards. There, in the storied Chelsea Hotel hallway still festooned with Christmas decorations, Mr. Nguyen shared his last card that said, “Will you marry me?”
They wed on April 11 in front of 200 guests at the Pump House, a covered space on the banks of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River. Mr. Nguyen’s sister, the Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen, who is ordained through the Unitarian Universalist Association, officiated.
Although formal attire was suggested, Ms. Lurio said that the ceremony was “pretty casual.” She and Jonathan got ready together, and their families served as their wedding parties.
“I said I wanted a five-minute wedding,” Ms. Lurio recalled, though the ceremony ended up lasting a little longer than that. During the ceremony, Ms. Nguyen read a homily and jokingly added that guests should not ask the bride and groom about their living arrangements, which will remain separate for the foreseeable future.
While watching Ms. Lurio walk down the aisle, flanked by her parents, Mr. Nguyen said he remembered feeling at once grounded in the moment and also a sense of dazed joy: “Like, is this real? I felt very lucky in that moment — and also just excited for the party to start!”
He always texted when he was outside. No call, no knock. It was just a message and then the soft sound of my door opening. He moved like someone practiced in disappearing.
His name meant “complete” in Arabic, which is what I felt when we were together.
I met him the way you meet most things that matter in Los Angeles — without intending to. In our senior year at a college in eastern L.A. County, we were introduced through mutual friends, then thrown together by the particular gravity of people who recognized something in each other. He was a Muslim medical student, conservative and careful and funny in the dry, precise way of someone who has always had to choose his words. I was loud where he was quiet, messy where he was disciplined. I was out. He was not.
I understood, or thought I did. I thought that I couldn’t get hurt if I was completely conscious throughout the endeavor. Los Angeles has a way of making you feel like the whole world shares your freedoms — until you realize the city is enormous, and not all of it belongs to you in the same way.
For months, our world was confined to my apartment. He would slip in after dark, and we’d stay up late talking about his family in Iran, classical music and the particular pressure of being the son someone sacrificed everything to bring here. He told me things he said he’d never told anyone, and I believed him.
The orange glow from my Nesso lamp lit his face while the indigo sky pressed against the window behind him. In our small little world, we were safe. Outside was another matter.
On our first real date, I took him to the L.A. Phil’s “An Evening of Film & Music: From Mexico to Hollywood” program. I told him they were cheap seats even though they were the first row on the terrace. He was thrilled in the way only someone who doesn’t expect to be delighted actually gets delighted — fully, without guarding it. I put my arm around his shoulders. At some point, I shifted and moved it, and he nudged it back. He was OK with PDA here.
I remember thinking that wealth is a great barrier to harm and then feeling silly for extrapolating my own experience once again. Inside Walt Disney Concert Hall, we were just two people in love with the same music.
Outside was still another matter.
In February, on Valentine’s Day, he took me to a Yemeni restaurant in Anaheim. We hovered over saffron tea surrounded by other young Southern Californians, and we looked like friends. Before we went in, we sat in the parking lot of the strip mall — signs in Arabic advertising bread, coffee, halal meats, the Little Arabia District — hand in hand. I leaned over to kiss him.
“Not here,” he said. His eyes shifted furtively. “Someone might see.”
I understood, or told myself I did, but I was saddened. Later, after the kind of reflection that only arrives in the wreckage, I would understand something harder: I had been unconsciously asking him to choose, over and over, between the people he loved and the person he loved. I had a long pattern of choosing unavailable men, telling myself it was because I could handle the complexity. The truth was more embarrassing. I thought that if someone like him chose me anyway — chose me over the weight of societal expectations — it would mean I was worth choosing. It took me a long time to see how unfair that was to him and to me.
We went to the Norton Simon Museum together in November, on the kind of gray Pasadena day when the 210 Freeway roars in the background like white noise. He studied for the MCAT while I wrote a paper on Persian rugs. In between practice problems, he translated ancient Arabic scripts for me. I thought, “We make a good team.” Afterward, we walked through the galleries and he didn’t let go of my arm.
That was the version of us I kept returning to — when the ending came during Ramadan. It arrived as a spiritual reflection of my own. I texted: “Does this end at graduation — whatever we are doing?”
He thought I meant Ramadan. I did not mean Ramadan.
“I care about you,” he wrote, “but I don’t want you to think this could work out to anything more than just dating. I mean, of course, I’ve fantasized about marrying you. If I could live my life the way I wanted, of course I would continue. I’m just sad it’s not in this lifetime.”
I was in Mexico City when these texts were exchanged. That night I flew to Oaxaca to clear my head and then, after less than 24 hours, flew back to L.A. No amount of vacation would allow me to process what had just happened, so I threw myself back into work.
My therapist told me to use the conjunction “and” instead of “but.” It happened, and I am changed. The harm I caused and the love I felt. The beauty of what we made and the impossibility of where it could go. She gave me a knowing smile when I asked if it would stay with me forever. She didn’t answer, which was the answer.
I think about the freeways now, the way Joan Didion called them our only secular communion. When you’re on the ground in Los Angeles, the world narrows to the few blocks around you. Get on the freeway and you understand the whole body of the city at once: the arteries, the pulse, the scale of the thing.
You understand that you are a single cell in something enormous and moving. It is all out of your control. I am in a lane. The lane shaped how I drive. He was simply in a different lane, and his lane shaped him, and those two facts can coexist without either of us being the villain of the sad story.
He came like a secret in the night, and he left the same way. What we made in between was real and complicated and mine to hold forever, hoping we find each other in the next life.
The author lives in Los Angeles.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
The art industry is increasingly shaped by artists’ and art businesses’ shared realization that they are locked in a fierce struggle for sustained attention — against each other, and against the rest of the overstimulated, always-online world. A major New York art fair aims to win this competition next month by knocking down the increasingly shaky walls between contemporary art and fashion.
When visitors enter the Independent art fair on May 14, they will almost immediately encounter its open-plan centerpiece: an installation of recent couture looks from Comme des Garçons. It will be the first New York solo presentation of works by Rei Kawakubo, the brand’s founder and mastermind, since a lauded 2017 survey exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.
Art fairs have often been front and center in the industry’s 21st-century quest to capture mindshare. But too many displays have pierced the zeitgeist with six-figure spectacles, like Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana and Beeple’s robot dogs. Curating Independent around Comme des Garçons comes from the conviction that a different kind of iconoclasm can rise to the top of New York’s spring art scrum.
Elizabeth Dee, the founder and creative director of Independent, said that making Kawakubo’s work the “nerve center” of this year’s edition was a “statement of purpose” for the fair’s evolution. After several years at the compact Spring Studios in TriBeCa, Independent will more than double its square footage by moving to Pier 36 at South Street, on the East River. Dee has narrowed the fair’s exhibitor list, to 76, from 83 dealers in 2025, and reduced booth fees to encourage a focus on single artists making bold propositions.
“Rei’s work has been pivotal to thinking about how my work as a curator, gallerist and art fair can push boundaries, especially during this extraordinary move toward corporatization and monoculture in the art world in the last 20 years,” Dee said.
Kawakubo’s designs have been challenging norms since her brand’s first Paris runway show in 1981, but her work over the last 13 years on what she calls “objects for the body” has blurred borders between high fashion and wearable sculpture.
The Comme des Garçons presentation at Independent will feature 20 looks from autumn-winter 2020 to spring-summer 2025. Forgoing the runway, Kawakubo is installing her non-clothing inside structures made from rebar and colored plastic joinery.
Adrian Joffe, the president of both Comme des Garçons International and the curated retailer Dover Street Market International (and who is also Kawakubo’s husband), said in an interview that Kawakubo’s intention was to create a sculptural installation divorced from chronology and fashion — “a thing made new again.”
Every look at Independent was made in an edition of three or fewer, but only one of each will be for sale on-site. Prices will be about $9,000 to $30,000. Comme des Garçons will retain 100 percent of the sales.
Asked why she was interested in exhibiting at Independent, the famously elusive Kawakubo said via email, “The body of work has never been shown together, and this is the first presentation in New York in almost 10 years.” Joffe added a broader philosophical motivation. “We’ve never done it before; it was new,” he said. Also essential was the fair’s willingness to embrace Kawakubo’s vision for the installation rather than a standard fair booth.
Kawakubo began consistently engaging with fine art decades before such crossovers became commonplace. Since 1989, she has invited a steady stream of contemporary artists to create installations in Comme des Garçons’s Tokyo flagship store. The ’90s brought collaborations with the artist Cindy Sherman and performance pioneer Merce Cunningham, among others.
More cross-disciplinary projects followed, including limited-release direct mailers for Comme des Garçons. Kawakubo designs each from documentation of works provided by an artist or art collective.
The display at Independent reopens the debate about Kawakubo’s proper place on the continuum between artist and designer. But the issue is already settled for celebrated artists who have collaborated with her.
“I totally think of Rei as an artist in the truest sense,” Sherman said by email. “Her work questions what everyone else takes for granted as being flattering to a body, questions what female bodies are expected to look like and who they’re catering to.”
Ai Weiwei, the subject of a 2010 Comme des Garçons direct mailer, agreed that Kawakubo “is, in essence, an artist.” Unlike designers who “pursue a sense of form,” he added, “her design and creation are oriented toward attitude” — specifically, an attitude of “rebellion.”
Also taking this position is “Costume Art,” the spring exhibition at the Costume Institute. Opening May 10, the show pairs individual works from multiple designers — including Comme des Garçons — with artworks from the Met’s holdings to advance the argument made by the dress code for this year’s Met gala: “Fashion is art.”
True to form, Kawakubo sometimes opts for a third way.
“Rei has often said she’s not a designer, she’s not an artist,” Joffe said. “She is a storyteller.”
Now to find out whether an art fair sparks the drama, dialogue and attention its authors want.
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