Manhattan Audio Tours

Manhattan is thirteen and a half miles long and two and a quarter miles wide at its widest point, which means the entire island is smaller than many suburban towns. Within that space it has managed to create more concentrated economic activity, cultural production and urban intensity than almost anywhere on earth. The grid established by the Commissioners Plan of 1811 runs from Houston Street to 155th Street with a discipline that makes navigation simple: avenues run north-south, streets east-west, and the numbers rise reliably as you go north and west. Central Park, 840 acres of engineered landscape opened in 1876, sits at the grid's heart like a necessary breath.

The architecture is the argument.

The Chrysler Building, finished in 1930 with its stainless steel eagle gargoyles and art deco crown, was the tallest building in the world for eleven months before the Empire State Building topped it in 1931. The Flatiron Building at the intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue has had its triangular shape since 1902. The High Line, a 1.45-mile elevated linear park built on a disused freight rail line from the 1930s, opened in 2009 and transformed the Meatpacking District and Chelsea into two of the most expensive real estate markets in the world in about eight years.