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.

15 minutes • Admission Ticket Free

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?

15 minutes • Admission Ticket Free

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

5 minutes • Admission Ticket Free

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.

• Admission Ticket Free

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

• Admission Ticket Free

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.

5 minutes • Admission Ticket Free

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.

10 minutes • Admission Ticket Free