Bowery Historic District Walking Tour

What you'll do:

Take A Walk turns ordinary walks into extraordinary adventures. With a passion for storytelling and a knack for uncovering the extraordinary in the everyday, our team is dedicated to making each tour a memorable and enriching experience. Join us and see your city in a whole new light!

Why we love it for your party:

• Historic riches (Experience over four centuries of fascinating history)
• Cultural melting pot (Learn about the diverse communities that shaped the Bowery)
• Entertainment legacy (Discover the Bowery’s role in NYC’s entertainment history)
• Artistic heritage (See where famous artists and writers lived and worked)
• Dynamic evolution (Understand the Bowery’s transformation through the centuries)

About this experience partner:

Join us on a journey through over four centuries as we walk down New York City’s oldest street! Originally a Native American footpath and Dutch farm road, site of the first free African American homesteads, and Washington’s triumphal march route during the British evacuation, it was the lower stretch of the Boston Post Road, one of America’s first highways. It witnessed 19th-century gang wars, the bloody Astor Place Riot, and the anti-slavery speech at Cooper Union that propelled Lincoln to the presidency. Though landed gentry like the Delanceys settled here, it soon became the working-class main street for sailors, shopgirls, gangs, gays, sporting men, and waves of immigrant Irish, Italians, Germans, Jewish, and Chinese. NYC’s first entertainment district, it has seminal links to tap dance, vaudeville, Yiddish theater, Houdini, Stephen Foster, Irving Berlin, Mae West, modern tattooing, Abstract Expressionism, Beat literature, improvisational jazz and punk rock. Comparing it to the more upscale Broadway, Walt Whitman found it “more democratic, with a broader, jauntier swing.” Though it declined in the 1900s, when flop houses and dive bars proliferated, it nonetheless became home to affordable jewelry, lighting, and restaurant supply stores, and a live-work home for artists like Marc Rothko, Maya Lin, William Burroughs, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin and Debbie Harry.

Additional information:

• Comfortable walking shoes are recommended, this Tour is 90 minutes long and under 2 miles of walking.
• We operate rain or shine so please come prepared for the weather.