Interboro Tours

The southern tip of Manhattan island is perhaps the world’s most potent and recognizable symbol of trade, capitalism and America’s financial dominance on the world stage. This small triangle of land is crowded with massive skyscrapers which seem to be impossibly clustered on a small rock outcropping that barely breaches the surface of the rushing waterways hurrying past the corporate headquarters, bank vaults and trading floors. 

 

While the area has always been a nexus of worldwide trade and international commerce it has also been, to varying degrees, a neighborhood in the fullest sense of the word. Single-family homes and overnight accommodations once sat a short walk from massive cargo ships that lined the shore, engulfing the land. Small family-owned businesses – where every transaction requires eye contact between the customer and worker, every purchase is placed audibly, and the till fits on a countertop – have long sat beside the the world’s biggest banks and the headquarters of multinational corporations.

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It is possible to tell all of NYC’s stories in Lower Manhattan. It is the place New York City began, and Lower Manhattan remains one of the city’s most important centers holding every one of the city’s stories within its streets, structures and spaces. Lower Manhattan also reflects the current state of all NYC neighborhoods and can be used as a metaphor to describe many of the challenges facing the city at large.

 

These are the themes that shine in every part of Lower Manhattan’s story:

 

Commerce and Culture - The southern tip of Manhattan island has been a nexus of trade and diversity from a time before humans. Every visitor and resident that has ever strode this land and crossed the converging waterways that shape it has taken part in a material and cultural interchange that has produced the most vibrant and robust diversity this world has ever known. 

 

Architecture and Public Planning - Lower Manhattan has been a proving ground for and remains a showcase of every major style of New York architecture. The sheer density this relatively small area supports, not only in concentration of uses and people, but vertical density – from the spires down to the subway – of structures, infrastructure and population requires profound ingenuity and a complexity of master planning that is matched in few places.

 

Living and Working - Lower Manhattan is supremely suited to support life. And from its beginnings as a community Lower Manhattan has functioned as a town and a trading post; as a village and a business; as a city and a corporation.

 

Loss and Recovery, Resilience - While Lower Manhattan has always been a site of incredible optimism, will and determination to build something great, it has several times been the site of great tragedy. From the great fire of 1776 to 9/11, over and over again, some part of Lower Manhattan has been felled by shockwaves of destruction. But each time it has been injured, Lower Manhattan has rebounded quickly and emerged even more resilient and stronger than it was before the strike.