New York Songlines: Maiden Lane

Site of 4 WTC

(150 Greenwich St): Here was the nine-story Commodities Exchange Building, destroyed in the September 11 attacks. Like WTC 7, the replacement building is going to have the same address: WTC Tower 4, a glassy, 72-story office tower designed by Fumihiko Maki. Scheduled to open in 2013, which would make it the first of the new WTC towers to be completed. This building will house the Port Authority's new headquarters, as well as half a million square feet of NYC government offices.

Future Site of WTC Tower 3

(175 Greenwich St): Richard Rogers' design is for an 80-story building with 2.8 million square feet of office space. It could open as early as 2015--if developer Larry Silverstein can find a tenant willing to commit to 400,000 square feet.

South:

1 Liberty Plaza

165 (block): A hulk built by U.S. Steel (1971-73), designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill to show off the client's product--the facade is mainly steel. Owned for a time by Merrill Lynch, it also served as the headquarters of NASDAQ; now houses the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.

Torn down for 1 Liberty Plaza was the Singer Tower, a 1908 building by Ernest Flagg that housed the sewing machine company's headquarters. Briefly the tallest building in the world at 47 stories, it became the tallest building ever demolished when it was torn down in 1968. The handsome Second Empire structure is considered one of New York City's great architectural losses, up there with Penn Station.

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Century 21

22 (corner): This is the mecca of discount shopping in New York City, where hard-core bargain-hunters elbow each other in pursuit of marked-down designer goods. Founded in Brooklyn in 1961. Currently expanding from four to seven floors at this location, where it was one of the first major businesses to reopen after the September 11 attacks, with its crowds and attitude intact.

8: Majestic Pizza

Corner: Bento Nouvuee sushi. The widow Jane Renwick, a friend of Washington Irving's, the inspiration for Robert Burns' ''Blue-Eyed Lassie'' and the grandmother of architect James Renwick Jr., lived at the corner of Cortlandt and Broadway.

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Corner (170 Broadway): Broadway-Maiden Lane Building, a 1903 design by Clinton & Russell

2: Cafe Health Exchange

6: Maiden Lane Wines & Liquors

8: Alfanoose, Mediterranean

22: Kawa sushi

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Corner (174 Broadway): William Barthman Jeweler was founded at this location in 1884. Barthman (1840-1914), who came to New York as a 12-year-old orphan by hiring on as a cabin boy, was later an lieutenant in Grant's army.

3: Chameleon Comics

9: Maiden Heaven, deli; Baoguette, Vietnamese sandwiches

15: New York Legislative Services, a non-profit organization founded in 1932 that researches the history of laws

19: This was the address of Elsworth's Boarding House, where James Madison lived in 1787 when he was writing The Federalist Papers explaining and advocating for the U.S. Constitution.

Corner (59 Nassau): Friendly Gourmet

South:

Federal Reserve Bank

This is the headquarters of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the wealthiest and most important of the 12 regional banks that make up the quasi-governmental Federal Reserve System. The New York Fed has a major role in carrying out Fed policy, buying and selling Treasury securities to regulate the availability of credit, and participating in foreign exchange markets to maintain or adjust the value of the dollar. Five stories below ground, a subbasement holds the largest stock of gold in the world, more than 5,000 tons valued at about $90 billion. (The film Die Hard With a Vengeance depicts a scheme to rob these vaults.) More than $2 trillion in cash and securities is transferred through this building every day.

The building itself is a Renaissance fortress (complete with turret) designed by York & Sawyer and built from 1919-35. The ironwork by Samuel Yellin is considered one of its main attractions.

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29-39 (corner): 2 Federal Reserve Plaza, a 1986 building by Johnson/Burgee Architects. The 27-story structure features turret-like structures at each corner, echoing the castle-like roofline of the Federal Reserve building.

43: Barthman & Straat, the predecessor to William Barthman Jewelry, was founded at this address in 1873.

57: Thomas Jefferson lived at this address for three months in 1790, when he was Washington's secretary of State. The house he lived in was torn down in 1929.

59 (corner): Home Insurance Plaza, a 45-story skyscraper built in 1966 for the Home Insurance Company. Architect Alfred Easton Poor worked in the International Style, with top-to-bottom light-colored columns reminiscent of the Two Towers design.

The plaza was redesigned in 1987 by Kohn Pedersen Fox. Loiterers in the plaza are threatened with arrest.

South:

Legion Memorial Square

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80 (corner): A 1912 building of 25 floors. In 2010, a 250-foot crane fell against the building, damaging the facade but injuring no one. In the building were offices of the city's Department of Investigation, which at the time had been looking into whether corruption at the Department of Buildings had contributed to similar crane collapses that killed nine people in 2008.

100 (corner): A 1929 building, 24 stories designed by Clinton & Russell

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Corner (84 William): A handsome 1907 building of 17 stories, designed by Howells and Stokes. In 1927, it became the offices of Fitkin Utilities, a holding company owned by Abram Fitkin, evangelist turned entrepreneur. Converted to residences in 2001.

83 (corner): A 13-story building from 1958. The NYC Department of Investigation Fingerprint Unit, which checks the prints of people who work in childcare and homecare, is based here. Toloache Taqueria is on the ground floor.

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2 Gold Street

Corner (2 Gold): This 51-story high-rise, designed by Avinash K. Malhotra and completed in 2003, is notable for having young, very attractive tenants (according to the readers of Curbed) and a sunbathing lawn on the roof. The metal sculpture in the plaza out front is Two, by Gustavo Bonevardi.

99: Stage Store Deli

Corner (211 Pearl): This 28-story apartment building, built 2007, preserves the facade of a Greek Revival warehouse built in 1831 by William Colgate, whose soap business eventually became Colgate-Palmolive. Later in the 1830s, Seth Low had a Far East import shop here, selling Chinese gongs and Turkish opium. It was much later a bar called Rosie O'Grady's. When the rest of the block was torn down, developers were mandated to save the facade and incorporate it into the new building. I'm not against the idea of preserving historic architecture while building modern annexes upon it, but this looks sort of silly.

South:

110 (block): A 39-floor building from 1961, also known as 80 Pine Street, designed by Emery Roth & Sons in the International Ziggurat style. The building is home to Cahill Gordon & Reindel, a high-powered law firm with clients like JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank.... Its most famous lawyer is Floyd Abrams, who defended The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case and got limits on corporate campaign contributions struck down in Citizens United.

There was a fire on the 29th floor here in 2007 that injured eight firefighters.

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125 (block): Water Street Plaza, a 16-story building from 1959, designed in an Art Deco/Art Moderne style by Sylvan & Robert Bien. The International Planned Parenthood Federation bought the entire ninth floor here in 2010. The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council is also here; formed in 1973, the arts promotion group lost its offices in the North Tower of the World Trade Center in the September 11 attacks. Has a cool map of Downtown culture.

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Block (88 Pine): Wall Street Plaza, a 32-floor building by I.M. Pei from 1973, which the AIA Guide calls "a white, crisp elegance of aluminum and glass."

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Block (160 Front): A seven-story building from 1930--a very short building for this part of the neighborhood.

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Continental Center

180 (block): A 41-story green-glass octagonal skyscraper, built in 1982 by the Rockefeller Group for Continental Insurance, to a design by Swanke Hayden Connell Architects. The AIA Guide calls it a "tacky green monster." Later occupants have included Goldman Sachs and AIG.

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