Big Onion Guide to New York City : Ten Historic Tours

by Kamil, Seth

• ISBN13: 9780814747483
• ISBN10: 0814747485
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-04-01
• Publisher: New York University Press

Summary

Visit the Big Onion Guide to New York City site at www.nyupress.org/bigonionWhether 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 inThe Big Onion Guidefor everyone.The authors show how it was nothing new when Mayor Giuliani was unable to ban sales by immigrant mobile food vendors.The Guidetakes 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 Guideincludes 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.

Author Biography

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

Table of Contents

Foreword	vii
Kenneth T. Jackson
Introduction	1	(6)
Wall Street: The Architecture of Capitalism	7	(32)
The Lower East Side: Immigrant New York	39	(42)
Greenwich Village: A Gay and Lesbian Mecca	81	(30)
Four Squares: Union Square, Stuyvesant Square, Gramercy Park, and Madison Square	111	(40)
The Brooklyn Bridge: A Walk from Brooklyn Heights to City Hall	151	(30)
Central Park: New York City's Largest Work of Art	181	(26)
The Upper East Side: Manhattan's ``Gold Coast''	207	(42)
Historic Harlem: African American Capital of the Twentieth Century	249	(30)
Green-Wood Cemetery: A Garden Cemetery Revisited	279	(38)
The Other Boroughs: A Driving Tour	317	(54)
Sources	371	(6)
About the Contributors	377	(4)
Index	381