Urban Adventures & More

About a month ago, I followed a walking tour in the financial district from the “Essential New York” book. Following are some pictures. I had lots of fun with panoramas. I also built on my lesson from last time; when taking pictures for a panorama, you have to make sure to fill up the corners or the visible rectangular part will be very small. On the other hand, once you do that you get greedy and want the corners to be very full, and, well, before you know it you wish you had taken a full 360 degree picture and a full 90 degrees up.

Note: Most of these pictures can be found in a better format on my new blog, NYC Facade.

We started on Wall and walked east. The first good shot was of a square formed at the intersection of Wall and Pearl.

Next, down Water Street. Across from the Vietnam Memorial is a square formed at Pearl and Coenties Slip.

Of course, Coenties Slip has a special place for me because I wrote a paper about it in High School; did you know it was the location of the Stadthuys, New York’s first City Hall? The site was preserved under the huge building at the back of the picture, which you can look into from the street.

We were big fans of the big yellow building, which we even detoured to find, located at William and Beaver Street (across from Delmonico’s, a quite old New York eating establishment). Actually we detoured to find Hanover Square, future destination of the 2nd Ave Subway. Along that route, we found this charming little street, Stone Street.

After that, we walked South to State Street and then west and north to Bowling Green, pictured here.

Then we walked up Broadway. At Wall Street again, we were cold and got hot chocolate at Dean & Deluca inside a Border’s. Then, on coming out, I got a shot of Trinity Church.

Across from Trinity Church is the very beautiful Irving Trust Building.

We then walked past the stock exchange and 120 Broadway (a rather ornate building that caused the city to pass zoning laws because of its monstrous dimensions). It is so large, in fact, I could only get a picture of this sculpture across the street in Liberty Plaza with a different building in the background. Can anyone identify the sculpture?

Further up Broadway we continued, next to St. Paul’s Chapel.

Cold again, we got one shot (well 3, but only 1 is here) of the Woolworth building’s facade.

It was a very fun walking tour, but didn’t inspire in me the same trivia as the buildings I find uptown. I was a little overwhelming because of all the readily available history of so many buildings you pass down there.