Landmarks in New York City
66 landmarks to discover with Bad Historian in New York City.
Empire State Building
Built during the Great Depression as a flex, this building was so empty for years that New Yorkers called it the 'Empty State Building.' Now it's just empty of affordable rent.
Statue of Liberty
She's been standing there since 1886, but did you know she was almost sent to Egypt? And that her original color was brown, not green? The French really knew how to regift.
Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House
That gigantic curved building with the four seated women out front is the Alexander Hamilton United States Custom House. And the small oval of grass beside it is Bowling Green — the oldest public park in New York City. The park first.
Bedford Street
Bedford Street.
Belvedere Castle
Belvedere Castle looks like a medieval fortress, but it was built in 1869 and has never defended anything except bird watchers.
Bethesda Fountain & Terrace
Bethesda Terrace.
Bow Bridge
Bow Bridge, one of the most romantic spots in the park, and scene of at least 47 movie proposals.
Bow Bridge & The Lake
Bow Bridge.
Brooklyn Bridge
This bridge took 14 years to build and claimed at least 27 lives - including the original architect. It's been sold to gullible tourists more times than we can count.
Brooklyn Bridge Exit
You've crossed.
Brooklyn Heights
If you're on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade — or anywhere along Columbia Heights — turn around.
Bryant Park
Bryant Park.
Canal Street
You're on Canal Street. Widest, loudest, most chaotic street in the neighborhood. Six lanes of gridlock, a river of people, tables of sunglasses, and a smell coming off the seafood stalls that arrives about a half-second before you do.
Chatham Square
This is Chatham Square, which is less a square than a place where as many as eight streets crash into each other and hope for the best.
Church of the Transfiguration
That old stone church on the corner is the Church of the Transfiguration, and it has been standing here, on this exact spot, since eighteen oh-one.
Confucius Plaza
That big curved red-brick tower is Confucius Plaza, and the bronze figure out front is Confucius himself.
Doyers Street — The Bloody Angle
Doyers Street. Two hundred feet long, one block, with a hard bend in the middle that swings the whole street almost ninety degrees. It follows the path of an old stream, which is why it wanders like that.
DUMBO
Stop.
Father Demo Square
You're standing in a triangle.
Federal Hall
Federal Hall — the marble temple with the bronze Washington standing out on the steps. Two things about it. Washington was inaugurated President of the United States on this spot. And this is not the building.
Fifteen Fifteen Broadway
A few floors up the tower in front of you there's a wall of glass that was, for about ten years, the most important window in American music.
Fraunces Tavern
The little yellow-brick building on the corner, three stories and a red roof, surrounded on all sides by things forty times its size. Fraunces Tavern. It has been serving drinks on this corner, on and off, since seventeen sixty-two.
Grand Central Terminal
Grand Central Terminal.
Jane's Carousel
You should be looking at a glass box on the waterfront.
Jefferson Market Library
Look at that building.
MacDougal Street
You're standing on the most important block in American counterculture, and it looks like a pizza place next to a souvenir shop.
Manhattan Tower
Look up.
Merchants' Gate
So.
Mid-Bridge
You're in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Minetta Lane
See this little curved alley? Minetta Lane.
Mott Street
This is Mott Street, the oldest spine of the oldest Chinatown in the country. If the neighborhood has a Main Street, you're on it. Look up at the rooflines — the little upturned corners, the painted balconies, the pagoda flourishes.
One Times Square
Find the narrow wedge of a building at the south end of all this — the skinny one buried under screens, where Broadway and Seventh Avenue cross each other. That's the building the ball comes down.
Pell Street
Pell Street. Short, narrow, and today almost entirely barbershops — you can get a haircut on this block roughly forty different ways.
Radio City Music Hall
Radio City Music Hall seats nearly six thousand people. On its opening night, most of them wanted to leave.
Seneca Village
Look around.
Sheep Meadow
Sheep Meadow.
Shubert Alley
Shubert Alley runs about three hundred feet between two theaters, and it is the closest thing the American theater has to a town square. Every opening night, every strike, every closing-night crowd, everybody spills out into this lane.
Stonewall Inn
That's the Stonewall Inn.
Summit Rock & Shakespeare Garden
Summit Rock.
The Accidental Garden
The Chelsea Grasslands — one of the wildest stretches of the High Line.
The Battery
The Battery. The bottom edge of Manhattan, the harbor opening out in front of you, salt air and ferry engines and a horizon full of water. Everyone will tell you Alexander Hamilton stepped off a boat right here. He didn't.
The Brill Building
There's a niche above the doors of this building with a brass bust of a teenage boy set into it. Thousands of people walk under him every day and none of them know who he is. His name was Alan Lefcourt.
The Brown Building (Triangle Fire)
Look at the building on the northwest corner of the park.
The Chrysler Building
The Chrysler Building.
The Cookie Factory
Chelsea Market.
The Ed Sullivan Theater
The theater behind that marquee has been four completely different buildings without ever moving an inch.
The Flatiron Building
The Flatiron Building.
The Food
Look in the windows around you. Lacquered ducks hanging by the neck, glossy and bronze. Trays of pork buns. Bakery cases of mooncakes.
The Gansevoort Cobblestones
Gansevoort Street.
The Great Lawn
The Great Lawn.
The Manhattan Bridge Arch & the Golden Buddha
Look up at this thing. A stone triumphal arch, seventy feet of it, with two curved rows of columns sweeping out on either side like the entrance to an empire.
The Morgan Library & Museum
The Morgan Library.
The New Amsterdam Theatre
That's the New Amsterdam Theatre — the ornate one wedged into the middle of the block, with the deep arched entrance and all the curling stonework that doesn't match a single thing around it.
The New York Evening Post Building
Twenty Vesey Street — the narrow limestone building with the curved top and four enormous stone figures standing in niches high up the front.
The New York Public Library
The New York Public Library.
The Palace Theatre
Everything about this corner tells you a theater should be at street level. The Palace is thirty feet above your head, sitting inside the tower with the giant screen wrapped around its base — the entire auditorium, a hundred and thirteen…
The Paramount Building
Look up for the clock tower with the glass globe sitting on top of it. That's the Paramount Building, and the globe used to be lit from inside so it could be seen from a long way off — a lighthouse for a movie studio.
The Ramble
You are now entering The Ramble, 36 acres of wild forest where anything can happen.
The Tracks That Killed
You're up on the High Line now — thirty feet above the street, walking on the old freight railroad.
The Twenty-Five Billion Dollar Punchline
The Spur — the very end of the High Line.
The Waldorf Astoria
The Waldorf Astoria.
The Window Seat
The Tenth Avenue Square.
Thirty Rockefeller Plaza
Follow the line of flags in toward the tall building at the end of the promenade. Eight floors up inside it is a room that has been going out live to the entire country since before the Second World War, and it has never once done the job…
Trinity Church
Trinity Church, sitting at the head of Wall Street with its brownstone spire pointed straight up. The church faces east, so it has spent a hundred and eighty years looking straight down the length of that street, directly at the money.
Two Guys and a Railroad
West Twenty-sixth Street.
Washington Square Park
That arch.
New York City Audio Experiences
Visit these landmarks and more on a self-guided audio experience.
Bodies, Bohemians & Basement Bars
Eight stops through Greenwich Village — where twenty thousand bodies lie under a dog park, a nineteen-year-old kid rewrote American music in a horse stable, and a drag queen kicked a cop and changed the world. Walk the crooked streets the grid forgot and figure out which stories are real.
Central Park Is a Lie
Every blade of grass was faked, and there are twenty thousand bodies underneath it. Walk south-to-north through eight of the most photographed spots in Central Park and discover the obsessive who designed it, the community that was erased to build it, and the loaded cannon that sat on display for a hundred and thirty years before anyone checked.
Death Avenue to the High Line
How a railroad that killed five hundred people became a park that grows wildflowers. Walk the High Line from the Meatpacking District to Hudson Yards and discover the cowboys who rode through Manhattan for ninety years, the cookie factory that became a tech campus, and the twenty-five-billion-dollar development that qualified for poverty-area tax breaks by drawing a map through Central Park.
Hamilton Invented the Money
The penniless immigrant clerk who built America's Treasury, banks, customs service and Coast Guard — then published ninety-five pages about his own affair to prove he wasn't a thief. Ten blocks of Lower Manhattan, from the wharf where he stole British cannons to the churchyard where he's buried. His enemy's bank still owns the pistols.
Secrets, Lies & Grand Designs
The buildings that lied to your face. Walk two and a half miles from the Flatiron to the Waldorf and discover the unhinged decisions behind New York's most iconic stretch of real estate — a secret spire raised in ninety minutes, a librarian who burned her own diaries, and a hotel built entirely out of spite.
The Bloody Angle and the Golden Buddha
New York's oldest Chinatown, where almost nothing is what it pretends to be: a golden Buddha inside a former porn theater, a lane so crooked it worked as a murder weapon, a crime boss with a real sheriff's badge, and America's favorite Chinese food — mostly invented right here.
The Family Business
How three Roeblings gave their bodies to a bridge. Walk two miles from City Hall to Brooklyn Heights and hear the story of the father who died, the son who was paralyzed, and the wife who finished the job — with no degree, no title, and no recognition for over a century.
The Hit Factory
Eight blocks of Broadway where American entertainment was manufactured. A Ziegfeld palace Disney found with mushrooms growing in the third row, a fourteen-million-pound theater lifted thirty feet into the air rather than demolished, a skyscraper built as a memorial to a dead teenager that became the most famous address in pop music, and the room where fifty thousand people wrote in for seven hundred and twenty-eight seats. Ten stops from West Forty-Second Street to Rockefeller Plaza.
Hear the stories behind these places
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