Walking the neighbourhood

The neighbourhood is small, flat and rewards wandering. These are three routes that make the layers legible.

Each of these takes about an hour at an unhurried pace, and all three are on flat ground. Nothing here requires a ticket.

1. The history walk

Start at Astor Place. Look at Cooper Union, founded in 1859, whose Great Hall hosted the speech that arguably made Lincoln president.

Walk east on East 4th Street, one of the best-preserved blocks in the neighbourhood, past the Merchant's House Museum — an 1832 row house preserved with its original interiors and furnishings, and the most complete surviving picture of nineteenth-century domestic New York.

Continue to Second Avenue and turn north. This is the old Yiddish Theatre District; brass stars set into the pavement outside what was the Second Avenue Deli mark the performers.

Detour to St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery at 10th and Second — built in 1799 on the site of Peter Stuyvesant's farm chapel. Stuyvesant is buried in the vault beneath it, making this about the oldest continuously used site of worship in the city.

End at Tompkins Square Park and find the General Slocum memorial.

2. The music walk

Begin at 315 Bowery — CBGB's address, now a shop, with the awning preserved. Walk north up the Bowery, which was the skid row that made the rents possible.

Cut to 105 Second Avenue, the Fillmore East building, now residential.

Continue north on Second, then east on St. Mark's Place, the neighbourhood's most-photographed and most-changed street, and the one that has carried the counterculture's retail end since the 1960s.

Finish at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on East 3rd Street between B and C, still operating.

3. The gardens walk

Start at Avenue B and East 6th Street at the garden with the salvage tower. Work south and east through Alphabet City, taking whichever gates are open — there is no correct order, and the point is the accumulation.

La Plaza Cultural at 9th and C is the largest. From there, walk east to East River Park and the waterfront to finish.

Practical

Most of these buildings are private, occupied and unmarked. Look, do not knock. The Merchant's House and St. Mark's have their own opening hours — check before relying on either.