Walking Tours

Meet at the Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Pl New York, NY 10012

The SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District, created in 1973, is dominated by remarkably intact mid-19th century architecture. Originally designed for both commercial and manufacturing uses, most of these buildings have been adapted for residential use. Meanwhile, over the last three decades, several entirely new buildings have been approved by the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission as “appropriate” for inclusion within the district.

This tour looks at these recent buildings as well as significant historic sites to examine a range of design strategies—some highly contextual and others more interpretive—for historic districts. The following buildings are included, among many others: Scholastic Building by Aldo Rossi, 40 Mercer by Jean Nouvel, 529 Broadway by BKSK, 27 Wooster by KPF, XOCO 325 by DDG, the 1857 Haughwout Building, the meticulously restored 101 Spring Street (Judd Foundation), 478-482 Broadway by Richard Morris Hunt, and the 1904 Little Singer Building by Ernest Flagg.

AIANY Guide: Tim Hayduk

Health and Safety Guidelines:
AIANY cannot be held liable and assumes no responsibility for any injury or loss incurred by participants in these programs. Tour is limited to 17 attendees. Walkups cannot be guaranteed a spot on the tour.

Cancellation Policy:
AIANY Walking Tours take place rain or shine, please dress for the weather. There are no refunds, cancellations, or exchanges, unless we cancel a tour.

Meet at NE Corner of Fifth Avenue and East 40th Street under the canopy.  Please arrive 15 minutes before the start of the tour.

Before Bryant Park became New York’s “Living Room” and home to the New York Public Library, this open space served as a potter’s field, a reservoir for the Croton Water System, and the site of the Crystal Palace Exhibition. During the Great Depression, Robert Moses implemented a sweeping new landscape plan. Following a decline in the social and physical conditions in the 1970’s the park underwent a major transformation completed in 1990 designed by Hanna/Olin. Today, Bryant Park, one of the premier outdoor spaces of Manhattan, serves as a model for public and private revitalization. This walking tour will explore the architecture lining the perimeter of the park which offers a timeline of the development of Midtown. Key projects include the New York Public Library by Carrère and Hastings, the Radiator Building by Howells and Hood, One Bryant Park by Cook + Fox, the Grace Building by SOM, and Bryant Condominiums and Hotel by David Chipperfield. Urban and architectural issues will be discussed, including NYC zoning law, business improvements districts, and the evolution of skyscraper design.

AIANY Guide: Joseph Lengeling, AIA

Health and Safety Guidelines:
AIANY cannot be held liable and assumes no responsibility for any injury or loss incurred by participants in these programs. Tour is limited to 15 attendees. A personal audio system will be in use for this tour. To insure each guest will receive a device, please arrive promptly 15 minutes prior to the start time. Walkups cannot be guaranteed a spot on the tour.

Cancellation Policy: 
AIANY Walking Tours take place rain or shine, please dress for the weather. There are no refunds, cancellations, or exchanges, unless we cancel a tour.

Join Amanda Davis and Ken Lustbader, the experts from the award-winning NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project, for its exclusive, first-ever LGBTQ walking tour of Chelsea.

For LGBTQ people in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Chelsea emerged as an affordable yet still-centrally located alternative to neighboring Greenwich Village. In fact, over the next two decades, Chelsea gradually overtook the Village as the city’s gay hub. Influential artists, from composer Virgil Thomson to poet Assotto Saint and photographer Tseng Kwong Chi, called Chelsea home. By the 1990s, gay-owned venues like the Big Cup and Barracuda were located on and around Eighth Avenue. The neighborhood also played a key role in LGBTQ rights and AIDS activism, as seen at sites connected to Lesbian Feminist Liberation, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, pioneering openly transgender psychiatrist Dr. Jeanne Hoff, bouncer and activist Stormé DeLarverie, and activist and film historian Vito Russo.

The tour will also feature the Project’s new research about the iconic Hotel Chelsea, bringing to light its rich LGBTQ history and expanding how it is interpreted today.

This 90-minute walking tour will begin in front of the Hotel Chelsea, 222 West 23rd Street, and end near The Lost & Found (372 8th Ave, New York, NY 10001), for networking and drinks. Rain or shine.

Speakers:
Amanda Davis, Project Manager, NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project
Ken Lustbader, Co-founder and Co-director, NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project

About the Speakers:
Amanda Davis is an architectural historian who has managed the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project’s initiatives since its founding in 2015. In this role, she has written National Register of Historic Places nominations and a diverse range of historical narratives for the project’s website. Davis has also developed and led public programs and walking tours and spoken to various stakeholders at the city, state, and national levels on the importance of documenting the LGBTQ community’s cultural heritage. She previously worked for Village Preservation, the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, and the Central Park Conservancy.

Ken Lustbader is a co-founder and co-director of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project. For over 30 years, he has been a national leader in issues related to LGBTQ history, documentation, and historic preservation. His prior work experience includes serving as the Historic Preservation Program Officer at the J.M. Kaplan Fund, consultant for the Lower Manhattan Emergency Preservation Fund, and Director of the New York Landmarks Conservancy’s Sacred Sites Program. Lustbader holds a B.A. in Economics from Vassar College and M.S. in Historic Preservation from Columbia University.

Meet at the Madison Avenue BID offices: 29 East 61 Street, Third Floor, New York, NY 10065. Please arrive 15 minutes prior to tour start time. 

Join AIANY and the Madison Avenue BID as we set out to discover the history behind Madison Avenue’s landmark buildings and explore how high-fashion retail has been incorporated into the district to create a world-famous shopping destination. The area has evolved from brownstones built in the 1870s and 1880s to lavish Beaux Arts townhouses by celebrated architects such as McKim, Mead & White, Carrère & Hastings, and Ernest Flagg, to luxury apartment buildings designed by Rosario Candela, Emery Roth, and others. Since the early 20th century, many of these historic residential buildings have been transformed to accommodate prestigious stores. The tour will examine architecture from 1870 to the present on and near Madison in the East 60s and 70s, an area entirely within the Upper East Side Historic District. We will consider how landmark designation has preserved the avenue’s distinctive character.

This monthly tour is offered in partnership with the Madison Avenue Business Improvement District (BID), a public-private partnership established in 1996 with the goal of enhancing the quality of life for the community and its visitors. The BID focuses on public safety, sanitation, promotion and advocacy for the district, striving to make Madison Avenue a more attractive and dynamic place in which to shop, live, work and visit.

AIANY Guide: John Arbuckle, Assoc. AIA

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Health and Safety Guidelines: 

AIANY cannot be held liable and assumes no responsibility for any injury or loss incurred by participants in these programs. Tour is limited to 17 attendees. Walkups cannot be guaranteed a spot on the tour. 

Cancellation Policy: 
AIANY Walking Tours take place rain or shine, please dress for the weather. There are no refunds, cancellations, or exchanges, unless we cancel a tour.

Meet at 42nd Street Entrance to the Ford Foundation. Please arrive 15 minutes prior to tour start time. 

There was a time when this seven block long stretch of East 42nd Street from the East River to Grand Central Terminal was seen as the undesirable back door of Midtown Manhattan. Slaughterhouses lined the banks of the East River, and an assortment of manufacturing and industrial uses continued west along this major artery. With the establishment of three large scale projects in the 1930’s—Tudor City, the Daily News, and the Chrysler Building—stepping stones were created for further development. By 1954 two clearly established anchors were in place: the United Nations on the East River and Grand Central at Park Avenue. The Ford Foundation then followed in 1967. With recent new development, including the towering One Vanderbilt office tower and the cavernous construction of Grand Central Madison, the history of this famous street continues to unfold.

AIANY Guide: Joseph Lengeling, AIA

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Health and Safety Guidelines:
AIANY cannot be held liable and assumes no responsibility for any injury or loss incurred by participants in these programs. A personal audio system will be in use for this tour. The tour is limited to 17 attendees. To insure each guest will receive a device, please arrive promptly 15 minutes prior to the start time. Walkups cannot be guaranteed a spot on the tour.

Cancellation Policy: 
AIANY Walking Tours take place rain or shine. Please dress for the weather. There are no refunds, cancellations, or exchanges, unless we cancel a tour.

Explore downtown New York through a mixed reality walking tour tracing the evolution of the skyscraper. Through direct observation of iconic landmarks, including the Equitable Building and Liberty Tower, participants will examine how early high-rise construction shaped New York City's landmark 1916 Zoning Resolution and the "wedding cake" massing profile it produced. The tour moves through historically layered neighborhoods, from Wall Street to Newspaper Row, revealing how shifts in zoning, fireproofing, prefabrication and elevator technology shaped the physical and social conditions of lower Manhattan across centuries. Experience historic Wall Street through Augmented Reality (AR), connecting archival urban history to present-day questions of public welfare, equitable access, and the livability of dense cities.

Participants will leave with a richer framework for evaluating how the built environment, regulations and advances in technology, directly affect the health, safety, and welfare of the people who lived and worked downtown.

Speakers:
Ananth Robert Sampathkumar, AIA, LEED, Co-founder and Partner, NDNY Architects; Co-chair, AIANY Historic Buildings Committee

About the Speakers:
Ananth Sampathkumar is a co-founder and partner at NDNY Architects and co-chair of the AIANY Historic Buildings Committee, bringing over 20 years of experience and a philosophy rooted in high-impact, low-footprint design to everything he does. His career has spanned landmark projects including the expansion of the Javits Convention Center and Teacher's Village in Newark, with earlier work at FXFowle and Richard Meier & Partners. A registered architect in New York and New Jersey, LEED accredited, and NCARB certified, Sampathkumar has been recognized with the Henry Adams Medal from the AIA, a Schiff Foundation Fellowship from the Art Institute of Chicago, and honors from both the Chicago Architectural Club and the Graham Foundation. Sampathkumar is passionate about preserving the built environment through the use of cutting edge digital technology and channels his passion for the city into architectural tours of New York, raising funds for causes close to his heart.

Meet at the South Facade of the Cooper Union Foundation Building at 7 East 7th Street, between Cooper Square and The Bowery. Please arrive 15 minutes before the start of the tour.

The rich and diverse architectural context of NoHo’s Historic Districts continues to inspire innovative contemporary design. The highly crafted execution of many of the recent buildings in the neighborhood shows reverence for earlier masterworks. Tour highlights include Morphosis’ Cooper Union Engineering Building, Herzog & de Meuron’s 40 Bond Street, DDG Partners’ 41 Bond Street, and Selldorf Architects’ 10 Bond Street. Also encountered is a fine group of 19th-century landmarks, including the Cooper Union Foundation Building, Astor Library (now the Public Theater), and the De Vinne Press, all of which grappled to find the appropriate architectural language for taller buildings so clearly illustrated by Louis Sullivan’s Bayard-Condict Building’s dominant vertical expression. Along the route, a discussion of technological and stylistic breakthroughs, including the transition from masonry load bearing to steel frame construction and the appearance of more varied cladding materials, will stitch the tour’s sites together.

AIANY Guide: Alex McLean, AIA

AIANY cannot be held liable and assumes no responsibility for any injury or loss incurred by participants in these programs. Tour is limited to 15 attendees. Walkups cannot be guaranteed a spot on the tour. 

Cancellation Policy: 
AIANY Walking Tours take place rain or shine, please dress for the weather. There are no refunds, cancellations, or exchanges, unless we cancel a tour.

Meet at SW Corner of 42nd Street and Park Avenue inside the atrium of the Philip Morris Building; Please arrive 15 minutes prior to tour start time.

Park Avenue, below Grand Central Terminal, and Park Avenue South (formerly Fourth Avenue) pass through the historic neighborhoods of Murray Hill and Rose Hill and the more recently named Flatiron and NoMad districts. Once the insurance row of Manhattan, today these neighborhoods feature a lively mix of commercial, residential, and institutional uses, including transformed Class B office buildings and recent ground-up additions.

Within this corridor lies an encyclopedia of the architecture of New York City. Charles Follen McKim, Stanford White, and Horace Trumbauer prominently represent the 19th Century, while projects by Cass Gilbert, Ely Jacques Kahn, and Harvey Wiley Corbett usher in the first forty years of the 20th Century. Contemporary work by Ennead Architects, Michael Graves, Renzo Piano, Pelli Clarke Pelli, Christian de Portzamparc, and Gwathmey Siegel are also highlighted on the avenues and adjacent blocks.

This tour examines urban design and architectural issues in Park Avenue South, including NYC zoning, the Manhattan grid, POPS bonus plazas, Class A and Class B office buildings, and façade organizing principles.

AIANY Guide: Joseph Lengeling, AIA

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Health and Safety Guidelines:

AIANY cannot be held liable and assumes no responsibility for any injury or loss incurred by participants in these programs. The tour is limited to 17 attendees. Walkups cannot be guaranteed a spot on the tour.

Cancellation Policy: 
AIANY Walking Tours take place rain or shine. Please dress for the weather. There are no refunds, cancellations, or exchanges, unless we cancel a tour.