The city vanishes

A leafy journey on Worcester's East-West Trail

Since hiking San Francisco’s Crosstown Trail and designing the Walking City Trail here in Boston, I’ve become totally obsessed with long urban trails. This idea of stitching park paths and street walks together to create an epic urban hiking route is something that anyone with a grasp of local green spaces and free mapping tools can realize. In June, I had a phone call with Bob Siegel, one of the architects of the Crosstown Trail, and during that conversation, he asked me if I had heard of any other long urban trails worth scoping out. I hadn’t, and not for lack of digging. But the conversation got me fired up and for the last few months, I’ve been chasing down long urban trails like Al Pacino’s Detective Vincent Hanna in HEAT, all-consumed by the hunt for Robert DeNiro and his crew of career thieves. And two weeks ago, I found something in Worcester.

The East-West Trail took root in the early 2000s when Worcester residents Rick Miller and Colin Novick drew up a way to connect roughly 14 miles of Worcester parks and urban woodlands with a singular hiking route. (This already makes the East-West Trail a progenitor for the Crosstown Trail and Walking City Trail.) The two presented their plan to Park Spirit, the nonprofit organization that oversees lots of public greenery in Worcester, and a really cool thing happened. The organization’s board of directors voted to allocate funds to pay for blazing the trail with blue markers! This is the only example of a blazed urban trail that I’m aware of, and in 2015, the City of Worcester tasked one of its summer Park Stewards work crews with installing many of these trail markers along the route. This included attaching markers to utility poles and trees along city streets—a potential nightmare of red rape that the East-West Trail founders managed to skirt. Today, the finished route runs from Lake Quinsigamond on the city’s densely urban east side to The Cascades on its forested western border.