walking the flatiron.

Sunday dawns bright and cool, a perfect day to take advantage of the free Flatiron district walking tour sponsored by the Flatiron and 23rd Street Business Improvement District. It is a pleasant walk up Broadway from my apartment on 13th Street, and I join the tour group at the foot of a bronze sculpture of William Seward.

The group today is a diverse mix of elderly European tourists, students and young couples taking advantage of the sunshine. Our guide, a burly man with a steel-wool beard, greets us by holding up a postcard depicting a scene from 1908 and asking us to imagine the two ladies strolling down the street on a sunny day like this one. I try, but get distracted by the industrial truck parked where a hansom cab once sat.

Standing on a little traffic island in the middle of Broadway, our guide points out the original site of Delmonico’s restaurant, the gastronomic birthplace of Lobster Newberg, Baked Alaska and Eggs Benedict. As he describes waiters carrying dinners across Broadway to millionaire Leonard Jerome’s mansion on 24th Street, a young man rushes by with a cart of frozen dumplings. I watch a man feed a proliferation of pigeons, and learn about a sculpture of Chester Arthur, who became President after James Garfield was shot, earning the unflattering nickname of “His Accidency.”

Our tour circles Madison Square Park and ends under a tree in the park, where our guide says Gouverneur Morris once stood and devised the layout of New York City. Standing by some construction workers, Morris was inspired by the grid-like shadow cast by the sun shining on an abandoned sand sifter. There are no construction workers here today, but there is plenty of sun and a sand pit, where children play and impatient New Yorkers wait in a line that snakes around the park to the Shake Shack. After the tour, I debate joining the queue; all that talk about Baked Alaska has made me hungry for a milkshake.