Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
farm country and wilderness. While all that's changed, this is still
the best place in the city to search for the past.
Lower Manhattan constitutes everything south of Chambers
Street.
Battery Park,
the point of departure for the Statue of Lib-
erty, Ellis Island, and Staten Island, is on the far southern tip of
the island. The
South Street Seaport,
now touristy but still a
reminder of times when shipping was the lifeblood of the city, lies
a bit north on the east side; it's just south of the Brooklyn Bridge.
The rest of the area is considered the
Financial District,
which
contains
Ground Zero.
Until September 11, 2001, the Financial
District was anchored by the
World Trade Center,
with the
World Financial Center and Battery Park City to the west, and
Wall Street
running crosstown a little south and to the east.
Just about all of the major subway lines congregate here before
they either end or head to Brooklyn.
TriBeCa
Bordered by the Hudson River to the west, the area
north of Chambers Street, west of Broadway, and south of Canal
Street is the
Tr i
angle
Be
low
Ca
nal Street, or TriBeCa. Since the
1980s, as SoHo became saturated with chic, the spillover has been
transforming TriBeCa into one of the city's hippest residential
neighborhoods, where celebrities and families coexist in cast-iron
warehouses converted into expensive apartments. Artists' lofts and
galleries as well as hip antiques and design shops pepper the area,
as do some of the city's best restaurants.
Chinatown
New York City's most famous ethnic enclave is
bursting past its traditional boundaries and has encroached on
Little Italy. The former marshlands northeast of City Hall and
below Canal Street, from Broadway to the Bowery, are where Chi-
nese immigrants were forced to live in the 1870s. This booming
neighborhood is now a conglomeration of Asian populations. It
offers tasty cheap eats in cuisines from Szechuan to Hunan to
Cantonese to Vietnamese to Thai. Exotic shops offer strange
foods, herbs, and souvenirs; bargains on clothing and leather are
plentiful. It's a blast to walk down Canal Street, peering into the
electronics and luggage stores and watching crabs cut loose from
their handlers at the fish markets.
The Canal Street (J, M, Z, N, R, 6, Q, W) station will get you
to the heart of the action. The streets are crowded during the day
and empty out after around 9pm; they remain quite safe, but the
neighborhood is more enjoyable during the bustle.
Little Italy
Little Italy, traditionally the area east of Broadway
between Houston and north of Canal streets, is a shrinking com-
munity, due to the encroachment of thriving Chinatown. It's now
