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Explore this neighborhood that has developed into a mecca for art lovers and makers. Artists from all over the city and the world have painted these six blocks in Brooklyn with an astounding variety of imagery. This internationally famous outdoor gallery of street art goes beyond hip and cool – these street artists display a virtuoso handling of material and media, wildly inventive illustration styles and themes, along with trenchant commentary on current social economic, political and social issues. Everyone will find something interesting and revelatory, on lampposts and sidewalks, on doorways and gates to rooftops and high walls. Crowded with old school graffiti, wild style masterpieces, inventive sculptures, stencil work, stickers, wheat paste posters and monumental spray paint murals, the concentration and diversity of artwork is hard to imagine or believe.

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.  

Walk along the waterfront from John Street in Dumbo to Atlantic Avenue near Brooklyn Heights to see new buildings and landscapes in and around Brooklyn Bridge Park.  

Look at recent additions to the campuses of Columbia University and Barnard College in Morningside Heights and then take a sneak peek at Columbia's expansion into Manhattanville.