Lower Manhattan

The bottom of the island is the oldest part of the city, the only part that was never put on a grid, and the one place in Manhattan that is busier on a Tuesday lunchtime than on a Saturday afternoon. It is also small — the whole of it can be walked in a morning — and it holds more history per street than anywhere else in New York.

Why the streets are like that

This is the seventeenth-century Dutch town, and its street plan has never been rationalised. Short lanes meet at odd angles, change name, and occasionally stop; the skyscrapers above them follow the same awkward plots, which is why the area looks so much less orderly than midtown.

Wall Street is named for an actual wall — a wooden palisade across the northern edge of the settlement, built in the 1650s. The usual story is that it was raised against the Lenape, and the historical account is that the Dutch were chiefly worried about an English attack, which duly came and succeeded without a shot being fired.

Just along it is Federal Hall, where George Washington was inaugurated as the first president in 1789 when New York was briefly the national capital. The building standing there now is a later one, with a statue of Washington on the steps, and it is free to go into.

The Stock Exchange, which cannot be visited

This needs saying plainly, because older guidance to New York routinely suggests otherwise and sends people on a pointless errand.

The New York Stock Exchange is closed to the public. The visitors' galleries that once looked down on the trading floor shut permanently after 2001 and have not reopened. There are no public tours and no tickets. And the thing older writing suggests going to watch — the open-outcry system, with brokers shouting orders across the floor — is largely historical: most trading is now electronic and the floor plays a limited role.

What is left is still worth ten minutes. The building is a grand Corinthian temple of a thing with an enormous flag across its front, and the corner of Wall and Broad is one of the most photographed in the city. Federal Hall is directly opposite.

The two statues, which are no longer facing each other

Charging Bull, the bronze bull, was installed without permission one night in 1989 and moved shortly afterwards to the small triangle at the foot of Broadway by Bowling Green, where it remains. Expect a queue of people photographing it from both ends.

Fearless Girl, the small bronze figure standing with her hands on her hips, was installed in 2017 directly facing the bull, which was the whole point of it. In 2018 she was moved to Broad Street, opposite the Stock Exchange, several streets away. So the confrontation that made the piece famous no longer exists on the ground, and visitors hoping to see the pair together are hunting for something that was only there for about eighteen months.

Churches, and the quiet bits

Trinity Church stands at the head of Wall Street, where Broadway crosses it, with a graveyard containing Alexander Hamilton among others. For a couple of centuries its spire was the tallest thing in New York, which is difficult to picture now. St Paul's Chapel a few streets north is older still, survived the attacks a short distance away, and served as a relief centre in the weeks afterwards.

Stone Street is a short cobbled lane of old buildings given over almost entirely to pubs, with tables down the middle of it in warm weather. It is the one place in the Financial District that feels like a street rather than a canyon.

The World Trade Center site

The footprints of the two towers are now sunken memorial pools, each the size of the building that stood there, lined with the names of the dead and with water falling continuously down the sides and into a further void at the centre. They are in an open plaza, free to walk into, and they are extraordinarily effective.

The 9/11 Memorial Museum, below ground alongside, is ticketed and demanding. It is not a quick stop and it is not suitable for every child; allow a couple of hours and expect to be affected by it.

One World Trade Center is the tall building on the north-west corner of the site, opened in 2014, with an observatory near the top. It is not called the Freedom Tower — that name was dropped during planning — and the Windows on the World restaurant was destroyed with the original North Tower and never rebuilt. The observation decks are compared under the skyscrapers.

Across from the memorial is the Oculus, a transport hub and shopping concourse of white steel ribs that looks like the skeleton of something enormous. It is free, it is above a major subway interchange, and opinion on it is divided in a way that is itself entertaining.

The water, and the ferries

Battery Park wraps the southern tip, with Castle Clinton — a round fort that later served as the city's first immigration station — at its centre, and views out to the harbour.

Two different boats leave from near here and the distinction matters:

• The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island ferry is ticketed, leaves from Battery Park, and lands at both islands. Book in advance, particularly for access inside the statue's pedestal or crown, which sells out well ahead. Security screening is airport-style and the whole trip takes most of a day.
• The Staten Island Ferry is free, runs day and night from the terminal at the very bottom of the island, and passes close enough to the statue for a good photograph. It does not stop at it. For anyone who wants the view and the harbour rather than the island itself, this is the best thing in New York that costs nothing.

Governors Island, a short ferry ride away, is a former military base turned park — car-free, with old officers' housing, hammocks and views back at the skyline. It is seasonal, so worth checking before making the trip.

The Seaport and the bridge

South Street Seaport, on the East River side, is the surviving fragment of the nineteenth-century port — cobbles, low brick warehouses, and historic sailing ships tied up at the pier. It was badly flooded in 2012 and has been substantially rebuilt since, so accounts of the shopping mall that used to be there are out of date. The maritime museum and the ships are the reason to go.

From there it is a short walk to the Brooklyn Bridge, whose pedestrian walkway runs above the traffic on a wooden deck and is one of the great city walks anywhere. Two things are commonly said about it; one is true. It was not the first wire-suspension bridge — those were being built decades earlier. It was the first suspension bridge to use steel wire, and when it opened in 1883 it was by a long way the longest span in the world.

Walking it from the Manhattan side means walking towards Brooklyn with the skyline behind; most people prefer the other direction, from Brooklyn back towards Manhattan, because the view is in front of them. Either way it is best early in the morning, when the walkway is not solid with people.

Practicalities

The one thing to plan around is that this is a working financial district. On weekdays the streets fill at eight, at lunchtime and again at six, and the restaurants are full of people in a hurry. At weekends the office crowd vanishes entirely, the area becomes oddly quiet, and some of the lunch places close — which makes a Saturday morning the pleasantest time to walk the old streets and a poor time to find lunch.

Everything above is within about a mile of everything else, so this is a walking district rather than a subway one. The free ferry, the memorial plaza, Battery Park, Stone Street, the churches and the bridge walkway all cost nothing, which makes Lower Manhattan the cheapest full day in the city.