New York Architecture Walking Tour

This New York Walking tour is available in two options: group and private. The tour starts from the lobby of the Tudor Hotel at 304 East 42nd Street.

This three-hour walking tour traverses one of the world's greatest thoroughfares, 42nd Street, to help you understand the architecture in New York City.

The walk is led by a tour guide who is either a practising architect or scholar of architectural history, and aims to give both an overview of the architectural history of the city and the fantastic ways that the human and built environments collide.

Begin your walking tour at the East River in the hidden residential enclave Tudor City. With the distinctive United Nations Building and spectacular views as a backdrop, get introduced to the architectural history of New York.

Continue on East 42nd Street, home to several important structures, from the glass and concrete Ford Foundation Building, to a trio of skyscrapers that epitomize Art Deco style: the Daily News Building, the Chanin Building, and the famous Chrysler Building.

Grand Central Station, a magnificent Beaux-Arts structure, is visited outside and inside to discuss the vast spaces and history of this temple to transportation.

Just two blocks away, another Beaux-Arts building, Carrère and Hastings’ New York Public Library, offers sumptuous exterior decoration and interiors for a different purpose.

The next stop is Times Square, where 42nd Street converges with Seventh Avenue and Broadway. Here, your tour guide will discuss the history of this fabled intersection, its "red light" past and its recent metamorphoses to a center of international media.

Next, visit restored early 20th-century theaters between Seventh and Eighth Avenues and learn about the establishment of the area in the late 19th-century as New York's Theater District.

Crossing Eighth Avenue, your walking tour ends with Raymond Hood's McGraw-Hill Building, a bookend – and counterpoint – to his Daily News Building at the east end of the street. This structure, with its tiling and horizontal bands of windows, was the only New York building included in Hitchcock and Johnson's landmark 1932 publication, The International Style, and ushers in a new style of sleek modern skyscraper that has come to define the city's architecture in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The tour ends at the New York Times Building on 41st and 8th.