🇺🇸 New York · Ghost walk

The buried city

Slave graves, gallows and the vice of Five Points where New York was founded

Before Wall Street had its money, it had its graves. Lower Manhattan is the oldest part of the city and also the most buried: beneath the office blocks, the parks and the pavements rest tens of thousands of enslaved Africans in a rediscovered burial ground, the poor and the executed in an old common, and whole quarters built on top of a filled-in lake that became New York's most notorious slum. On this walk you go from the African Burial Ground, where free and enslaved Africans finally have a memorial, through the vice and poverty of Five Points, past the gallows and poorhouses at City Hall, out to the harbour that swallowed sailors and ships, and end at Trinity and St. Paul, where New York's oldest gravestones still stand. This is no scare show. It is documented American history about who the city's dead were and how long they were forgotten.

6 stops · ⏱ 120 min · 2.4 km

Self guided on your phone, walk whenever you like

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