The oldest part of the city, where the streets predate the grid and bend around vanished shorelines. Offices by day, increasingly residential by night.
The original city
Everything New York was until about 1800 is in this square mile. The Dutch laid out New Amsterdam here, the English took it in 1664, and the street pattern — Pearl Street, which was the waterfront; Wall Street, which was the wall; Broad Street, which was a canal — is a map of a town that no longer exists.
The grid that governs the rest of Manhattan starts at Houston Street. Below that, nothing is straight.
What is here
Wall Street and the Stock Exchange. Trinity Church and St Paul’s Chapel. The 9/11 Memorial and Museum, One World Observatory and the Oculus. The Battery and every ferry in the harbour. The Brooklyn Bridge approach. City Hall and the Woolworth Building.
The Seaport on the East River side has cobbled Fulton Street, a few surviving Federal-era buildings, tall ships at the pier, a rooftop bar season, and the Tin Building food hall.
Stone Street, a pedestrianised alley of nineteenth-century buildings, fills with tables in summer and is where the finance crowd drinks.
Living and staying
The Financial District was almost entirely offices until the 2000s, when a tax incentive turned a lot of old office towers into apartments. It now has a real residential population, a supermarket problem that is slowly resolving, and a much better hotel supply than it used to.
Staying here is a reasonable choice: it is quiet at night, well connected, close to the ferries, and cheaper than Midtown. The downside is that the dining is thin and a great deal of it closes when the offices do.
Battery Park City, on landfill from the World Trade Center excavation, is a planned residential district on the Hudson with an esplanade that is one of the pleasanter walks in Manhattan and almost no visitors on it.
More Neighborhoods
Midtown
Where the skyscrapers, the theatres and most of the hotels are. Nobody who lives in New York would choose to live here, and almost every visitor should stay here once.
Greenwich Village
Low brick townhouses on streets that ignore the grid, because the Village was a separate settlement before the grid arrived and refused to be redrawn.
SoHo
Cast-iron warehouses, Belgian block streets and a hundred and fifty years of the same cycle: industry, then artists, then shops.