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The Age of Innocence Walking Tour
New York

Walk the drawing rooms, opera houses, and promenades of Edith Wharton's Old New York — a city governed by unspoken rules, where everything is permitted except honesty.

8 stops · Lower Manhattan & Upper East Side

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Every Stop Has a Story

The Ancestral Heartland

Washington Square was the symbolic heart of the old Knickerbocker families Wharton anatomizes in the novel, though the famous arch you see today wasn't built until 1892, two decades after the story is set.

Newland's Walk

This corner marks where Fifth Avenue's fashionable promenade began, and though a 1927 Art Deco tower has replaced the brownstones that once lined the avenue for miles, the geography is exactly as Wharton described it.

The Wedding

Newland and May are married in this Gothic Revival church, completed in 1846, whose sexton, Isaac Brown, was so socially powerful that he effectively controlled who could attend Old New York's weddings.

Newland's House

The Archer family brownstone sits on this quiet Greenwich Village block, where Newland occupied the entire upper floor while his mother and sister shared the narrower quarters below, an arrangement that encoded the family's social assumptions as precisely as any written rule.

Ellen Arrives

The Academy of Music once stood here, its boxes owned exclusively by Old New York families who refused the Vanderbilts entry, prompting them to fund a rival opera house instead: the Metropolitan Opera.

Newland's Club

This mansion, now the National Arts Club, once belonged to Samuel J. Tilden, the New York governor who won the popular vote in the 1876 presidential election but lost the White House to Rutherford B. Hayes through a contested Electoral College deal.

The Beaufort's Mansion

Julius Beaufort's mansion represents everything that both attracts and disturbs Old New York: European luxury and money of uncertain origin, thrown open once a year for the most coveted invitation of the season, the annual Beaufort ball.

Newland and Ellen Meet

Newland and Ellen share one of their only unchaperoned meetings here, standing before paintings they barely discuss, in a museum that opened in 1872, the same year the novel is set.

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