Description:
A color map of the Manhattan subway system greets you as you open Memorable Walks in New York, right inside the front cover, setting the tone of convenient, accessible information. It's a very good start. The rest of the book follows suit with 10 walking tours, taking in Chinatown, the Lower East Side, SoHo, the Village, Central Park, the Financial District, Lower Manhattan, and the Upper East and West Sides. Each tour provides subway-route starting points; a time estimate (generally three to five hours, not including restaurant stops); an excellent map of each neighborhood and its notable sites; plus a word of advice on the best times to be (or not to be) walking there. Then there's each walking-tour narrative, pointing out historic landmarks and events, and providing detailed route instructions for 20 to 50 notable sites. For the Chinatown tour, for example, 27 points of interest are listed on the itinerary, including vegetable sellers on Baxter Street, the Manhattan Bridge (built in 1905), Confucius Plaza (first major public-funded housing project built for Chinese use), and Bloody Angle, where two Chinatown gangs engaged in fierce turf warfare. There's a profile of dim sum, a selection of Chinese restaurants suitable for lunch breaks, the Ming Fay Book Store, the Chinatown History Museum, and Columbus Park. The tour ends on Rutgers Street near the East Broadway F-line subway entrance, a location you can find easily enough on that front-page subway map. In all of the walking tours, Bramblett includes the same thoughtful attention to detail and the concerns of the visitor on foot, making for a compact, considerate guide and a lovely way to get to know New York. --Stephanie Gold
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