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5 CIVIC CENTER AND CHINATOWN: CULTURE CRAWL

BOUNDARIES: Broadway, Grand St., Mott St., Murray St.

DISTANCE: 3.4 miles

SUBWAY: R to City Hall

Manhattan has places that are busy and frenetic interspersed with relatively relaxed and even quiet spots. The Civic Center and Chinatown are two such places, neighboring precincts where people are constantly on the go—walk through either district, and you’ll hear dialects of legalese and Chinese spoken loudly—but even in these neighborhoods you can find mellower outposts.

The Civic Center area is dominated by buildings dedicated to public services and agencies, politics, law, and official business of many types; it also provides fascinating lessons in history and culture. Chinatown is lively and gritty, exotic to tourists and many New Yorkers alike.

The energy in both areas is immeasurable, but don’t be afraid to stop your stroll. Public parks offer seats for the weary. Slow down to examine artistic details, architectural touches, and more. Check out the wares sold by street vendors, or perhaps pause for some dim sum.

 When you arrive at the City Hall station, ascend the stairs and walk on Broadway with City Hall and City Hall Park to your right. Dispersed throughout parts of the sidewalk are panels with historical and geographical lessons, such as one about the “British Soldiers’ Barracks.” At Chambers Street, notice an old-fashioned clock clamped to the corner building on your right: THE SUN, IT SHINES FOR ALL is the message delivered along with the time. It’s a reference to The Sun, a newspaper published from 1833 to 1950.

 Go to the right along Chambers. The building with many stairs, its pediment supported by four classical columns, is the Tweed Courthouse, back-to-back with City Hall. Ah, William Magear Tweed—perhaps the most cartoonishly crooked politico in New York City history. This handsome Italianate building was built with a rapidly rising tab, due to corruption in “Boss” Tweed’s time. Now it houses the Department of Education, among other city services.

BACK STORY: A TALE OUT OF SCHOOL

New Yorkers love their Yankees. (Some love the Mets too.) The New York Yankees have won more World Series than any other Major League Baseball team; thus, a heckuva lotta victory parades have been held in the Yankees’ honor. One year, some friends and I nearly got swallowed up in one such parade.

The Yanks won the Series in 1998, sweeping the San Diego Padres. At the time, I was teaching at Murry Bergtraum High School in downtown Manhattan, and on the day of the parade, our usually solid student attendance was way down. Enthusiastic students warned us grumpy adults in advance that they would be at the parade, so please don’t give homework or tests that day, pleasepleaseplease.

Along with Howard, Nigel, and Robin, three of my cronies from the social studies department, I hatched a lunchtime plan to go over to the parade—it was, after all, practically at our doorstep. Once there, we realized that we were thick in a throng and we might have a hard time getting back in time to teach our next classes.

We saw a bit of the parade—the crowds being what they were, we heard a lot more than we saw—and then we had to beg the beleaguered police officers on duty to help us get back to Bergtraum. They had us enter the Brooklyn Bridge subway station, walk through the concourse level, and come back up across the street. Of course, there was the one cop who didn’t quite buy our story about being teachers trying to make their way back to work. But we did it, returning in time to teach just a handful of kids, who seemed resentful that they too hadn’t braved the crowds outside.

 Across the street is a more opulent building, the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank. Notice the beehive decorations on the main doors. (Other old bank buildings in town have bees and beehive decor, apparently symbolic links to Freemasonry, royalty, and even productivity.) Farther down the block is 31 Chambers St., the Surrogate’s Court. Among the city offices and services housed here are the Municipal Archives, records offices, the Department of Cultural Affairs, county courts, and more. The main lobby and staircases are gorgeous Beaux Arts dreams. The outside has fanciful statues and carvings, columns, and a roof that is full of detail and replete with beautiful windows.

 Walk more and behold 1 Centre St., the Manhattan Municipal Building. Many New Yorkers come and go here all the time and don’t think much about it—trust me on that. But for five years I walked by it or through it every workday, when I taught at nearby Murry Bergtraum High School, and I did admire its art and architecture. Several city agencies are based here, as are the offices of the Manhattan borough president. First occupied in 1913, this regal C-shaped building of neoclassical design rises 40 stories and is topped by a gilded statue called Civic Fame that can be seen from afar. She holds a five-peaked crown, each peak representing one of the five boroughs. The building’s south arcade has a ceiling of lovely white Guastavino tiles. (In case you didn’t know, any place in New York City that has Guastavino tiling always brags about it.)

 Wander around here a bit, then go back across Centre Street and to the left, into City Hall Park, where you’ll encounter the Horace Greeley statue, the Joseph Pulitzer plaque, the quaint domed kiosk entrance of the Brooklyn Bridge subway station, and more. (Sometimes you might see fenced pens of vegetables growing on the grass in this part of the park.) The pedestrian access to the Brooklyn Bridge is next to the Municipal Building. On the other side of the bridge entrances, note a tall, shimmery metallic building in the near distance. That’s 8 Spruce St., a.k.a. New York by Gehry, a reference to its architect, Frank Gehry.Turn around and gaze again at the Surrogate’s Court building; try to discern the statues near the top. The pegleg guy is Peter Stuyvesant, governor of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam from 1647 to 1664. He was roundly disliked in his time but is memorialized in many ways throughout Manhattan.

 Walk back to the Municipal Building and follow the path through the arcade to the spacious plaza area. You’ll see a few intriguing sights, such as the Sugar House Prison Window, part of a Revolutionary War–era prison (although there is some debate about that), and the curious red sculpture called Five in One, by Bernard Rosenthal. Like the Civic Fame statue, it references the five boroughs of New York City, in this case with five giant interlocking disks. Farther ahead on the right is Police Plaza, headquarters for the NYPD.

 Where the pathway through the Municipal Plaza ends, walk left on St. Andrew’s Plaza, follow it back to Centre Street (also signed as Foley Square) and turn right. Along this stretch, there are often food kiosks as well as seating areas. On your right, you’ll come first to the massive Thurgood Marshall US Courthouse, with its 30-story tower, and then the New York State Supreme Court Building, reminiscent of a Greek temple. neoclassical in design, these buildings are often in the news; trucks and vans from media outlets are usually nearby. The Supreme Court Building should also be familiar to fans of TV’s Law & Order.

 Across Centre St. from the courts are Thomas Paine Park to the north and Foley Square to the south. Foley Square has a black-marble modernist sculpture called Triumph of the Human Spirit, which relates to the nearby African Burial Ground. The horizontal piece is meant to evoke a slave ship, the vertical piece an African antelope mask. This space was originally the Collect Pond, a freshwater source that was drained and filled in (1811). During the Victorian era, the immediate neighborhood was known as the rough and tough Five Points, a breeding ground for gangs that was immortalized in the novel and movie Gangs of New York. Hard to believe that this highly bureaucratic district was once so lawless.

 From the south end of Foley Square (more of a triangle, really), walk northwest on Duane Street. The modern building on your right, with the huge glass windows, is the United States Court of International Trade. Just past it is 26 Federal Plaza, the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building. (Javits was a longtime US senator from New York.) If you like 1960s space-age office buildings, you’ll love this one.Evoking a completely different era and mood are the green space and memorial to your left at Elk Street, the African Burial Ground National Monument. In 1991, during excavation for the construction of a government building, hundreds of graves were discovered; research determined the site to have been a major burial ground for enslaved and free blacks from the late 17th century into the 18th century. The current site, comprising a monument, burial mounds, and a visitor center, is supervised by the National Park Service. Granite structures, the Circle of the Diaspora and the Ancestral Chamber, are inscribed with signs and symbols that are significant to different African cultures, such as an Egyptian ankh, a Muslim star and crescent, and a Ghanaian sankofa.

 Walk back on Duane Street to Lafayette Street and turn left.

 At Worth Street, lined with even more government buildings, make a right. On your left is the New York City Department of Health building; the geometric metal grillwork over its entrance is a typical Art Deco touch. A freestanding column topped with a stylized eagle flanks each side of the entrance. Then cross Centre Street to see the Louis J. Lefkowitz State Office Building, named for a New York attorney general. Art Deco with a twist, this 1928 building incorporates Egyptian elements into both its exterior ornamentation (such as the sphinxlike gargoyles at the roofline) and its extravagant lobby. A bit farther along Worth on the right side is a newer court building, the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse, named for the late New York senator. It’s opposite Columbus Park, an oddly shaped but appealing green space with a playground, sports courts, lots of benches, and an open-air pavilion on its northern end. Nowadays it seems relaxed, dominated by Chinese seniors playing mah-jongg or doing Tai Chi exercises, kids running around, teens shooting hoops. But in the mid-1800s this was Mulberry Bend, the heart of Five Points, rife with slum housing and gang domination.

 Walk on Baxter Street with Columbus Park to your right, passing the New York City Criminal Courts Building on your left, and make a right into the park. Just inside the entrance stands a bronze statue of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China, atop a descriptive black-marble base. Sun was once a New Yorker, having lived in Chinatown briefly at the turn of the century before returning home to help overthrow the Qing Dynasty and establish the Republic of China.

 Notice the park’s cottagelike pavilion, built in 1897. For decades, it was a blighted eyesore—and a favorite haunt of the city’s pigeons—but it was renovated in 2007.

The stately columns of the Tweed Courthouse

 If you haven’t been yanked into a game of checkers, continue on through the park to Mulberry Street and Bayard Street. The redbrick corner building diagonally across from the park, #70, has some cool architectural touches, such as corner windows set on diagonals. It was built as a public school in the early 1900s, but now Chen Dance Center and Chinatown Manpower Project are among the cultural and community tenants here. Walk onto Mulberry with that building to your right and examine a typical Chinatown street: fish store, tchotchkes and souvenirs, Chinese and Vietnamese eateries, and much more.

 Cross Canal Street carefully; it gets crowded here, and some drivers jump the traffic lights. Farther up Mulberry Street, the ethnic pride shifts to Italian. This was traditionally the heart of Little Italy, but over the years Chinatown has expanded and the Italian presence has diminished. Still, pause a moment to see the Church of the Most Precious Blood, set back from the street on your left. (If it looks plain and drab, that’s because this is the rear of the church—the main entrance, on Baxter Street, would look right at home in Italy.) An arched gate announces the church’s name; a colorful Statue of Liberty mural is painted on the side wall of the building next door. Most Precious Blood is a focal point of Little Italy’s annual Feast of San Gennaro, an 11-day street fair held in late September.As you might expect, this block also has numerous Italian restaurants and pastry shops. The building at 121 Mulberry bears the inscription ANNA ESPOSITO 1926 near the roofline, along with a pretty sunburst decoration. (The Espositos, one of Little Italy’s leading families, built #121.) Also notice the WELCOME TO HISTORIC LITTLE ITALY banners on streetlight poles. Red, white, and green streamers are strung from one side of the street to the other on Mulberry and other streets around here, reflecting the colors of the Italian flag.

 At Hester Street, make a right and you’ll notice a greater concentration of Italian establishments. On the right, at Mott Street, is The Original Vincent’s. Established in 1904, this red-sauce joint is one of the oldest restaurants in the area, and it has a nifty neon sign.

 The rest of Mott Street, however, is much more Chinese in character. Turn right on Mott; past Canal Street, at #68, is House of Vegetarian, one of the better-regarded vegan ethnic restaurants in Manhattan. (Try the turnip cake. My younger daughter and I love it.) At 64 Mott is the Eastern States Buddhist Temple. Housed in a storefront, it’s far less splashy than other area temples but is nonetheless dominated by the color red. Look left at Bayard Street and you’ll see The Original Chinatown Ice Cream Factory, the place for unusual ice-cream flavors such as red bean or lychee.

 Walk farther on Mott Street to where it bends at Pell Street. Here, on your right, are the Church of the Transfiguration, a Catholic congregation, and its companion school building. Built in the Georgian style, the church dates to 1801 (it was originally a Lutheran congregation) and features Manhattan schist as well as brownstone; an octagonal copper-clad tower was added in 1868. Inside, the church is beautiful and light, with a fresco of the Last Supper painted on the ceiling above the altar. Most of Transfiguration’s parishioners are Chinese, so you’ll see signs in both Chinese and English.

 As you walk along Mott and other streets in the vicinity, don’t forget to notice the Eastern decorative touches on the buildings: human faces, sunbursts, floral swirls, shells, and such. Sometimes there are political touches, too, such as the Taiwanese flags hanging over Hop Lee Restaurant at 16 Mott.

 Mott Street ends at Bowery (also signed as Park Row and Chatham Square) and intersects Worth Street, Oliver Street, and East Broadway. Be vigilant when crossing Bowery, especially if there’s no traffic cop on duty. Walk to the pedestrian plaza, Kimlau Square, which consists of a statue, memorial, and small park dedicated to Chinese American servicemen who perished in World War II. (The square is named for Benjamin Ralph Kimlau, a bomber pilot who grew up in New York City and was shot down over New Guinea in 1944.)

 With the park to your left, walk on Oliver Street and stop in front of the Mariners’ Temple Baptist Church on Henry Street. It was built in the 1840s, in the Greek Revival style. Turn left on Henry Street; on your right is an old school building, still active, with GRAMMAR SCHOOL NO. 1 inscribed over its entrance. Known today as PS 001 Alfred E. Smith, the school dates to 1897.

 Go back in the direction you came on Henry and then Oliver to St. James Place. At the large intersection, make a left on St. James. Pass a building with a few stores, then come to a tiny cemetery, raised several feet off the ground and fenced in. This is the original cemetery of the Spanish–Portuguese synagogue Shearith Israel, established in 1654. It is the very first Jewish cemetery in the United States and the second-oldest burial ground in Manhattan—only the northernmost section of the cemetery at Trinity Church is older (see Walk 3). This is just a small portion of the original graveyard, situated on land purchased by the congregation from the Roosevelt family. Shearith Israel has two other small cemeteries in Manhattan (see Walk 9, Central Greenwich Village, and Walk 12, Chelsea and Madison Square Park; also see Walk 21, Central Park West, which includes the synagogue itself). This highly historic site is bedraggled now, but pay it respect.

 Walk a couple of blocks down St. James Place, passing James Madison Plaza on your right. Across Pearl Street on your right is a smaller triangular building, Murry Bergtraum High School. I taught here for five years (see Back Story), and it was a very good experience, although the classroom layout took some getting used to.

 Backtrack on St. James Place to James Street, and turn right. At the corner stands a triangle-shaped school building, Hall of St. James School, now used by the Transfiguration School upper campus (you passed Church of the Transfiguration a few blocks back, at Mott and Mosco Streets). Above the entrance, note the logo with the interlocking S and J.

 Walk south on James Street to see St. James Church, built in 1836. It’s the second-oldest Catholic church building still standing in New York City; however, there is currently no active parish here. At the end of James Street you can see the sort-of-X-shaped apartment buildings of the Smith Houses, a public housing project named for Al Smith, a four-term governor of New York.

 Make a left on Madison Street and walk two blocks to Catherine Street. Make another left and admire the neat little brick Chinese United Methodist Church. It has pretty stained-glass windows and a plaque about the Five Points Mission, a Methodist charity established in 1850 (it moved to this site in 1921). As you cross Henry Street, you’ll again see PS 001 on your left.

 Walk farther on Catherine and cross Bowery carefully, merging onto Doyers Street, a crooked little thoroughfare with an ugly concrete box of a post office. A bend in the street was known as the “Bloody Angle” decades ago because Chinese gangs (tongs) would fight there. At #13 is the Nom Wah Tea Parlor, which has been serving dim sum since 1920.

 Doyers ends at Pell Street; make a right on Pell and walk until you hit Bowery in one block. Across the street is the Confucius Plaza complex. Go left on Bowery, crossing Bayard Street and then walking a lengthier block to Canal Street. To the right you have the Manhattan Bridge, and catty-corner from you is the Mahayana Temple Buddhist Association. It’s big and colorful—and housed in a former adult-movie theater.

 Make a left on Canal—which was indeed a canal long ago—and pass a multitude of stores, offices, eateries, sidewalk vendors … a bit dizzying perhaps, but definitely an experience. You can catch the subway where Canal intersects Centre Street or Lafayette Street.

POINTS OF INTEREST

Surrogate’s Court Building nycourts.gov/courts/1jd/surrogates, 31 Chambers St., 646-386-5000

Manhattan Municipal Building manhattanbp.nyc.gov, 1 Centre St., 212-669-8300

City Hall Park and City Hall nycgovparks.org/parks/city-hall-park, Broadway and Park Row at Barclay Street, 212-639-9675

Thurgood Marshall US Courthouse ca2.uscourts.gov, 40 Foley Square, 212-857-8500

New York State Supreme Court nycourts.gov, 60 Centre St., 646-386-3600

African Burial Ground National Monument nps.gov/afbg, 290 Broadway, 212-637-2019

Columbus Park nycgovparks.org/parks/columbus-park-m015, bounded by Mulberry Street, Baxter Street, Worth Street, and Bayard Street

Church of the Most Precious Blood tinyurl.com/mostpreciousblood, 109 Mulberry St., 212-226-6427

The Original Vincent’s tinyurl.com/originalvincents, 119 Mott St., 212-226-8133

House of Vegetarian 68 Mott St., 212-226-6572

The Original Chinatown Ice Cream Factory chinatownicecreamfactory.com, 65 Bayard St., 212-608-4170

Church of the Transfiguration transfigurationnyc.org, 29 Mott St., 212-962-5157

Kimlau Square nycgovparks.org/parks/kimlau-square, bounded by Park Row/Chatham Square/Bowery, Oliver Street, and East Broadway

PS 001 Alfred E. Smith tinyurl.com/ps001alfredesmith, 8 Henry St., 212-267-4133

Chatham Square Cemetery, Congregation Shearith Israel shearithisrael.org/content/chatham-square-cemetery, 55 St. James Place

Murry Bergtraum High School for Business Careers tinyurl.com/bergtraumhs, 411 Pearl St., 212-964-9610

Chinese United Methodist Church cumc-nyc.org, 69 Madison St., 212-267-6464

Nom Wah Tea Parlor nomwah.com, 13 Doyers St., 212-962-6047

Mahayana Temple Buddhist Association mahayana.us, 113 Canal St., 212-925-8787

ROUTE SUMMARY

1 Walk up Broadway from City Hall station.

2 Walk right on Chambers Street to the Manhattan Municipal Building, across Centre Street.

3 Cross Centre Street to explore City Hall Park, then return to the Municipal Building.

4 Walk through the arcade/plaza of the Municipal Building and, where the walkway ends, turn left on St. Andrew’s Plaza.

5 Follow St. Andrew’s Plaza back to Centre Street, and turn right.

6 Go northeast on Centre Street into Foley Square and Thomas Paine Park.

7 From the south end of Foley Square, walk northwest on Duane Street to Elk Street.

8 Double back on Duane Street and make a left on Lafayette Street.

9 Make a right on Worth Street.

10 Go left on Baxter Street with Columbus Park on your right; enter the park in the middle of the block.

11 Go north on Mulberry Street out of the park.

12 Go right on Hester Street.

13 Go right on Mott Street.

14 Where Mott ends, cross Bowery to Kimlau Square, then go south on Oliver Street.

15 Make a left on Henry Street, walk halfway down the block, then go back the way you came to Oliver Street and then St. James Place.

16 Make a left on St. James, then turn around at Pearl Street.

17 Go right on James Street.

18 Go left on Madison Street.

19 Go left on Catherine Street.

20 Cross Bowery onto Doyers Street.

21 Walk right on Pell Street to Bowery.

22 Go left on Bowery.

23 Go left on Canal Street to one of the subway stations.

CONNECTING THE WALKS

To begin Walk 7 (The Bowery, Little Italy, and Soho), head east about six blocks on Canal Street to Chrystie Street, then walk two blocks north on Chrystie to Grand Street.

The busy, bureaucratic, yet beautiful Municipal Building