19th Century NoHo: Glamour, Greed, Money, and Murder

Discover the origins of The Gilded Age in New York!

Overview

• Join this unique tour of the once elegant Bond Street NOHO neighborhood, former home to some of New York's most famous families including the Astors, Vanderbilts, Delanos and Schermerhorns. You'll see how the neighborhood from the Bowery to Washington Square evolved into an enclave of the very rich and often very famous as well as the fringes of New York's 19th-century underbelly.

• You'll explore 19th century cobblestone streets and hear stories of characters in this real-life drama such as John Jacob Astor, Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Mrs. Astor, and Edith Wharton.

• Our tour will pass by such New York landmarks as the famous Colonnade Row, the Public Theater, once New York's first public library, and Cooper Union site of impassioned political speeches from Lincoln to Obama. You'll be able to imagine the drama of events that unfolded on today's bustling Astor Place including the Opera House riot of 1847, one of the bloodiest in American history.

• We'll see the site of the notorious 1857 Bond St. murder of Harvey Burdell which remains one of New York's still unsolved murder mysteries and you'll hear true stories of the literary as well as the libertine residents of this incredible neighborhood.

Tour Highlights

• Astor Place, a longtime site of cultural life as well as a political struggle

• Visit Washington Square and the chance to explore the myth and reality of this historic space

• Grace Church, built for the neighborhood's wealthy elite and a background setting in Edith's Wharton's The Age of Innocence

• Colonnade Row, once the most exclusive residential site in America with a look at some of the homes' most famous inhabitants

• Merchant's House Museum, Manhattan's first landmark and a virtually intact home inside and out from 1832

• The Bowery - tales of the famous and infamous that once walked this famous street

• Site off AT Stewart's Iron Palace, one of America's very first grand department stores

• St.-Mark's-in-the-Bowery, a look at this beautiful Georgian church built on the site of land once belonging to New Amsterdam's final leader, Peter Stuyvesant

Please Note

The walking tour runs rain or shine and as the sun is going down — dress for the weather!