Recreate the Most Requested Walking Tour of 1840s New York: A Walk through SoHo

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Duration

3 Hours

About

This walking tour commences at Astor Place and Colonnade Row, the 1830s home to prominent families like the Astors and Delanos, and culminates about a mile away at today’s Civic Center, one-time location of the notorious Five Points neighborhood.

In the 1840s the walk from Colonnade Row and Washington Square to the gang-ridden slums (as they were considered), was a common request from tourists and visitors. Vestiges of that time remain in the form of Georgian, Federal, and Greek Revival homes we'll find here and there on the way.

The walk down Broadway will show the village-like qualities of the 1840s give way to New York's first cosmopolitan city center, when New York was first trying to be like London and Paris with the finest of shops, theaters and hotels. We then see that city give way to wholesale trade, and the most excruciatingly ornamented towers for the otherwise most mundane purposes, like mail order catalogue fulfillment.

We continue on a few blocks further past Canal Street to the old Five Points and Mulberry Bend. We recount the history of the area with as much history as you would like to hear for it is the beginning of another Manhattan Unlocked tour: Tenement Housing and Immigrant Life.