NYC Walking Tour- The Bridge Cafe

The Bridge Cafe at Water and Dover Streets in NYC

The Bridge Cafe is a historic New York City restaurant and bar located at 279 Water Street in the South Street Seaport area of Manhattan The site was originally home to "a grocery and wine and porter bottler," opened in 1794, and has been home to a series of drinking and eating establishments. In the nineteenth century the building was describes in city directories variously as a grocery, a porterhouse, or a liquor establishment. Henry Williams operated a brothel there from 1847 to 1860 and the prostitutes were listed in the New York City census of 1855. In 1888 the building's exterior was altered to its present form. It is the city's oldest continuous business establishment and has been under its current ownership since 1979. The cafe has been reported to have paranormal activity that is currently being reported  to involving: moving shadows, the sound of footsteps from the above floors, strange feelings of being watched, and the smell of perfume or lavender, the source of which can never be adequately explained.

While in office, Mayor Edward I. Koch regularly had dinner at the Bridge Cafe and declared it to be his favorite restaurant.

NYC Walking Tour - Battery Park Manhattan

Jenny Lind the Swedish Nightingale

September 11, 1850 at Castle Clinton

Battery Park is a 25-acre (10 hectare) public park located at the Battery, the southern tip of Manhattan Island in New York City, facing New York Harbor. The Battery is named for artillery batteries that were positioned there in the city's early years in order to protect the settlement behind them. At the north end of the park is Castle Clinton, the often re-purposed last remnant of the defensive works that inspired the name of the park; Pier A, formerly a fireboat station; and Hope Garden, a memorial to AIDS victims. At the other end is Battery Gardens restaurant, next to the United States Coast Guard Battery Building. Along the waterfront, ferries depart for the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and there is also a New York Water Taxi stop. The park is also the site of the East Coast Memorial which commemorates U.S. servicemen who died in coastal waters of the western Atlantic Ocean during World War II, and several other memorials.

Within the park lies Castle Clinton, an American fort built on a small artificial off-shore island immediately prior to the War of 1812 and named for mayor DeWitt Clinton. When the land of Battery Park was created, it encircled and incorporated the island.

The fort became property of the city after the war and was renamed Castle Garden. Leased by the city, it became a popular promenade and beer garden. Later roofed-over, it became one of the premier theatrical venues in the United States and contributed greatly to the development of New York City as the theater capital of the nation.

After a New York clipper had finished loading, it was the custom for her to drop down the East River and anchor off Battery Park, then a fashionable resort, where she would remain for a few hours to take her crew on board and usually to ship between five and ten tons of gunpowder ... The people who gathered at Battery Park to see a clipper ship get underway came partly to hear the sailors sing their sea songs, or chanties  which originated early in the nineteenth century, with the Negro stevedores at Mobile and New Orleans ... As the ship pays off, and gathers way in the slack water, the longshoremen and runners tumble over the side into the Whitehall boats, the crowd at Battery Park gives three parting cheers, the ensign is dipped, and the clipper is on her way to Cape Horn.

The migration of the city's elite uptown increased concurrently with the mass European emigration of the middle 19th century. As immigrants settled the Battery area, the location was less favorable to theater patrons and Castle Garden was closed. The structure was then made into the world's first immigration depot, processing millions of immigrants beginning in 1855 - almost 40 years before its successor, Ellis Island, opened its doors. This period coincided with immigration waves resulting from the Great Hunger in Ireland (a.k.a., "The Irish Famine") and other pivotal European events. The structure then housed the New York Aquarium until the 1940s, when it was threatened with destruction. It is currently a National Monument known again by its original name, and managed by the National Park Service. In addition to a small history exhibit and occasional concerts, the fort is the site where ferry tickets are sold to visit Liberty and Ellis islands.

NYC Walking Tour - South Street Seaport

South Street Seaport prior to 1924

The South Street Seaport is a historic area in the New York City borough of Manhattan, located where Fulton Street meets the East River, and adjacent to the Financial District. The Seaport is a designated historic district, distinct from the neighboring Financial District. It features some of the oldest architecture in downtown Manhattan, and includes the largest concentration of restored early 19th-century commercial buildings in the city. This includes renovated original mercantile buildings, renovated sailing ships, the former Fulton Fish Market, and modern tourist malls featuring food, shopping and nightlife, with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge. At the entrance to the Seaport is the Titanic Memorial Lighthouse.
South Street Seaport Museum was founded in 1967 by Peter and Norma Stanford. When originally opened as a museum, the focus of the Seaport Museum conservation was to be an educational historic site, with "shops" mostly operating as reproductions of working environments found during the Seaport's heyday, 1820 to 1860.

Designated by Congress in 1998 as one of several museums, which together make up "America's National  Maritime Museum", South Street Seaport Museum sits in a 12 square-block historic district that is the site of the original port of New York City. The Museum has over 30,000 square feet (2,800 m²) of exhibition space and educational facilities. It houses exhibition galleries, a working 19th-century print shop, an archeology museum, a maritime library, a craft center, a marine life conservation lab, and the largest privately owned fleet of historic ships in the country.

Almost all buildings and the entire Seaport neighborhood are meant to transport the visitor back in time to New York's mid-19th century, to demonstrate what life in the commercial maritime trade was like. Docked at the Seaport are a few historical sailing vessels, including the Flying P-Liner, Peking and museum ships. A section of nearby Fulton Street is preserved as cobblestone and lined with shops, bars, and restaurants.

The Bridge Cafe, which claims to be "The Oldest Drinking Establishment in New York" is in a building that formerly housed a brothel.

The Seaport itself now operates primarily as a mall and tourism center, built on Pier 17 on the East River. Visitors may choose from among many shops and a food court. Decks outside allow views of the East River, Brooklyn Bridge and Brooklyn Heights. The Seaport is now operated by The Howard Hughes Corporation.

NYC Walking Tour - SoHo

The E.V. Haughwout Building at Broadway and Broome Street was built in 1856-57, and has a cast-iron facade

This naming convention has become a model for the names of new and emerging neighborhoods in New York such as NoHo, for "NOrth of HOuston Street", TriBeCa ("TRIangle BElow CAnal Street"), Nolita ("NOrth of Little ITAly"), NoMad ("NOrth of MADison Square"), and DOMBO ("Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass").

Almost all of SoHo is included in the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District, which was designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1973, extended in 2010, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and declared a National Historic Landmark in 1978. It consists of 26 blocks and approximately 500 buildings, many of them incorporating cast iron architectural elements. The side streets in the district are notable for being paved with Belgian blocks.

Cast-iron architecture

SoHo boasts the greatest collection of cast-iron architecture in the world. Approximately 250 cast iron buildings stand in New York City and the majority of them are in SoHo. Cast iron was initially used as a decorative front over a pre-existing building. With the addition of modern, decorative facades, older industrial buildings were able to attract new commercial clients. Most of these facades were constructed during the period from 1840 to 1880. In addition to revitalizing older structures, buildings in SoHo were later designed to feature the cast iron.

The E.V. Haughwout Building at Broadway and Broome Street was built in 1856-57, and has a cast-iron facade by Daniel D. Badger.

An American architectural innovation, cast iron was cheaper to use for facades than materials such as stone or brick. Molds of ornamentation, prefabricated in foundries, were used interchangeably for many buildings, and a broken piece could be easily recast. The buildings could be erected quickly; some were built in four months. Despite the brief construction period, the quality of the cast iron designs was not sacrificed. Bronze had previously been the metal most frequently used for architectural detail. Architects found that the relatively inexpensive cast iron could provide intricately designed patterns. Classical French and Italian architectural designs were often used as models for these facades. Because stone was the material associated with architectural masterpieces, cast iron, painted in neutral tints such as beige, was used to simulate stone.

There was a profusion of cast iron foundries in New York, including Badger's Architectural Iron Works, James L. Jackson's Iron Works, and Cornell Iron Works.

Since the iron was pliable and easily molded, sumptuously curved window frames were created, and the strength of the metal allowed these frames considerable height. The once-somber, gas-lit interiors of the industrial district were flooded with sunlight through the enlarged windows. The strength of cast iron permitted high ceilings with sleek supporting columns, and interiors became expansive and functional.

During cast iron's heyday, many architects thought it to be structurally more sound than steel. It was also thought that cast iron would be fire-resistant, and facades were constructed over many interiors built of wood and other flammable materials. When exposed to heat, cast iron buckled, and later cracked under the cold water used to extinguish fire. In 1899, a building code mandating that the backing of cast iron fronts with masonry was passed. Most of the buildings that stand today are constructed in this way. It was the advent of steel as a major construction material that brought an end to the cast iron era.

NYC Walking Tour - Central Park

Central Park initially opened in 1857, on 843 acres (3.41 km²) of city-owned land. In 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a design competition to improve and expand the park with a plan they entitled the Greensward Plan. Construction began the same year, continued during the Civil War, and was completed in 1873.

New York City's need for a great public park was voiced by the poet and editor of the Evening Post (now the New York Post), William Cullen Bryant, and by the first American landscape architect, Andrew Jackson Downing, who began to publicize the city's need for a public park in 1844. A stylish place for open-air driving, similar to the Bois de Boulogne in Paris or London's Hyde Park, was felt to be needed by many influential New Yorkers, and, after an abortive attempt in 1850-51 to designate Jones's Wood, in 1853 the New York legislature settled upon a 700-acre (280 ha) area from 59th to 106th Streets for the creation of the park, at a cost of more than $5 million for the land alone.

While planting and land form in much of the park appear natural, it is in fact almost entirely landscaped. In fact more gunpowder was used to clear the area than was used at the battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War. The park contains several natural-looking lakes and ponds that have been created artificially. Sheep grazed on the Sheep Meadow from the 1860s until 1934, when they were moved upstate as it was feared they would be used for food by impoverished Depression-era New Yorkers.

Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1962, the park is currently managed by the Central Park Conservancy under contract with the city government. The Conservancy is a non-profit organization that contributes 83.5% of Central Park's $37.5 million dollar annual budget, and employs 80.7% of the park's maintenance staff.

New York City Walking Tour - Great Fire of 1776

New York City Great Fire of 1776

The New York City Great Fire of 1776 was a devastating fire that burned through the night of September 21, 1776, on the west side of what then constituted New York City at the southern end of the island of Manhattan. It broke out in the early days of the military occupation of the city by British forces during the American Revolutionary War.

The fire destroyed 10 to 25 percent of the city, and some unburned parts of the city were plundered. Many people believed or assumed that one or more people deliberately started the fire, for a variety of different reasons. British leaders accused rebels acting within the city, and many residents assumed that one side or the other had started it. The fire had long-term effects on the British occupation of the city, which did not end until the British left the city in 1783.