A walking route through East Village's art galleries
A 5-stop walking route through the art galleries of East Village, ordered so you walk 0.9 mi instead of doubling back.
- 5galleries
- 0.9 mitotal walking
- 19 minwalking time, not counting stops
A short walk with only a handful of stops, best treated as the first half of an afternoon that continues south into the Lower East Side. The spaces here lean toward foundations and cultural institutions rather than commercial dealers.
The neighborhood itself is the other half of the appeal — community gardens, secondhand bookshops and record stores fill the gaps between stops.
Getting to the start: 6 to Astor Pl, L to 1st Ave, or F to 2nd Ave.
Practical notes for this walk
Best time to go. Weekday afternoons. Several of the spaces here keep institutional rather than gallery hours, so check individually.
Worth knowing. The stops are spread across the neighborhood rather than clustered, so the walking between them is a larger share of the afternoon than usual.
Combine it with. This is a short route by design — continue south across Houston into the Lower East Side, where the density picks up sharply.
The route
- Uffner & Liu — website ↗↓ 0.5 mi to the next stop — about 11 min on foot
- IFAC — website ↗↓ 0.1 mi to the next stop — about 3 min on foot
- Aicon Art — website ↗↓ 0.1 mi to the next stop — about 3 min on foot
- SWPK Gallery (Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Art Foundation) — website ↗↓ 0.1 mi to the next stop — about 3 min on foot
- The Ukrainian Museum — website ↗
How this route was built. We ordered these stops by their actual coordinates, using a nearest-neighbour path improved with a 2-opt pass, so the sequence is close to the shortest walk that visits every stop once. The walking times assume a steady city pace of about 4.5 km/h including traffic lights, and count only the walking — not the time you will spend inside.
Galleries close, move and change their hours. Check before you set out, and treat this as a suggested order rather than a schedule.