A walk through Stuyvesant Square, Gramercy and Madison Square Park
Get an intimate look at the gaslight neighborhoods of 19th-century New York
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Stuyvesant Square, Gramercy Park, and Madison Square Parks anchored Manhattan neighborhoods that were home to both the wealthy and the middle class. Newly arrived immigrants lived around the corner from some of the oldest families in New York.
The tour explores the places in these neighborhoods where New Yorkers lived, worshipped and took respite from a city that was growing up around them.
Tour Highlights Include:
- Surviving middle-class residences from the 1850s
- The hospital for more than half of the babies born in Manhattan during the early 1900s
- An elegant Richard Morris Hunt residence
- The oldest cast-iron fence in New York
- William Penn’s carriage block and hitching post
- The oldest apartment building and first co-op apartment in Manhattan
- A German beer hall from the days of “Little Germany” (Kleindeutschland)
- The Washington Irving home that he never actually lived in
- Some of the last remaining gaslights around Gramercy Park
- The church where Edith Wharton worshipped and Eleanor Roosevelt was christened
- The invention of the profession of interior design (Elsie de Wolfe)
- The first co-op apartment building in New York
- The tavern where O Henry frequented
- The home of Mamie Fish before she built her mansion on 78th Street
- A courthouse with prominent sculptors of the nineteenth century and a stunning interior (sometimes open to the public)
- The statue of the man who didn’t survive the Great Blizzard of 1888
- The park where the torch of the Statue of Liberty was displayed for seven years
- The site of the original Madison Square Garden
- The only president other than George Washington to take the oath of office in New York
The Tour
The tour lasts 2 hours and covers 1.4 miles. It starts at 18th Street and First Avenue and ends at Madison Square Park.
Rates
$40
Please contact us to set up a private tour!
Duration
2 hours
Ages
This tour is best suited for ages 12+
Bill Shaffer is a licensed New York City tour guide and the author of The Scandalous Hamiltons: A Gilded Age Grifter, a Founding Father’s Disgraced Descendant and a Trial at the Dawn of Tabloid Journalism.
Prep for your tour by listening to Bowery Boys episodes: “New York By Gaslight: Illuminating the 19th Cenutry”