240 Years in the Making: A Self-Guided Manhattan Walking Tour

This self-guided audio tour packs 240 years of Upper Manhattan history onto one Hudson-side ridge: a Dutch Colonial farmhouse rebuilt in 1784 after British troops burned the original down, a Gilded Age mansion's lone granite driveway, and the Met Cloisters, built from real medieval stonework shipped over from France and Spain. You'll stand where Margaret Corbin earned the first U.S. military pension, learn why Le Corbusier called the George Washington Bridge the world's most beautiful, and walk through Washington Heights history that inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda's In the Heights. You'll finish at the Little Red Lighthouse, saved from the scrapyard by children's mailed-in pennies, on a walk where the city's layers pile up like the ancient schist beneath your feet.