• The Public Theater - We start across from Astor Place and Colonnade Row, the most elite residences in the country in the 1830s. We will lay the groundwork for what will be seen on the tour, including the impact of the Erie Canal, and Croton Water. We cover the economic, real estate, social-cultural and commercial business construction that moved uptown according to the city’s early natural geographic features.
• Astor Place - The high ground nature of this historic spot is the sole reason for its rich and complex history.
• Noho - We walk down Broadway and decode the streetscape making sense of history through the buildings’ size and facades. We use historic images to show the evolution of the blocks, and learn the forces that under-girded them through history.
• 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.
• SoHo - At Houston Street and Broadway, where the uptown numbered streets start, we appreciate the role of the ancient geography as a reason the grid may begin here. The early social history when it was the site of St. Thomas Episcopal Church, is stunning.

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.

• Canal Street - The shifts dramatically when we reach Canal Street (a toponym). As a watery low ground area, it would have a very different evolution and building history.
• 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.
• 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.

• Professional guide

• Gratuities