By: I’ve Bean Travelling
United States, , , , , , , , , ,

On this day: Lower Manhattan, New York City

See more from my On This Day series here, where I celebrate travel memories on their trip anniversaries.

On December 6, 2017, I was in Lower Manhattan, New York City.

As we approached the end of our week in New York City, we ventured back to the south end of Manhattan Island to explore further. In the morning, we headed out early to Russ & Daughters in the Lower East Side for their famous cream cheese and lox bagels. Yummy.

Afterward, we took a walk through Chinatown. Bordering the Lower East Side, New York City’s Manhattan Chinatown is home to the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere and is one of the oldest ethnic Chinese enclaves in North America. Historically, the neighbourhood was primarily populated by Cantonese speakers, but in the 1980s and 1990s, a large number of Fuzhounese speaking immigrants arrived and formed a sub-neighbourhood in the eastern portion now known as Little Fuzhou. In the following decades, Flushing Chinatown in the borough of Queens has since overtaken Manhattan Chinatown in size, although it remains a dominant cultural force for the Chinese diaspora.

Heading further south, we moved onto the Two Bridges neighbourhood. This is where we would find one of the city’s most famous landmarks — the Brooklyn Bridge. This hybrid cable-stayed/suspension bridge extending 1,595 feet (486 metres) spans the East River, connecting the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn. It opened in 1883, serving as the first fixed crossing of the East River, and was notable as the longest suspension bridge in the world at that time. Today, it remains an iconic symbol of New York City, used as the location of various stunts and performances. It has been designated a National Historic Landmark, a New York City landmark, and a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark.