New London's setting at the confluence of the Wolf and Embarrass rivers is its main asset for visitors. The rivers and nearby lakes offer fishing, canoeing, kayaking, and tubing in summer, and ice fishing in winter. The St. Patrick's Day celebration — when the city renames itself "New Dublin" for a week — is the calendar highlight and draws crowds from well beyond the Fox Valley. Downtown has a walkable historic core with some well-preserved commercial buildings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.