A guide to a variety of witty, informative walking tours in New York City 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. Visit the Big Onion Guide to New York City site at www.nyupress.org/bigonion "One could scarcely find a more informative and engaging guide than this book, distilled from the award-winning tours developed over the last decade by Big Onion Walking Tours...It is a delight, deeply knowledgeable, presented with wit and style. Would that more historians engage the public so well." ― New York History,Spring 2002 "The founders of the acclaimed Big Onion Walking Tours outline 10 historical walks in their home borough, from America's first pencil factory to Bedford-Stuyvesant's beautiful row houses to Coney Island." ― San Francisco Chronicle This witty, informative walking guide includes nine walking tours, plus a 5-borough driving tour, peppered with informative sidebars, illustrations, and photos from the collection at the New-York Historical Society. Seth Kamil and Eric Wakin's tour company, Big Onion Walking Tours conducts more than 1,200 tours of New York City for more than 35,000 people each year. 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) 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. Eric Wakin is Chief Tour Guide. Their company conducts more than 1,200 tours of New York City for more than 35,000 people each year. They are both in the Ph.D. program in history at Columbia. Used Book in Good Condition