The Big Onion Guide to New York City: Ten Historic Tours [Paperback]

Seth Kamil (Author), Eric Wakin (Author), Kenneth Jackson (Author)

Book Description

Series: Big Onion Walking Tours | Publication Date: April 1, 2002

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“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

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“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

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 [e-mail]. Seth Kamil and Eric Wakin (the authors)

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: NYU Press (April 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814747485
• ISBN-13: 978-0814747483
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 4.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #921,837 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must-Have for those who Love New York, February 1, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Big Onion Guide to New York City: Ten Historic Tours (Paperback)

Whether you are a native New Yorker or a tourist visiting New York City for the first time, you need to pick up a copy of The Big Onion Guide To New York City.

Big Onion has established itself as the leading walking tour company in New York City for over 10 years. And for good reason. Their guides are American history graduate students who know and love the city.

Big Onion's first guide book is loaded with interesting facts and stories about the city's history. Their easy-to-follow self-guided tours will delight tourists exploring the city's streets and enlighten even native New Yorkers who think they know everything about their hometown.

I'm constantly using this book as a reference book to look up facts about New York history. In my opinion, two of the best tours are the Lower East Side, with its tales of immigrant life, and Central Park, which the book calls New York's "greatest public space." There is even a driving tour (which I haven't tried yet) for those who want to explore New York's "outer boroughs."

The book is concise, well-written and always informative. It's a must-have for anyone interested in New York City history.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Informative walking tour, April 30, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Big Onion Guide to New York City: Ten Historic Tours (Paperback)

We just came back from NYC and went on one of the walking tours in this book--guided by the author Eric Wakin (Ethnic Eating Tour of Chinatown and Little Italy). Mr Wakin took us into Chinatown and discussed how the area is a living, breathing, working neighborhood, filled with shops, pushcarts, and restaurants that cater to the neighborhood's residents. We then walked into Little Italy and noticed how the neighborhoo is nothing but restaurants designed to attract tourists. Quite a contrast. Mr Wakin discussed how the neighborhoods have changed over the centuries as the older, more established immigrants move out and new immigrants (often of a different ethnic background) come in. The author was knowledgeable about his facts and history and the the different food tidbits were a real treat!

3.0 out of 5 stars OK, but not a good tour book, March 25, 2011

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Robbie L. Eidson (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Big Onion Guide to New York City: Ten Historic Tours (Paperback)

I wanted a book for walking tours of NYC, but this book really didn't fit the bill. It doesn't have any pictures and the prose is hard to read and way too detailed.