Take a journey through lower Manhattan and experience the “city at the heart of the Revolution.” Each stop provides audio narration with site information, character profiles, select video, and links to our Library for a scalable, “choose your own adventure” model of self-guided tourism. Here you’ll learn about some of the period’s most famous characters and events — and others far less known — for a trip that will challenge the knowledge of even the most ardent buff!
Walking TourKnow Before You Go
Walk Length: 90 minutes
Audio Narration: 75 minutes
Distance: 3 mi / 5 km
Starting Point: The Battery
Ending Point: Federal Hall
Tour Map
Site List
Imperial Crisis (1763-75)
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New York rose to prominence in the British empire during the mid-1700s, supplying the army with textiles, weapons, food, and drink in a series of wars against France and Spain that extended to North America. As the region prospered from the drive against these colonial rivals, New Yorkers of all kinds proudly identified as “Englishmen.” Britain, in turn, steadily fortified the imperial outpost, recognizing the value of its deep-sea harbor at the mouth of Hudson River, which provided unrivaled access to the continental interior. Bolstering the old Dutch barricades on the East and Harlem rivers, and the fort at the southernmost tip of Manhattan, London also stationed their only garrison in the thirteen colonies (the largest and fastest-growing part of the empire) in New York. The Battery, or cannon-mounted wall lining the city’s harbor, further protected the economic and political hub, a symbol of New York’s status as the unofficial capital of British North America.
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New York was extraordinarily cosmopolitan, even for a small port in the modern Atlantic. It was a thriving center of exchange for goods and people, serving regional and international markets in the British empire. Dozens of ethnicities of various races mixed in a city unrivaled for its diversity as well as its share of voters (“freemen” and “freeholders”). This played out dramatically with the Imperial Crisis of 1763-75, as ports like New York became the first and leading edge of protest because of their dependence on British trade, uniting rebel merchants and seamen. Coenties Slip lay in the Dock Ward, at the start of the East River waterfront, where the “Sons of Liberty” and “Sons of Neptune” came together.
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Hanover Square was the leading communications hub in British North America. With ships arriving directly from London, New York was often the first to receive and publish European news. It then circulated up to New England via Boston and down to the southern colonies via Philadelphia. Printers were rarely impartial observers, and became major political figures in this era, stitching together previously non-existent lines of communication and giving new voice to protest with anonymous, widely circulated broadsides and pamphlets. British legislation in the 1760s also directly threatened their business. Here at the old “printers corner,” we discuss the role of New York’s early media headquarters in shaping the Revolution — from both sides of this “first civil war.”
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New York hosted the first meeting of leaders from across the colonies during the Stamp Act crisis of 1765. Parliament repealed the law, but one year later enacted a raft of import taxes and other regulations, the Townshend Acts of 1767. The most dramatic of the laws suspended New York’s legislature, demanding the colony house and feed its unrivaled share of British soldiers — the most dramatic action taken until the Coercive / Intolerable Acts of 1774, which transformed the rebellion into a war for independence. As depression once again returned to New York, resentment over the “Redcoats” boiled over in the city’s streets, particularly on the waterfront and the Common, where rebels hoisted “liberty poles” near the main Barracks. Tensions culminated in the Battle of Golden Hill, the “first blood shed in the American Revolution,” a bloody two-day skirmish, now largely forgotten, that directly instigated the pivotal Boston Massacre.
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Because the Hudson divided the middle and southern colonies from New England, this city was considered a “post of infinite importance” for the British — and for the rebels, who described it likewise as the “key to the whole continent.” Here at the close of Part I, we end our review of the Imperial Crisis with the Battle for New York in 1776. The campaign would remain the largest and deadliest of the war — and the most important, enabling the rebellion to survive, although it was the most disastrous of a series of early military defeats. Here at South St. Seaport, you can view several locations in this fight — including the path Washington’s miraculous escape over the East River under the cover of a random, heavy fog at night.
War & Occupation (1776-83)
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New York once again became the military headquarters of the British in 1776. Yet this short-term victory undermined long-term success in still-unappreciated ways. The war radically changed life on the home front, especially in New York, which experienced the longest military occupation by far — seven, long, miserable years. Here at Peck Slip, the ancient ferry landing, where people gathered to exchange goods and information from across the region, we consider what the occupation and the war meant for all of the colony’s diverse groups.
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Nathan Hale’s statue in City Hall Park honors perhaps the Revolution’s most famous spy and one of its earliest martyrs. The 21-year-old Patriot, hung in today’s Midtown after the Great Fire, underscores the importance of espionage in New York during the Revolution, with the rebel army staged permanently outside the British military headquarters. The region became the intelligence-gathering hub for Washington’s famous spy ring in lower Manhattan and north-central Long Island. But here we also discuss the many other figures, yet unrecognized, who provided far more common forms of espionage — on both sides of the conflict.
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The rebels spent most of the war on the run, the British capturing upwards of 30,000 soldiers. As a result, New York quickly morphed from a “compleat garrison” under the rebels into a city of British prisons. Upwards of 18,000 prisoners-of-war died from malign neglect, torture, and summary execution. Three to four times as many Continental soldiers perished under these conditions, here in New York, as on the battlefield — their bones washing up on beaches and skulls littering Brooklyn’s northwestern harbor like “pumpkins in [] autumn” for many years after the war. But as printers spread news of this mistreatment, British authority declined across the colonies, winning over neutral and even loyal colonists. Here at the Sugarhouse Prison, we discuss this largely forgotten, grisly part of the Revolution, as well as the wider impact that martial law had on the seldom-considered home front and the battle for hearts and minds.
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Before the invasion, New York struggled to house, feed, clothe, and warm the rebel army. But all those problems trebled during the occupation, as the city’s population exploded from 5,000 to 50,000. Even in normal times, the Almshouse serviced just a fraction of the poor. But now even some of the wealthy experienced hardship. Many loyal, neutral, and even rebel refugees had to find shelter in “Canvas Town,” amid the ruins of 800-900 buildings destroyed in the Great Fire. “Holy Ground,” the old northern red-light district, grew from 500 to 3,000 “ladies of pleasure.” But the growing demands on food and energy, a record-cold winter, and epidemics of cholera and smallpox devastated the entire city. Every morning, cartmen wheeled piles of the frozen, starved, pestilent dead, their bodies now in largely unnoticed graves here at colonial New York’s burial grounds.
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Often no less than 10,000 British soldiers were lodged or staged in New York during the war. Here at the main Barracks just 300 to 500 soldiers were housed — including wives, children, and other camp followers, 20 apiece in 21 sq. ft. rooms. The rest were put in earthen huts, bivouacs, tents, and civilian homes across the city and region. With these numbers and the hardships of an often brutal and corrupt military dictatorship, hatred of the foreign occupying army only grew, now increasingly among the loyal and neutral. But the ill-paid and diverse corps of Redcoats has often been unfairly portrayed, too, as has its officer core. Here at this most British location, we look at the Revolution as it so rarely has been — from the view of the “enemy.”
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The history of the Revolution is something that has been created and recreated many times, and the struggle to control the past began even as the cannon fell. At St. Paul’s Chapel, you can see the first national memorial, honoring the general Richard Montgomery, who partnered with Benedict Arnold on the failed rebel invasion of Canada in 1775-76. Here we explore their unexpected, divergent paths to heroism and villainy, and the eternal drive to construct simplistic historical narratives of good and evil.
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During the occupation, St. Paul’s became the center of Anglicanism, as the only remaining parish. But Trinity had been the most elite church of state, an important, high-profile mouthpiece for the British cause during the Imperial Crisis, rallying the Anglican minority and the much larger numbers of loyal or fluidly neutral across the colonies. Here at the end of the Part II, we discuss the role of religion in the Revolution, and consider what the US victory, cobbled out in 1781-83, meant for the Loyalists who belonged to New York’s famous parish and their infamous rector Charles Inglis.
Critical Period (1784-89)
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Bowling Green was New York’s most elite park, where “gentlemen” and “ladies” came to relax, bowl, or play cricket, to escape the bustle of the waterfront and the stress of government and military life. But the space’s location, just outside the Fort, had made it an ideal spot to protest British policies, from the beginning to the end of the Imperial Crisis. Residents thus naturally came back here for Gen. Washington’s triumphal return on November 25th, 1783 — after 50,000 soldiers and Loyalists had already disembarked from the city. Evacuation Day would mark the start of what became a local holiday for more than a century. But the artwork memorializing the other famous events at Bowling Green have also masked the darker side of the US victory, particularly for Natives like the Haudenosaunee of New York. Here, in the shadow of the American Indian Museum, we explore both stories.
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Fraunces Tavern (or, the Queen’s Head) hosted a slew of landmark events during the Imperial Crisis and the Critical Period, most famously as the site of Gen. Washington’s farewell. But it was also the place where the British determined the fate of roughly 3,000 Black men, women, and children in the Birch Trials — the largest emancipation until the Civil War. This group was just a fraction of the much larger group of runaways in the Revolution, half of whom escaped to metropolitan New York. Here we explore this mostly unknown story, as well as the new colonies White and Black Loyalists established in Canada, and the the start of New York’s role as the US capital during the Critical Period (1784-89).
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Alexander Hamilton played many roles across this era. But after serving as Washington’s unofficial chief of staff during the war, the young man returned to New York, where he established a thriving legal practice and national reputation for a seldom-remembered chapter of his life: fighting to reintegrate the 450,000 Loyalists who remained in the US, a sixth of the population. This little-known part of the Critical Period accompanied the incredibly severe economic downturn that came with US victory, a depression perhaps larger than that of the 1930s, which quickly reordered political dividing lines. Hamilton shifted the course of national events with the culminating act of this redirection, too, organizing and writing a series of op-eds urging New York to support a new constitution during the close struggle over Ratification. Those “Federalist Papers” were circulated by the even larger and more influential set of printers in the city, who operated steps from Hamilton’s office, down the street from the new congress building, Federal Hall.
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Unlike Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell or Boston’s Old North Church, there are few iconic symbols of the Revolution in New York, and little celebration of this history — even though the city remained at the center of events from 1763 to 1789. Here at Federal Hall, where America’s first president swore the oath and some of the nation’s most consequential laws were passed during its time as the first US capital, we end our tour by considering the many factors that pushed New York from its place in national memory as “the city at the heart of the Revolution,” as well as the era’s legacy for all the groups discussed in NYC Revolutionary Trail.
Meet the Characters of
NYC Revolutionary Trail
