NYC WTC Solar System Walk
☉ The Sphere (Koenig Sphere)
Starts at ☉ The Sphere (Koenig Sphere). You'll get directions there, then scan the GO code on your card when you arrive.
The Sphere is seventeen feet of bronze that stood between the towers and outlived them. Take it as the Sun and the rest of the solar system lands on Manhattan almost too neatly: Mercury 739 feet away under the ribs of the Oculus, Earth at a fountain in City Hall Park, and Neptune ten and a quarter miles north — a small red lighthouse under the George Washington Bridge. The four rocky planets are all within ten minutes of Liberty Park, so the inner system is a lunch break. Everything after Mars is the walk: just under eleven miles between stops, nearer twelve and a half once you follow actual streets. Give it a full day, or split it at Bryant Park and come back for the outer half.
The Sun
☉ The Sphere (Koenig Sphere)
Fritz Koenig's bronze sphere in Liberty Park, 5.2 metres across, damaged but standing after the towers fell around it. At 1 : 268 million every other number on this walk follows from it — the orbits, the planet sizes, the ten and a quarter miles to Neptune. Nothing here is chosen; it is all just this sphere, scaled.
See this stop →Getting there
The route
Tap a stop to expand it and locate it on the map.
Want to do this in your city?
The mission builder lets you place any real-world landmark as the Sun and generates a true-scale walk from there. Walks you create can be submitted to appear here for everyone.