Alphabet City
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the lettered avenues forming Alphabet City formed a notoriously unsafe corner of town, run by drug pushers and gangsters. Most of this was brought to a halt with "Operation Pressure Point," a massive police campaign to clean up the area and make it a place where people would want to lie. Crime is way down, the old buildings have been renovated and supplemented by ugly new ones, and today the streets have become the haunt of moneyed twenty's and tourist youth. Go beyond Avenue C and you may get hassled, but - during the day at least - you're unlikely to be mugged, and avenues A, B and C have some of the coolest bars, cafés and stores in the city.

At the NuYorican Poets Café at 236 E 3rd St (Ph 212/505-8183), you may catch some of the biggest stars of the spoken-word scene .

Astor Place
Just west of Cooper Square lies Astor Place, named after John Jacob Astor and, during the 1830s, just before high society moved west to Washington Square, one of the city's most desirable addresses. The old-fashioned kiosk of the Astor Place subway station, bang in the middle of the junction, discreetly remembers Astor on the platforms, its colored mosaic relief's depicting beavers recalling Astor's first big killings - in the fur trade. The orange-brick Astor Building (housing one of the city's ubiquitous Starbucks on its lower level) with arched windows, is where John Jacob Astor III conducted business. It's currently being converted into $1 million loft apartments, despite intense neighborhood resistance - one indication of the speed of East village gentrification.

East toward Tompkins Square Park

St Mark's-in-the-Bowery is a box-like church on the corner of Second Avenue originally built in 1799 but with a Neoclassical portico added half a century later. In the 1950s, the Beat poets gave readings here, and it remains an important literary rendezvous, with regular readings, dance performances and music recitals, where you can often catch the likes of Lou Reed, Patti Smith and Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo do their thing.

Walk east along Tenth, past the old redbrick Tenth Street Russian and Turkish Bath, whose steam and massage services have been active back into the nineteenth century. venture further east and you'll catch up with Avenue A, which will lead you south to the once-sketchy, now-safe Tompkins Square Park and which buzzes with thrift stores and trendy bars.

Lafayette Street and Broadway (Greenwich village)

Today, it's hard to believe that Astor Place was once home to wealth and influence. Lafayette Street is an undistinguished thoroughfare, steering a grimy route along the edge of the East village and down into SoHo. All that's left to hint that this might once have been more than a down-at-heel gathering of industrial buildings is Colonnade Row, just south of Astor Place. This strip of four 1832 Greek Revival houses with a Corinthian colonnade is now home to the Colonnade Theater. The Public Theater, at no. 425, is legendary both as a forerunner of Off-Broadway theater and as the original venue of hit musicals like Hair . For years it was run by the director Joseph Papp, who pioneered Shakespeare in the Park. On the ground floor you'll find the celeb-studded performance space/restaurant/bar, Joe's Pub, named in his honor.

Head one block west to Broadway and look north: filling a bend in the street is the lacy marble of Grace Church, on the corner of 10th Street, which was built and designed in 1846 by James Renwick (of St Patrick's Cathedral fame) in a delicate neo-Gothic style. Dark and aisled, with a flattened, web-vaulted ceiling, it's one of the city's most successful churches - and, in many ways, one of its most secretive escapes.

St Mark’s Place and Cooper Square 

It's best to use St Mark's Place (aka 8th St) as a base and branch out from here. Start between Second and Third avenues, where independent book and discount record stores struggle for space amid hippy-chic clothiers and head shops in a somewhat contrived atmosphere of MTcool. Seventh Street boasts used-clothing stores as well as several original boutiques, while 6th Street, between First and Second avenues - also known as " Indian Row " - offers endless choices of all things curry.

On Cooper Square, a busy crossroads formed by the intersection of the Bowery, Third Avenue and Lafayette Street, countless teenage style-gods and hipsters from out of town mill around. The square is dominated by the seven-story brownstone mass of Cooper Union, erected in 1859 by the wealthy industrialist/inventor Peter Cooper as a college for the poor, and the first New York structure to be hung on a frame of iron girders. It's best known as the place where, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln wowed an audience of top New Yorkers with his so-called "might makes right" speech, in which he criticized the pro-slavery policies of the Southern states and helped propel himself to the White House later that year.

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