Visual Guided Tours of New York City

This is the corner of Stone Street, perhaps a block from the Museum of the American Indian.. If you turn around from here and go around the building with the pillars, you may see a plaque at the place Herman Melville (1819-1891) was born, although the building no longer exists. Much of Manhattan burned down in the fire of 1835.

The restaurants are easy to miss if you're coming from the other end, South William Street, but the entrance is right next to the India House and off Hanover Square. From here you're quite near the historic Fraunces Tavern.

Fraunces Tavern, restaurant, and museum (1719), the oldest structure in Manhattan, is at the corner of Pearl and Bridge Streets just south of Stone Street, pictured above, and just a few of blocks from Bowling Green. At the end of the Revolutionary War, Washington gave his farewall to his officers in the long room here before he returned to Mount Vernon. Various rooms and floors of the tavern were used for the Dept. of the Treasury and Dept. of War when New York City was the capitol of the country.

The tavern escaped the 1835 fire that burned down much of New York (nearly 700 buildings south of Wall Street), but suffered other fires. It has been restored to resemble the 18th Century version as much as possible, although some guesswork was involved. Anyone interested in the history of New York and the nation should not miss this museum.

If you return to Stone Street and go to South William, you'll see Delmonico's restaurant up the street. Note the space between buildings down the street on the left. That is Mill Lane, which intersects with the Stone Street and its restaurants. Everything is close in this tour of Lower Manhattan. You can do it on foot as well as on a bike.

Similar photo, but I love this place! We'll see more of the construction site across the street in the last photo.

Looking back after I've headed north up South William Street towards Wall Street, which is just a block away.