New York - Lower Manhattan Tip

Ground Zero Museum Workshop features photographs, artifacts from the recovery, items worn by recovery workers, actual tools used for digging and and 12 minute film. The Museum features 100 images and artifacts as well as the stories behind them.

The George Gustav Heye Center of the National Museum of the American Indian is home to over a million works concerning Native American peoples and their customs with most of the collection in storage, the exhibits change frequently. It is housed in the neoclassical Alexander Hamilton Customs House.

The National Museum of the American Indian also hosts numeroud public programs including music and dance performances, films, and symposia.

Built in 1790, New York is the world's most important stock exchange. It has survived bear markets, bull markets, depressions, recessions, tickertape and computer crashes.

Financial keystone of the U.S.

The Custom House is one of the city's finest Beaux Arts designs, absorbing the talents of the best sculptors and artists of the early twentieth century. Notable pieces include the 44 Ionic columns out front, murals by Reginald Marsh decorating the marble rotunda and a portrait of Garbo at the entrance. Since 1994, the Custom House has exhibited new works for contemporary Native American artists.

The Barclay-Vesey Building was designed by McKenzie, Voorhes & Gmelin to house the New York Telephone Company. The design emphasized the vertical and the modern. The 52,000 square feet building occupies a full, parallelogram-shaped city block. Today, the building is admired for its bold, geometric massing, flattened, non-historical ornamentation and verticality.

Bowling Green is a triangular plot north of Battery Park. It was New York's earliest park and later became a cattle market then a bowling ground, hence its name. A statue of King George III stood here until the signing of the Declaration of Independence when it was hacked to pieces and smelted for ammunition.

The Castle Clinton National Monument was built in 1807 as a defense post and later became a theater, then an immigration center processing 7.5 million newcomers. Now, it is a monument and visitors' center for the National Park Service. The monument is also a point of departure for the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.

The Cunard Building has a Renaissance facade and its hall contains murals and frescoes including maps of the world and a decorated ceiling. The main floor served as a ticket office for the Cunard Passenger Ship Line.

ATTRACTION IS CLOSED.

The Downtown Athletic Club is an art deco creation from 1926, featuring a front arcade of Moorish-flavored arches and a facade of salt-glazed tiles in burnt orange and brown.

This is one of 12 Federal Reserve banks. It issues U.S. currency, and, five stories below ground, houses gold owned by the nations of the world. Completed in 1924, the bank occupies a full block and is liberally adorned with wrought-iron grillwork and inspired by the palaces of the Italian Renaissance.

The Fraunces Tavern Museum is New York's only remaining block of eighteenth-century buildings. The museum contains an exact replica of the original Fraunces Tavern, first built in 1719. Here, George Washington said farewell to his officers in 1783.

The Museum of American Finance, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, seeks to empower people to better understand risk and reward, thereby making better financial decisions. The Museum, as of January 2008, is located in the 30,000 sq. ft. historic, former headquarters of the Bank of New York at 48 Wall Street featuring permanent, interactive exhibitions on the Financial Markets, Money, Banking, Entrepreneurship and Alexander Hamilton, as well as a gallery for changing exhibits.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage chronicles the twentieth-century Jewish experience through photos, artifacts and videotaped narratives. The museum pays special attention to the Holocaust of World War Two.

New York Unearthed has archaeological exhibits about New York City that piece together 6,000 years of history through dioramas and artifacts. The museum is especially popular with children.

Most appropriately, the Skyscraper Museum is located in New York City.The museum explores tall buildings as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence.

Temporary exhibits feature different themes related to skyscrapers, the history and future.

Built in 1696-7, Trinity Church was the first site of King's College (Columbia University). Alexander Hamilton and Robert Fulton are buried in the church. It is one of America's oldest Anglican parishes. Its design marks the beginning of the best period of Gothic Revival in America.