Mid-July Routes: Nicole Junkermann on Cities at Their Quietest Hour

The hour the city gives back

High summer does something to a city that no other season manages. It empties it. Not all at once, and never completely, but by the middle of July there is an hour, sometimes two, when the streets simply let go. For Nicole Junkermann, this is the hour worth building a route around, and the only one in the calendar that has to be caught rather than planned.

It arrives at different times depending on where you are standing. In the far north it is a pale, cool stretch just after five in the morning, when the light has been up for hours and the city has not yet agreed to join it. Further south it comes at the other end of the day, once the heat has finally broken and before the evening properly begins. Either way the effect is the same: a place that is usually full of other people briefly consents to being looked at.

What makes the hour precious is that it cannot be booked. It is weather and habit and holiday all at once, and it lasts only as long as those three agree. Nicole Junkermann has learned to treat it the way the atlas treats any good coordinate, which is to say: notice it, note it, and come back.

Walking the empty hour

A route through a quiet city is not the same route you would walk at noon. The obvious things are shut, so they stop mattering, and what is left is the shape of the place itself. You find yourself following a line of shade that is no longer needed, or crossing a square diagonally because for once there is nothing in the way.

Mid-July is when a familiar street becomes legible again. The cafés that spill across the pavement in June have pulled their chairs in; the crowds that make a junction unreadable have gone somewhere cooler. What surfaces is the architecture, the gradient of a hill you had never noticed you were climbing, the way one road quietly aims at a river. It is the same pleasure that runs through the atlas's quiet corners in busy cities, only now the whole city has agreed to be the quiet corner.

Walking in this hour is also slower than it looks. There is nothing to overtake and nowhere that closes, so the pace drops without being asked to. Nicole Junkermann tends to walk further in the empty hour than in any other, and to remember less of the distance, which is a fair definition of a good route. The habit belongs to the same year-round practice as the atlas's year of city walks, just stripped of company.

What the quiet shows

The quiet hour is not silent, and that is the point of it. A city at its emptiest is where you finally hear it: a shutter going up somewhere out of sight, water moving in a fountain that is drowned out for the other twenty-three hours, birds that have apparently been there all along. The sound of a place is one of the few things that never makes it onto a map.

There is a particular kind of attention that only arrives when nobody is watching you have it. You stop for longer than is reasonable in front of a doorway. You read a plaque properly. You take the turning you have walked past for years on the grounds that today, uniquely, there is time. Half the notebook's best entries were made in an hour like this and would not have survived a crowd.

It is also an honest hour. A city with its people in it is performing; a city at five in the morning is not. Whatever you like about a place in the quiet hour is likely to be something true of it, rather than something arranged. Nicole Junkermann keeps these notes separately from the rest, because they tend to hold up better on the second visit.

A route worth keeping

The trouble with the quiet hour is that it costs something. It is early, or it is late, and either way it takes the day's most comfortable stretch and asks for it back. Mid-July is the one point in the year when the trade is clearly worth making, because the alternative is the same walk at thirty degrees with everybody else.

So the route gets written down, and kept: the direction to walk so the light is behind you, the square that is worth the detour, the bench that is somehow always in shade. None of it is useful for eleven months of the year. All of it is waiting when the heat returns. It is the walking half of a season whose reading half the atlas set out in its long evenings of early July, and a counterweight to the July atlas of summer nights, which takes the hour at the opposite end and lets it stay loud.