Chinatown, Little Italy & SoHo Free Tour

Foley Square sits at the hinge between three neighborhoods that tell New York's immigration story across three different centuries. This tour starts among the courthouses of the Civic Center and walks into Chinatown, one of the oldest and largest in the Western Hemisphere, before crossing into Little Italy, where Mulberry Street's red-sauce restaurants are what's left of a neighborhood that once packed in tens of thousands of Italian immigrants. It ends in SoHo, where 19th-century cast-iron warehouses — cheap, fast to build and dressed up with prefabricated facades — sat half-empty for decades before artists moved into the lofts and turned the neighborhood into one of the city's most fashionable.

Groups are capped at six, and the route is built for wandering: side streets, a hidden temple or two, the last stretches of old tenement housing, and the cast-iron fronts that gave SoHo its name — South of Houston Street. Expect stories of tenement life, turf wars and gentrification from a guide who knows exactly which alley to duck into.