New York Songlines: Vesey Street

South:

World Financial Center

4 World Financial Center

250 (corner): This 34-story building completed in 1986 houses the world headquarters and central trading floor of Merrill Lynch. It was the least damaged of the four World Financial Center towers on September 11.

3 World Financial Center

200 (corner): At 51 stories, this 1986 post-modern skyscraper is the tallest building in the World Financial Center. It's distinguished by the pyramid on its roof. It serves as the world headquarters of the American Express corporation, which owns the building. Other tenants include the Security & Exchange Commission and the Royal Bank of Canada.

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North:

Conrad New York

Corner (102 North End): A Hilton hotel, originally built in 2000 (Perkins Eastman, architects) as one of the chain's Embasssy Suites. Closed in 2010 for extensive internal reconstruction to become part of a more luxurious brand, named for the company's founder (and Mad Men character) Conrad Hilton. (Perhaps subliminally they're calling these Not Paris hotels.) The hotel's atrium features the massive mural Loopy Doopy (Blue and Purple) by Sol LeWitt.

Goldman Sachs Headquarters

Corner (200 West): 43 stories built from 2005-09, designed by Pei Cobb Freed, with a parabolic eastern facade and a deconstructivist western face. The company built at about the same time another similarly sized office tower across the Hudson in Jersey City. Founded in 1869 by Marcus Goldman and (later) his son-in-law Samuel Sachs, it's probably the best politically connected corporation in the world--having produced three U.S. Treasury secretaries, a White House chief of staff, a New York Fed chief, an Italian prime minister, a New Jersey governor.... The list goes on.

South:

Ground Zero

Freedom Tower

The single tower that is replacing the Twin Towers as the high point of the World Trade Center will have 104 stories, six fewer than the previous buildings, but will match the height of the taller of the twins, at 1,368 feet. (Counting its antenna, it will a symbolic 1,776 feet--though the connection between post-terrorism rebuilding and independence from Britain is somewhat murky.) When completed, it will be New York's and the U.S.'s tallest building, and the third tallest building in the world.

The start of construction was delayed until 2006, largely due to squabbling between the state government and developer Larry Silverstein.

The project's popular name was given it by then-Gov. George Pataki, though the Port Authority prefers that it be referred to as One World Trade Center, and insists this has nothing to do with the fact that the first major tenant is the China Center.

This corner of the site used to be the location of World Trade Center 6. Completed in 1975, this eight-story building housed the U.S. Customs House and other government offices, including the Export-Import Bank of the United States and the Peace Corps' regional office. It was destroyed on September 11, 2001, by debris from the North Tower and subsequent fire.

Future Performing Arts Center

To be designed by Frank Gehry, it will house the Joyce modern dance company, moving here from Chelsea. The building was going to house the Drawing Center art project as well, but it withdrew after an absurd McCarthyite campaign led by The Daily News. A proposed International Freedom Center was also driven from the site by critics who feared it would be a venue for "controversial debate."

Future Remapped Greenwich Street

At some point when the reconstruction of Ground Zero has progressed, Greenwich Street will once again run interrupted from Vesey to Liberty Street, unmaking part of the World Trade Center superblock. Superblocks are not nearly as fashionable in urban design as they once were.

Site of 5 WTC

Corner (200 Greenwich): Was the nine-story Dean Witter Building, destroyed in the September 11 attacks. Future site of 2 World Trade Center, aka 200 Greenwich Street, a planned 88-story building that will rise to 1,349 feet--99 feet taller than the Empire State Building (not counting the antenna spire). The Foster and Partners design features a distinctive cluster of four diamond-shaped spires. This will be the last WTC tower to be completed--if it's ever built at all.

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North:

Barclay-Vesey Building

Block (140 West): Built from 1923-27 for New York Telephone, this 32-story brick-and-limestone structure designed by Ralph Walker is considered the first Art Deco skyscraper. Noted for its dramatic setbacks, its communication-themed murals and its Guastavino-vaulted pedestrian arcades. It was seriously damaged during the September 11 attacks but survived thanks to its solid masonry construction. It now serves as the headquarters of Verizon Communications.

WASHINGTON ST         ===> N

The northeast corner of the old Washington Market.

7 WTC

Block (250 Greenwich): A 52-story building clad in highly reflective glass, constructed 2002-06 to a design by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, this is the first and so far the only part of the World Trade Center complex to be rebuilt. The financial ratings firm Moody's is the biggest tenant here. On the 40th floor is the New York Academy of Sciences, an organization founded in 1817 whose members have included presidents Jefferson and Monroe, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Albert Einstein and Margaret Mead.

The former building here, also known as 7 WTC, was a red-granite by Emery Roth & Sons, who also designed the Twin Towers. Built atop a Con Ed substation, it was supposed to house Drexel Burnham Lambert, which pulled out of a $3 billion rental deal after it was rocked by a insider-trading scandal.

It did house offices for the IRS, INS, DoD and CIA--as well as the NYC Office of Emergency Management, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's bunker, which he placed here against all advice next to the city's No. 1 terrorist target. It got much more use as a lovenest for Giuliani and his mistress than as an actual emergency command center.

The building's collapse on September 11 has been central to conspiracy theories about the supposed planned demolition of the World Trade Center. To this layperson, the official conclusion that a skyscraper might fall down after burning for seven hours without any effective firefighting does not seem far-fetched.

GREENWICH ST         ===> N

7 WTC Park

Point: A triangular park that opened in 2006, at the same time as the completion of 7 WTC. Includes Jeff Koons' Balloon Flower.

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Church Street Station

Block (90 Church):

Built 1935 in a mixture of Classical and Art Deco. The building, with more than a million square feet of space, is owned by the Postal Service, which uses it as the major mail sorting facility for Lower Manhattan. It also houses the New York City Housing Authority and the Legal Aid Society.

South:

29 (corner): A building once at this address served as offices for St. Paul's. Apparently removed during the building of the IND subway line. Earlier, the fire department's Columbia Engine No. 14 was based here.

St. Paul's Churchyard

Corner: Several of George Washington's officers are buried here, including Major John Lucas, Major Job Sumner, Lt. Col. Etienne Marie Bechet and Dr. John Francis Vacher. Also interred here are John Bailey, who forged Washington's battle sword, and John Holt, editor of the New York Gazette and New York Journal. The cemetery is said to be haunted by the headless ghost of actor George Frederick Cooke, who left his skull to science to pay for his medical treatment; it's said to have been used as a prop in Edwin Booth's Hamlet.

St. Paul's Chapel

Depending on whether you count the starting date (1764) or the date of completion (1766), this may be the oldest building in Manhattan. (The Morris-Jumel Mansion in Harlem was built in 1765.) It was and is a satellite of Trinity Church; it survived the 1776 fire that destroyed the first Trinity because its relatively flat roof allowed rescuers to stand atop it and put out falling embers. The steeple was not added until 1796. The ornament over the altar was designed by Pierre L'Enfant, the designer of Washington, DC.

This was the church where a service was held after George Washington's inauguration in 1789; he attended services here regularly when New York was the new nation's capital. Hanging above Washington's pew here is the first depiction of the Great Seal of the United States. Other notables who worshipped here are King William IV (as a prince), Lord Cornwallis, the Marquis de Lafayette, New York Gov. George Clinton and presidents Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison and the elder George Bush. James Monroe's funeral was held here in 1831. The church served as a sanctuary for rescue workers after the September 11 attacks; the stump of a sycamore tree that protected the church from debris is preserved as a memorial.

This was the southeastern corner of the Queen's Farm, a large tract of land donated by Queen Anne to Trinity Church in 1705.

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North:

30 (corner): Underwood Building, an 18-story office building from 1911, designed by Starrett & Van Vleck for the Underwood typewriter company.

26: Stage Door Deli

24: In the 1790s, George Washington's dentist, John Greenwood, had his office at this address. Contrary to popular impression, the dentures he made for Washington were not made of wood, but from human teeth.

Garrison Building

20: This 1907 landmark was designed by Robert D. Kohn In the Vienna Secession style. It originally served as offices for The New York Evening Post, which was then run by Oswald Garrison Villard, who helped found the NAACP and the ACLU; he also owned The Nation, which served as the Post's weekly edition. The paper was sold in 1918 after accusations of pro-German sympathies hurt its circulation; it moved to a new building on West Street in 1926. The expressive sculptures holding up the cornice represent The Four Periods of Publicity; two are by Gutzon Borglum, Mount Rushmore's sculptor, and two by his wife Estelle Rumbold Kohn. New York's Landmarks commission was based here from 1980-87. It's been home to the 9/11 Memorial Preview Site, explaining the progress of the permanent memorial and museum.

18: Was O'Henry's Film Works

14: The New York County Lawyers' Association Building is a 1928 landmark designed by Cass Gilbert in the English Georgian style. The Association itself was founded in 1908 to create a nondiscriminatory bar association, and is still based here.

Corner (217 Broadway): Was the Franklin Society for Home Building and Savings, a savings & loan.

Previously on this site was the Park Hotel--better known as the Astor House Hotel-- an ultra-fashionable hotel built in 1834 by John Jacob Astor. (Astor had previously lived on the site, in the house of Rufus King, one of New York's two original senators.) Its guests included Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, James Polk, Davy Crockett, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Sam Houston, Jefferson Davis, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jenny Lind. The psychologist William James was born in the hotel on January 11, 1842. Inventor Nicola Tesla lived there from 1889-92. The hotel was torn down in 1914.

South:

222 (block): From approxi- mately this corner to the northwest corner of Pearl and Maiden Lane was the farm of Anthony ''the Turk'' Jansen, whose wife, Grietse Reyniers, was New Amsterdam's first prostitute, arriving here in 1633.

Later, this corner was the site of the Spring Garden, New York's first pleasure garden, which opened ealy in the 18th Century and lasted until 1768.

By 1834, this was the site of Scudder's Museum, which featured elaborate dioramas, a mummy, scalps, John Hancock's signature, live boa constrictor feedings and a wax statue of Daddy Lambert, known as the fattest New Yorker ever.

In 1841, Scudder's became P.T. Barnum's enormously popular American Museum, where midget Tom Thumb and Siamese twins Chang and Eng performed. The famous sign marked ''This Way to the Egress'' tricked visitors into exiting. When the museum burned down on July 13, 1865, a Bengal tiger escaped and had to be killed on Broadway by a firefighter.

From 1866-96 here was the New York Herald Building, home of the racist, anti-Semitic newspaper founded by James Gordon Bennett. It introduced such features as the gossip column and Wall Street coverage, and was the paper that sent Henry Stanley to look for the missing Dr. David Livingstone.

From 1898-1958 the St. Paul Building was here, which one architecture critic called ''perhaps the least attractive design of all New York's skyscrapers.''

The current building served as the offices of Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen in the movie Wall Street.

Bennett Building

Corner (93-99 Nassau): Built by the New York Herald's James Gordon Bennett Sr. in 1873, to a Second Empire design by Arthur Gilman; extensive additions from 1890-94. Described by the AIA Guide as "a glassy building with a deeply 3-dimensional and lavish cast-iron structural grid." With four stories added to its original six, this may be the tallest cast-iron building in the world.

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North:

Millennium Park

A nicely landscaped traffic island.

PARK ROW         ===> N

Corner (1 Park Row): J & R Computer World is part of a collection of electronics stores that takes up most of this block. J & R has a reputation as the place to go in New York for the best prices. J and R are Joe and Rachelle Friedman, a married couple who started the company in 1971 with money they got as wedding presents. This is perhaps the best-known branch of the store; much of the Songlines were written on a J & R computer. The name evokes the brilliant Kraftwerk album.

15: Pita Express

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Corner (105 Nassau): H & M Art Gallery of Downtown, African-American art

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Corner (161 William): A 22-story building designed by Sylvan Bien, completed 1952.

South:

Block (150 William): Administration for Children's Services

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North:

89: Tsingtao Cottage, Chinese