When people ask me where I’m from I’ve started saying “the Amtrak Northeast Regional.” And if that gets a laugh then I tag it with “Train 154.”

This Fall brought me to Newark, New Jersey, where I walked through Branch Brook Park nearly every day for a couple months during my fellowship at NJIT. Walking is the photographer’s secret weapon and so I moved and saw and snapped many times over.

There are six East Coast cities where I’ve lived for at least a couple months, most of those for a year or more:

Washington, DC – 10+ years
Baltimore, MD – a couple months
Newark, NJ – one semester, going on two
New York, NY – 15 years
Providence, RI – 4 years of college
Boston, MA – 10+ years

That doesn’t count the large number of times I’ve visited Philly, the many nights out carousing in Wilmington, countless beach trips to New Jersey, and at least a few nights in various cities in Connecticut. Demographers have given this entire region, which doubles as the spine of my life, a name worthy of its expanse — the Northeast megalopolis.

Unarmed is starting a big project called We. It’s been fun to use those walks as an excuse to launch it. More than that, it’s been fun to see another great East Coast city in all its colors.

Update — I wanted to try a coding project with AI, so I had Copilot build this interactive map of all the places I’ve lived. Took me three hours. Here’s the first prompt:

I’d like to create an interface that loads in a web browser. The interface has two parts, a frame holding a map on the top part and a bottom part that allows the user to move a slider from left to right. The slider has several hash marks indicating amounts of time, starting with 10 years on the left side and one week on the right. As the user moves the slider right, the map widens out and more dots appear on the map, highlighting places listed in a multidimensional array. Can you build this for me?

From there it was like a conversation and I would ask the AI to code whatever other idea I had. It was fun, if unsettling, to take a skill that’s taken me decades to (sort of) learn and then use a machine do it better and faster than I ever could. And it was fun remembering so much travel. The “U.S. Only” box is checked by default. Unchecking it is a great reminder of all the places I’ve been, and all the others I hope to visit someday. Don’t be shy – give it a whirl!