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Overview

This 2.5-hour walking tour meets at the Public Theater in Astor Place, across from Colonnade Row and what was the highest end residential block in the country in the 1830s, the resides of Astors, Delanos and Roosevelts. We end at the Civic Center, and the old Five Points neighborhood of "Gangs of New York" notoriety. Going from the upper class residential precinct of today's Astor Place to the gang-infested slums of the Five Points was a typical request of visitors in the 1830s and 40s. That walk down Broadway would have taken them through a part of town that would, in the 1850s, break out as the new fashionable city center, what we now call SoHo. This part of Broadway was once a tether between the locales of these social extremes. In making that walk again, we decode and deconstruct the streetwalls of NoHo and SoHo to reveal the forces at work in the architectural creation of New York City.

Meeting and Pickup

Meeting point

We meet inside the Public Theater, New York's first public library. (Bathrooms are available)

Language Offered

English-GUIDE

Itinerary

1. The Public Theater

We start at the ruins of Colonnade Row, the early 1830s residence in the country's elite. We will lay the groundwork of history and the forces that passed through a landmark location of many histories. What's most to be appreciated is the high ground setting of once was a pleasure garden when "the city" was far downtown.

Duration: 15 mins

2. Noho

We walk down Broadway and decode the streetscape making sense of history through the buildings, noticing their styles, and sizes, and how they may have been adapted (and re-adapted) for re-use. Images from the past show the evolution of the SoHo section of Broadway. What went on before the fashionable shops and the artists gallery before them? Who were the people who walked the sidewalks?

Duration: 15 mins

3. Bayard–Condict Building

We stop to appreciate Louis Sullivan's only building in the city, and learn its role in the evolution of the skyscraper style.

Duration: 5 mins

4. SoHo

At Houston Street and Broadway the ancient geography makes it apparent in the asphalt why the grid began here. It was an early site of St. Thomas Episcopal Church, and an upper class residential neighborhood. The tour continues through SoHo, a name place only since the 1950s, which begs the question, how did people refer to this part of town at different times in the past? We go down Broadway with explanations, descriptions, and images that deconstruct of the streetscape and reveal the brick-and-mortar history of New York City.

5. Canal Street

The walk down to Canal Street is a roster of social and retail history, with stories and characters from a by-gone era.

6. Foley Square

Today's Civic Center was a lake, the shore of which had been the African Burial Ground through much of the British colonial period. The lake would be filled in, and along its old shoreline would develop The Five Points, the most notorious slum in New York City history.

Duration: 5 mins

7. Columbus Park

The tour ends at the location of The Five Points, now 500 Pearl Street. From the high historical social standing of the beginning of the tour, we end where the most long-lived desperate and deplorable living conditions once existed, from the Irish (and The Five Points), through the tenements of Mulberry Bend, the area is now at the border of the Court District and Chinatown.

Duration: 10 mins