The Big Onion Guide to New York City: Ten Historic Tours - Softcover

Kamil, Seth I.; Wakin, Eric

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814747485 ISBN 13: 9780814747483

Publisher: NYU Press, 2002

Synopsis

Visit the Big Onion Guide to New York City site at www.nyupress.org/bigonion

Whether you're a tourist or a native New Yorker, you will appreciate this witty, informative walking guide to New York City, as authors Seth Kamil and Eric Wakin peel back the layers of New York's most popular neighborhoods. Here in one volume are their award-winning tours. In their "Immigrant New York" tour you can take a walk on the Bowery, the most infamous street in the city and learn how the city's finest roadway became America's "Skid Row." In "Before Stonewall" you'll discover the many facets of gay and lesbian history and trace the development of Greenwich Village as a cultural mecca. From SoHo to the Upper West Side; from Harlem to Brooklyn there's something in The Big Onion Guide for everyone.

The authors show how it was nothing new when Mayor Giuliani was unable to ban sales by immigrant mobile food vendors. The Guide takes us to the place where the Dutch tried to ban street side sales by Scottish peddlers 350 years ago, and where the great Fiorello La Guardia banned most of the pushcart salesmen at midcentury.

But Kamil and Wakin are not nostalgists or preservationists. Instead, their historical tours connect today's city with the snapshots of yesterday, blending social and cultural history with the evolution of different ethnic and cultural communities.

The Big Onion Guide includes ten walking tours, plus a 5-borough driving tour, peppered with informative sidebars, illustrations, and photos from the collection at the New-York Historical Society.

About this title

From the Author:

We wrote this book for everyone who has a love of, or an interest in, New York City.Today, we conduct more than twenty different tours, and counting, all over the city. In the book we've brought together our experience as historians and doctoral candidates, reading and writing about New York and New Yorkers. What we do in the book and on our tours is introduce people to things they wouldn't normally see. We then talk about how what you see all around you today in the city is related to all sorts of events that have happened in the hundreds of years since New Amsterdam and New York were established. Our goal is to make the history accessible, interesting, fun, and serious at the same time. The book has versions of our walking tours of the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village, Harlem, the Financial District, the Upper East Side, Central Park, Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn Bridge and Brooklyn Heights, and the Four Squares of Manhattan. In addition, we've crafted a driving tour of the neighborhoods outside of Manhattan that many visitors and many New Yorkers don't often visit. We hope you like it and we'd like to hear from you. Please let us know what you think by writing to us at bowtnyc@aol.com. Seth Kamil and Eric Wakin (the authors)

About the Author:

Seth Kamil and Eric Wakin are, respectively, the president and chief tour guide of the largest and best-known walking tour company in the United States-Big Onion Walking Tours. They are also the authors of The Big Onion Guide to New York City: Ten Historic Tours, also published by NYU Press. Both live in Brooklyn, NY.

About this edition

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0814747485
• ISBN 13: 9780814747483
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 390