New York: Lower Manhattan, Wall Street & the Edge of the World

Behind you is Castle Clinton, a circular brownstone fort built between 1808 and 1811 to defend New York harbour from British attack during the tensions that would become the War of 1812. It was called Castle Garden in those days. The British never came, and the fort never fired a shot in battle. Instead, it was leased to the city and transformed into a concert hall. Jenny Lind, the famous Swedish Nightingale, gave her American debut here in 1850 before a crowd of six thousand people. P.T. Barnum had sold tickets for up to two hundred and twenty-five dollars apiece — an extraordinary sum in 1850.

But Castle Clinton's most important chapter came from 1855 to 1890, when it served as New York's immigration processing station, before Ellis Island opened. More than eight million people were processed here — Irish fleeing the famine, Germans fleeing political upheaval, Scandinavians, Italians, Eastern European Jews. They stepped off ships and walked through this building and into America. After Ellis Island opened, the fort became an aquarium, which it remained until 1941. It is now a national monument.

Before all of this, before the Dutch, before the English, before the forts and the ferries and the financial towers, this was the territory of the Lenape people, who had lived on this island for thousands of years. They called it Mannahatta, meaning 'island of many hills.' In 1626, the Dutch director-general Peter Minuit allegedly purchased Manhattan from the Lenape for sixty guilders' worth of trade goods — cloth, tools, and wampum beads. Whether the Lenape understood this as a permanent sale or a temporary arrangement for shared use is a question historians still debate. What is not debated is what happened next. The Dutch built New Amsterdam right here, at the southern tip, and within a generation the Lenape had been pushed off the island entirely.

When you are ready, head north along Broadway, the oldest road in Manhattan. It follows an ancient Lenape trading path. The bull is about four hundred metres ahead.

The New York Police Department impounded it the same morning. The public reaction was immediate and emphatic. New Yorkers wanted it back. Within days, the city had relented and agreed to display the bull in Bowling Green, just south of here, as a temporary installation. That was in 1989. The bull is still there.

Now look down Broadway at the small bronze girl standing with her hands on her hips, facing the bull. She is not part of Di Modica's original installation. The Fearless Girl was added on March seventh, 2017, the eve of International Women's Day, by State Street Global Advisors, a financial firm managing trillions of dollars of assets. State Street installed her to promote a campaign for greater gender diversity on corporate boards. She was designed by sculptor Kristen Visbal and placed without Di Modica's consent, which created an immediate controversy. Di Modica argued that adding a girl to confront his bull changed the meaning of his work from a symbol of American optimism to a symbol of an adversarial standoff. The debate about public art, corporate messaging, and artistic intent has never entirely been settled.

What is not disputed is that Fearless Girl became, almost immediately, the most photographed spot in lower Manhattan. People queue here to take photographs of their children with her, of themselves with her, of their friends with her. Something about a small girl standing unflinching in front of three thousand kilograms of charging bronze speaks to something people want to feel or remember or send home to their families.

Look at the bull's nose. It is bright gold from the thousands of hands that rub it for luck. The horns are similarly polished. Between the two statues and the Stock Exchange just up the street, this block contains more layers of financial mythology per square metre than anywhere else in the country. Continue north on Broadway toward Wall Street, which is one block ahead.

The New York Stock Exchange building in front of you, with its massive Corinthian columns and its classical Beaux-Arts facade, was built in 1903. The eleven marble figures in the pediment represent Integrity, flanked by figures of Commerce and Industry. Look at the columns. Each one is more than nine metres tall. The architect was George Post, and the building replaced an earlier structure on the same site that had housed the exchange since 1865.

The exchange itself began with a document signed in 1792: the Buttonwood Agreement, named for the buttonwood tree — a species of American sycamore — that stood on Wall Street where the signing apparently took place. Twenty-four brokers and merchants agreed to trade securities only among themselves and at fixed commission rates. That agreement, signed under a tree on a New York street, is the direct ancestor of the most powerful financial exchange on earth. By the end of the nineteenth century, the NYSE was controlling the flow of capital for industrialising America — the railroads, the steel mills, the oil companies, the telegraph networks.

On September sixteenth, 1920, at twelve noon, a horse-drawn wagon stopped in front of the Treasury building across the street and exploded. The bomb — packed with iron sash weights — killed thirty-eight people and injured more than one hundred and forty. Anarchists were suspected but never charged. You can still see the pockmarks in the stone of the Treasury building across from the Stock Exchange, at the corner of Wall and Broad streets. They were never repaired, as a memorial. This square kilometre of lower Manhattan controls more capital than any other comparable space on earth, and it has been a target because of it for more than a century.

Trinity Church is one block north on Broadway. Head there now.

The churchyard surrounding Trinity is one of the oldest burial grounds in New York, and it contains some of the most significant graves in American history. The most famous belongs to Alexander Hamilton, who is buried near the Broadway entrance. Hamilton was one of the Founding Fathers, the first Secretary of the Treasury, the architect of the American financial system, and — in the most extraordinary and wasteful end to a career in American political history — he was killed in a duel with Aaron Burr.

The duel took place on July eleventh, 1804, in Weehawken, New Jersey, on a rocky ledge above the Hudson River. Burr, then the sitting Vice President of the United States, had challenged Hamilton after Hamilton made disparaging remarks about Burr's character during the New York gubernatorial election. Hamilton fired wide — whether deliberately or not remains debated. Burr did not. Hamilton was carried back across the river to New York, where he died the following afternoon. He was forty-nine years old.

Also buried here is Robert Fulton, the inventor of the first commercially successful steamboat, who died in 1815. And Francis Lewis, the only signer of the Declaration of Independence buried in New York City. Walk into the churchyard and stand among the slate headstones. The inscriptions are worn by two and a half centuries of weather, but the names are still legible. You are standing on the floor of American history.

The names inscribed in bronze around the perimeter of each pool are the names of every person who died in the attacks of September eleventh, 2001, and in the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Two thousand nine hundred and seventy-seven names in total, arranged not alphabetically but in clusters — victims are placed near colleagues, near friends, near family members who died alongside them. Some names have a small white rose pressed into them. The roses are placed by staff on the birthday of each victim.

On the morning of September eleventh, 2001, nineteen hijackers took control of four commercial aircraft. Two planes hit the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center. One hit the Pentagon. One crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers attempted to retake the aircraft. The South Tower collapsed at nine fifty-nine in the morning, fifty-six minutes after impact. The North Tower fell at ten twenty-eight, one hundred and two minutes after it was struck. Both towers fell almost straight down, in what engineers describe as progressive collapse — each floor failing and driving the next floor below it. The collapses killed nearly three thousand people and injured more than six thousand others.

Look for the Survivor Tree, a Callery pear tree that was found in the rubble of the site in October 2001, with its roots damaged and its trunk charred. City workers transported it to a nursery in the Bronx, where it was nursed back to health over eight years. In 2010 it was replanted here, and every year since it has flowered in spring. The tree now stands about nine metres tall. It is gnarled and asymmetrical where new growth filled in the damaged sections, and those irregularities are the record of what happened to it. It is the most quietly powerful thing on the site.

The 9/11 Memorial Museum is below ground beneath the plaza, built within the original foundations of the Trade Center. Take a moment here before continuing north.

The master plan that eventually guided the reconstruction was developed by architect Daniel Libeskind, whose lower Manhattan development plan won a competition in 2003. Libeskind envisioned a family of towers arranged around the memorial pools, with One World Trade Center at the northwest corner of the site as the anchoring presence. The angular form of the tower — each floor is a square, but the corners are chamfered to create eight isosceles triangles that are visible from above — was meant to convey strength and openness simultaneously. Whether it succeeds is a matter of opinion, but the building is unmistakable on the skyline, and that clarity of presence was always the intention.

The building opened in November 2014 and became the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, surpassing the Willis Tower in Chicago. One World Observatory occupies floors one hundred through one hundred and two, and on a clear day the views extend fifty miles in every direction — across Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, New Jersey, Long Island, and far out over the Atlantic. The observatory experience includes a theatrical 'sky pod' elevator ride that compresses the entire history of the Manhattan skyline into a forty-seven-second ascent. The ride is genuinely impressive, particularly if you know the buildings it is showing you.

The original Twin Towers, completed between 1971 and 1973, were at the time the tallest buildings in the world. They were designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki and were controversial from the start — critics called them cold, inhuman, monotonous. New Yorkers largely ignored them until they fell. Now they are missed with an intensity that no one anticipated. The building in front of you is the answer to that absence.

The building has 104 floors, three million square metres of office space, and a reinforced concrete core designed to withstand the kind of structural damage that brought the original towers down. Engineers spent years studying the failure modes of the 2001 collapses to make sure this building would respond differently.

From here, turn south and east toward St. Paul's Chapel, two blocks away on Fulton Street.

On September eleventh, 2001, the Twin Towers collapsed less than one hundred metres from this chapel. Debris rained across the churchyard. Windows shattered in buildings all around. But St. Paul's was untouched. The reason, according to the story, was a single sycamore tree that stood in the churchyard and deflected the debris that would otherwise have struck the building. The tree was destroyed by the impact, but the chapel was unharmed. The stump of that sycamore is displayed inside the chapel as a memorial.

In the days and weeks after the attacks, St. Paul's became a rest and relief station for rescue workers and volunteers. For nine months — from September eleventh through May thirtieth, 2002 — the chapel was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, offering meals, medical care, sleeping cots, and counselling to the thousands of workers who came here between shifts. An estimated five thousand volunteers from across the country staffed the operation. The pews where Washington once sat became sleeping places for exhausted firefighters. Massage therapists worked on the backs and shoulders of workers who had been shovelling rubble for twelve-hour shifts.

Inside the chapel, you can see a permanent exhibition about that nine-month period: the handmade quilts that volunteers sent from across the country, the banners and cards and drawings sent by schoolchildren, the tools and equipment left behind. The building held, and the people inside it held, and the city eventually pulled itself back together. Go inside before continuing east toward the Brooklyn Bridge. It is free, and it takes only a few minutes.

His son Washington Roebling took over. Washington oversaw the construction of the enormous pneumatic caissons — airtight wooden chambers sunk to the riverbed where workers excavated by hand in compressed air to reach the rock below. The compressed air prevented the river from flooding in. It also caused a condition that workers called caisson disease and we now call decompression sickness, or the bends. Workers who came up too quickly from the pressurised chambers suffered agonising joint pain, paralysis, and sometimes death. Washington Roebling himself was stricken in 1872 and spent the rest of the construction bedridden in his apartment in Brooklyn Heights. From his window, using binoculars, he watched the bridge rise. His wife Emily Warren Roebling became his communicator with the construction teams, eventually learning enough engineering to supervise the project herself. When the bridge opened, Emily rode across in the first ceremonial crossing.

The two Gothic towers are eighty-three metres tall and were, for a brief period, the tallest structures in the United States. The bridge deck is suspended from four main cables, each forty centimetres in diameter, containing more than five thousand steel wires. This was the first bridge in the world to use steel-wire cables rather than iron. The pedestrian walkway runs above the traffic lanes, giving you an elevated view of the river and both shorelines.

The walk across is one point eight kilometres. As you walk, look back at the Manhattan skyline behind you — it grows more spectacular with every step. The water below is the East River, which is technically not a river at all but a tidal strait connecting Upper New York Bay to Long Island Sound. On the other side is Brooklyn, once a separate city, now the most populous borough of New York. Cross the bridge and continue to the neighbourhood at the base.

These cobblestones are not decorative. They are the original Belgian block paving from the nineteenth century, when this waterfront was New York's most active industrial district. The warehouses around you — most of them now converted to tech offices, luxury apartments, film production studios, and expensive restaurants — were built between the 1850s and the 1920s to handle the goods that moved through the port. Paper, coffee, sugar, textiles. The Empire Stores warehouse on the waterfront, with its distinctive arched windows, was built between 1869 and 1885 and is now a shopping and office complex.

Walk down to Brooklyn Bridge Park, which runs along the East River waterfront for around ninety acres between the Manhattan Bridge and Atlantic Avenue. The park was built on the former sites of industrial piers — the derelict remains of the shipping industry that left in the 1960s when containerisation moved freight to deeper ports in New Jersey. The piers are now lawns, sports courts, playgrounds, and waterfront promenades.

Near Pier Two, look for Jane's Carousel — a fully restored 1922 merry-go-round with forty-eight hand-carved horses, housed inside a glass and steel pavilion designed by architect Jean Nouvel. The carousel was built in Youngstown, Ohio, and spent decades at an amusement park before being purchased, lovingly restored over seventeen years, and installed here in 2011. It operates year-round and costs three dollars to ride. The glass box that houses it was designed to disappear against the sky and the river, and on a clear day it does exactly that.

Now look back at lower Manhattan from the waterfront. This is the view that explains why New York became the image of the modern city for the entire twentieth century. The density, the height, the fact that all of it is crammed onto an island — the skyline reads as pure ambition made physical. Turn around when you are ready. The Seaport is a fifteen-minute walk back across the bridge approach or via the water street.

New York's commercial dominance in the nineteenth century was founded on the Fulton Fish Market, which operated on this waterfront from 1822 until 2005. For a hundred and eighty-three years, this was where New York's fishing boats and wholesale distributors traded the fish that fed the city. By the time it moved to a modern facility in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, the market was the second-largest wholesale fish market in the world, after Tokyo. The smell of it, according to everyone who worked here or lived nearby, was something you never entirely forgot.

Look at the historic ships moored along the piers. The Wavertree, a square-rigged iron sailing ship built in 1885, is one of the last surviving examples of the deep-water sailing cargo vessels that made New York harbour one of the busiest in the world before steam replaced sail. The Peking, a four-masted steel barque built in 1911, is even larger. These ships are here because this harbour, and these piers, were where they belonged.

The Pier Seventeen pavilion at the end of the pier is a contemporary building designed by SHoP Architects and completed in 2018 on the pilings of a demolished earlier structure. The rooftop is used as a concert venue in summer. Whether the glass-and-steel pavilion belongs aesthetically next to the nineteenth-century warehouses is a debate New Yorkers have not finished having.

Stand at the edge of the pier and look north. The Brooklyn Bridge rises to your left. The East River moves past you, carrying container ships and tugboats and the occasional kayaker. Behind you, the towers of lower Manhattan press up against the sky. You started at the bottom of the island and you have walked through four hundred years of it. New York does not give you its history easily — it layers it, buries it, builds over it, and forces you to dig. You have spent the afternoon digging. That is the best way to know a city.