A Walking Tour of New York City Midtown

A Walking Tour of New York City – Central Midtown

a walking tour in the Look Up, America series from walkthetown.com

by Doug Gelbert

published by Cruden Bay Books at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 by Cruden Bay Books

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Central Midtown (sometimes called simply Midtown) comprises the area between 40th and 59th streets, flanked by Eighth Avenue to the West and Park Avenue to the East. While quite a few New Yorkers work here (an estimated 700,000 commuters daily) very few actually live here...or in any area even remotely resembling Midtown.

Central Midtown is what many people imagine the entire city of New York to be. Skyscrapers, neon lights, crowds of people, a cacophony of car horns, and so on. Even subway announcers (or digital recordings gradually replacing them) sometimes play into this by announcing the 42nd street stop as the crossroads of the world.

That’s where this walking tour will begin, but we will only venture as far west as Sixth Avenue on this landmark-stuffed tour...

1.

New York Public Library

475 Fifth Avenue, between 40th and 42nd streets

In the United States the Library of Congress is bigger than the New York Public Library and that is it. America’s first millionaire, fur trader John Jacob Astor, left $400,000 when he died in 1848 to get the ball rolling on a public library but when it opened in 1854 in the East Village it was a research-only affair, no books circulated. In fact, you had to pay admission to get in and there was no physical access to any items. In 1895 the New York Public Library formed with the consolidation of the Astor Library, the Lenox Library