English

We will share NYC -- a magical place -- unique for over 2 Billion years and counting! Attracting first the diverse North American Native nations and tribes who shared Manhattan for thousands of years, then Italians, Spanish, the Dutch, African-Americans, Jews, British, Germans, Irish, Italians, Caribbeans, Chinese, and many other peoples, their languages, cultures, and dishes arrived and persisted. A place where change is the constant.

Hopes, triumphs, defeats, massacres, dreams, conflicts, beauty, tolerance, diversity, justice, religion, sprituality, creativity, capitalism, boozing, entertainment, poverty, reform, ostentation, sobriety, the wretchedness that even shocked Dickens, and mountebanks -- these stories will be vital to our NYC experience.

It is my proud pleasure to show and share New York City, my home for twenty-one years, and professionally licensed Tourguide ('Star' score on the 150 question NYC Consumer Affairs Department exam) for over a year. But all New Yorkers are unlicensed tourguides for visiting family, friends, and folks on the corner with maps who come for the holidays.

I'm 3.5 generation New Yorker, born at NYU Hospital, growing up in the local suburbs, visiting my parent's sports event public relations firm in the city enjoying museums, restaurants, and folks from the world of sport, journalism, and corporations. I grew up hearing my parent's NYC stories and the city's trivia.

I was employed at major NYC corporations and institutions like the New York Times, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Reader's Digest and IBM, and educated at Columbia University's College (B.A.) and returned to its Graduate School of Business (M.B.A.). I was influenced by scholars including James Shenton, Kenneth Jackson, Raymond Horton, Kenneth Koch, and Mitchell Moss.

I have worked in community organizing, training, and management consulting for affordable housing co-operatives housing 25,000 working class families. I have been across half of NYC from Highbridge in the Bronx to Harlem, Hells Kitchen, the Lower East Side, Williamsburg, Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy, and Far Rockaway in Queens by JFK airport.

I have helped a Chinatown Housing organization expand across New York City.

I volunteered on the successful campaigns to revise the NYC Charter and to elect the first Dominican City Council Member in Washington Heights, the Manhattan Borough President, and the first Public Advocate, as well as several unsuccessful Mayoral and City Council Races. I led the registration of 5000 voters at Columbia University and in nearby Harlem in English and Spanish. I was a community gardener in the East Village, clearing bricks, debris, and needles from a vacant lot, transforming it into a neighborhood green space.

I worked in the dotcom boom doing deals that transformed companies worth millions of dollars, while witnessing excess and corporate corruption.

I have acted and have been writing about NYC.

My tours are high-energy, personal, intense, fun, dramatic, passionate, tasty, smart, knowldegeable, and droll. My work is based on memory, reading, scholarship, other tours, documentaries, personal experience. I appreciate high culture, low-brow, and everything in between. I love history and pointing out ironies and poetry in meaning through space and time. My tours show an appreciation for the major monuments, the overlooked, the forgotten. The great figures from history and the regular guys and gals pop in and out, inspired by the streets, parks and buildings.

My goal is to create an unforgettable experience for you based on your interests and passions. I have a background in adult and adolescent training, so I have an appreciation for interaction and involvement with learning and memories. I want you involved in the planning of your custom tours, based on your interests. I am also flexible.

In addition, I regard myself as a travel services professional, often providing maps and guides, and often lugging reference materials and illustrations to tours to show 'then and now' contrasts. I want to help you get the most from NYC safely, efficiently, healthily, happily, while getting great value for your time and money.

The great majority of my clients are thrilled with my tours, moved, smiling, sometimes tearing up, afterwards shaking or squeezing my hand, or applauding. They sometimes contact me weeks later to reflect on our touring. I can adapt to most visitor's preferences and needs. Call me to see if you feel comfortable with my style. Talk with me about your goals, any special needs, or questions planning your trip so your time in NYC and in NYC with me is best spent.

Thank you for considering me and a visit to NYC! I think you will be pleasantly surprised. My goal is to exceed expectations through heroic customer service and dedication to quality.

• The WTC 360 Deep History Tour (through the bottom of Ground Zero, the history, present and future of the WTC - including the heros, the hubris, the insane that the towers attracted),
  
• The RENT Tour of Alphabet City: squats, community gardens and Life Cafe and the movie and musical sets and scenes (discount vouchers to the theatre available),
  
• NYC & the Modern Traditional Christmas,
  
• Radical NYC,
  
• Architecture (Federal, Beaux Arts, Gothic, Modern and after),
• Great Churches,
  
• Window Shopping and Modern Retail History,
  
• Best NYC Christmas Trees and Spectacles,
  
• Great Pizzas of NYC,
  
• New Chinatown, Asian American civil rights, Old Chinatown and the Five Points,
  
• Chowhound's NYC (affordable great eats),
  
• NYC, birthplace of modern rights,
  
• NYC and Modern Art,
  NYC and Capitalism,
  
• Greenwich Village and Gay NYC,
  
• The Gilded Age and the Robber Barrons,
  
• Alexander Hamilton's New York,
  
• Great Bridges,
  
• Slavery and Freedom and African Americans building NYC and beyond,
  
• Columbia University's campuses past, present, and future,
  
• The Beats,
  
• NYC on Film,
  
• Bob Dylan's NYC,
  
• Stanford White and his Civic Glory,
  
• Immigrants - Transformation, Revolution, and Assimilation,
  
• Lenny Bruce, Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, the Yippies, and Bob Dylan on Bleecker,
  
• Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed - the most feared and powerful political machine,
  
• From Triangle to Union Square - Al Smith's NYC,
  
• Abraham Lincoln's NYC,
  
• Great Museums and Art,
  
• Central Park, NYC's Largest Work of Art,
  
• Peter Cooper's NYC,
  
• Under-rated Museums,
  
• SkyScraper National Park,
  
• NYC's Corporations and international corporate alumni,
  
• Hearst, Columbus Circle and Lincoln Center,
  
• Great Coffees of NYC,
  
• NYC and Wars of Choice 1848-1862-1898,
  
• Three Little Italies,
  
• From Grand Central to Times Square,
  
• Theatre Districts then and now,
  
• Pastrami Tours - 'I'll have what she's having!',
  
• When Harry Met Sally Tour,
  
• Cornelius Vanderbilt's NYC,
  
• Bagels, Brunch, and Bialys,
  
• Manhattan's Geology and Ecology,
  
• What's Next for NYC?,
  
• John Lennon's NYC,
  
• From Abandonment to Hope - How Tenants and Community Gardeners Transformed NYC from dark days to a new dawn,
  
• Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs' NYC,
  
• Dylan, Hendrix, Warhol, and Ginsberg and the 60s in the Village,
  
• Tenement NYC and the Lower East Side,
  
• Jewish NYC,
  
• Andy Warhol, Pop Art, Abstract Expressionists, and 80s Art in NYC,
  
• Walt Whitman's NYC and Brooklyn,
  
• Brownstones, Mansions, and Luxury Apartments,
  
• Literary and Poetic NYC with quotations and readings,
  
• Hipster NYC then and now,
  
• Speakeasies and Old Bars with history,
  
• Emerging Artists and DJs,
  
• unique neighborhoods and economic districts - only in NYC!

$94 per hour for customized tours requiring research and routing.

$43 per hour for Group Escorting.