South Street Seaport was once America’s center of commerce. The ships that docked here came from every corner of the globe. The coastline was so valuable that people literally bought the right to fill in the water and build on it.

Fulton Street was the site of George Washington's miraculous escape from the British in 1776. A generation later, it would see the invention of the World's ferry steam-powered ferry. Thomas Edison invented electricity here. Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid stayed here awaiting transport to South America.

Behind the seaport lay the 4th Ward - once the toughest neighborhood in all America. Our tour will show them to you - the “hole-in-the-wall” where Gallus Meg acted as bouncer and kept a jar of bitten-off ears behind the counter; the rat-pit where Kit Burns oversaw a nightly spectacle of carnage; the “Tub of Blood,” “Cat Alley,” and “McGuirk’s Suicide Hall.”

The second half our tour presents an in-depth expose of the Brooklyn Bridge - the greatest feat of engineering in modern history. The greatest of New York can be attributed to two great public works - the Erie Canal that linked New York to the continent, and the Brooklyn Bridge that coupled the energies of what were America’s first and fourth largest cities - Manhattan and Brooklyn.