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Since the spring of 2009, New Yorkers and visitors have been enjoying the High Line, a public park built on an abandoned elevated rail structure on Manhattan's West Side.  The High Line has sparked a design revival in the neighboring Meatpacking District and Chelsea, with work by some of today's best-known architects, including Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, and Shigeru Ban.  Join us for an architectural walking tour along 1.5-miles of this elevated park from south to north.  Learn about the design of the park and the many new buildings that have sprung up alongside it.  

The old Lower East Side comes alive in this walking tour.  Central to the tour is the Jewish neighborhood, whose teeming tenements formed the heart of the most crowded place in the late nineteenth century world, including stops before a gloriously restored historic synagogue and the Jewish-owned bank tower where struggling immigrants built their nest eggs.  We also briefly visit the surrounding wards, marked at the time by gangs, flophouses, homeless newsboys and the noisy, smoke-belching elevated railway, as well as the seventeenth century Jewish cemetery that is the oldest human site in Manhattan.  Along the way, Velona tracks unforgettable photographs by Jacob Riis and others to the exact spots they were taken, portraying the struggles and desperation of immigrant life.