Preview of our Tours

Here is a 5-minute video, previewing our most popular walking tours:

Videos: Moynihan Connector, Central Park Reopenings, 6 1/2 Ave

Here’s some recent walkthrough videos, shot in the past week:

1. A look at recent reopenings in Central Park: the revamped Chess & Checkers House, and the Boathouse and restaurant (not dead, despite rumors last year!):

2. The first extension of the High Line beyond the borders of the original rail line upon which it was built. Called the Moynihan Connector, it connects the northern spur of the High Line into the Manhattan West complex, where you can walk to Moynihan Train Hall/Penn Station:

3. A walk through 6 1/2 Avenue, and then through to Rockefeller Center. This thoroughfare connects several privately owned public spaces into a cohesive city pedestrian avenue in Midtown:

What's THAT building?

When I do tours in lower Manhattan, I always discuss the very famous landmarks that we pass. But I also get many other questions about the less-than-famous, but still striking and important, buildings we pass along the way. Here's a collection of some of these interesting buildings, with photos taken on my walk yesterday:

Photo 1: The Manhattan Municipal Building (today, formally known as The David N. Dinkins Municipal Building), completed in 1914 on plans by McKim, Mead & White. This building is just a block northeast of City Hall. After the 1898 consolidation of the five boroughs, it became clear that the now much, much larger city needed more space for its growing government. At 40 stories high, it is a rare municipal skyscraper. It was constructed at the end of the nationwide City Beautiful movement, which pushed for grand civic architecture: beauty not only for its own sake, but also to create moral and civic virtue among urban populations. The statue atop the building is known as Civic Fame.

2: The E. V. Haughwout Building stands out among the many buildings of the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District. Built in 1857, it originally housed Eder V. Haughwout's fashionable emporium. What the building is most famous for is having been the home of the world's first passenger elevator when it opened, a hydraulic lift designed by Elisha Graves Otis (it was powered by a steam engine in the basement). At just five stories, the building hardly required an elevator, but Haughwout knew that people would come to see the new novelty, and stay to buy his goods. In modern times, the building housed an Artists & Fleas location on the ground floor, with offices above.

3: 240 Centre Street, as the old signage on the building reads, was formerly the headquarters of the New York City Police Department (from 1909 to 1973). Much like the Municipal Building, after consolidation, the city required a bigger HQ for its police. After the police moved downtown, the building became a landmark, and was eventually converted into luxury condominiums in 1988. Recent sale prices in the building range from $1.6M last year for a 1-bedroom to $27.9M for a 5,500 ft² penthouse in 2017.

4: This famous corner building is the financial district (at 56 Beaver St) is best known as the home of Delmonico's. The original Delmonico's opened in 1827 in this area, before eventually moving to this famous corner, where it gained a nationwide reputation. This current building came decades later. Delmonico's is credited with being one of the first American restaurants to allow patrons to order from a menu à la carte (ordering individual dishes), as opposed to table d'hôte (a prix fixe menu offering that had previously been the norm). The corner building also shows the landmarked colonial-era street pattern of this part of Manhattan. Due to its look, it is nowadays often mistaken as the building used for the facade of the fictional The Continental hotel in the "John Wick" movies which is actually a few blocks north on Beaver Street...

5: 1 Wall Street Court, also known as the Beaver Building, was once the home of the New York Cocoa Exchange... and in the "John Wick" films is a hotel for assassins run with strict rules by its manager, Winston. The building dates back to 1904. Most of the building today is residential, with restaurant space on the main floor. Most of the interior scenes (and roof scenes) for the Continental were shot elsewhere-- from the old Cunard Building to Rockefeller Center -- or on sets.

6: 32 Avenue of the Avenues, also known as the AT&T Long Distance Building, is an Art Deco telecommunications building completed in 1932. The building has two twin antennas on the roof. No longer owned by AT&T, it has several high-profile tenants today, including several of the city's top FM radio stations. It is in Tribeca, at the intersections of 6th Ave, Lispenard St, and Beach St. Like many Art Deco buildings, its landmarked lobby features gorgeous murals and mosaics.

7: 33 Thomas Street, formerly known as the AT&T Long Lines Building, is the Brutalist cousin to the previous building, and was completed in 1974. It is said to be one of the most secure buildings in America, and was designed to be self-sufficient with its own gas and water supplies along with generation capabilities and protected from nuclear fallout for up to two weeks after a nuclear blast. It is still a secure telecommunications building, with many rumors for years about other uses, leading to pop-culture depictions ranging from the obscure 1979 film "Winter Kills" to episodes of "The X-Files" and "Mr. Robot" in modern times. Modern exposes peg it as the likely location of a NSA mass surveillance hub codenamed TITANPOINTE.

8: The "Jenga Building" is what locals have dubbed this Tribeca residential skyscraper at 56 Leonard Street. Completed in 2017, it was designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, which described the design inspiration as "houses stacked in the sky." With most modern residential skyscrapers adopting fairly uniform designs, the unique architecture of this building has helped it stand out amidst an increasingly crowded skyline (you can its much taller neighbor to the south-- One World Trade Center-- in this shot). Recent sales price have ranged from $2.975M for a 1-bedroom to $21.5M for the 5,252 ft² top penthouse on the 57th floor.

9: A look up at "houses stacked in the sky" at 56 Leonard.

10: This gorgeous landmark is right across the street from our first building, at 31 Chambers Street. The gorgeous Beaux Arts building was completed in 1907 as the Hall of Records, and today is The Surrogate's Courthouse. The building today also houses the city's Municipal Archives in the basement, which is open to the public. There are dozens of sculptures on the facade, including eminent figures from the city's past, such as Peter Stuyvesant, DeWitt Clinton, David Pietersen De Vries, and mayors Caleb Heathcote, Abram Stevens Hewitt, Philip Hone, Cadwallader David Colden, and James Duane. The building has (in this guide's opinion) one of the most gorgeous lobbies in New York City.

That's it!

Anyone have a favorite building in lower Manhattan?

Onward to 2021!

Thank you to all who have supported Custom NYC Tours over the past year. It was truly appreciated, now more than ever.

I am proud that I remained a strong ambassador for this city that I love. A city I believe in. And I am proud of every single tour I gave this year, largely to locals who share my love of discovering new things about this city. I look forward to welcoming back groups from afar next year.

As we soon enter 2021, I urge all to support local businesses and neighborhoods first. The road to recovery begins there. And, as the year goes on, the doors of the wider world will reopen. I look forward to seeing you there!

In addition to my usual public tours (see our tour menu above), we have expanded dates for our special tours through the end of June. All tours— whether public or private— will operate with 10 people max, to ensure an experience that is both safe and personalized. These special tours are: a private version of our Central Park tour, a private version of our Midtown architecture tour, our Lower East Side Street Art tour, our Brooklyn Street Art tour, a private version of our Prospect Park tour, our Queens World’s Fair Nostalgia Tour, and our Bronx Art Deco Architecture tour.

We hope to see you on tour in 2021, and we wish everyone a new year of recovery and happiness.

In The Papers

A writer from the Red Hook Star-Revue, a local paper from one of my favorite Brooklyn neighborhoods, recently joined me on one of my Victorian Flatbush walking tours. I was thrilled that even someone who had previously lived in the area we were touring learned several new things about his former neighborhood! It was part of a larger story about the Tour Your Own City project I have helped work on, and how several guides are helping build a safe & sustainable return for NYC’s vital tourism industry over this next year.

The article is not yet online, but here are scans from the November 2020 issue where the article appears.

[Update: The article is also now online: New York City’s Hidden Gems ]

The Art Deco Treasures of The Bronx

Here at Custom NYC Tours, we are always looking for unique, new tours to help people explore New York City. One of our more popular regular tours is our Art Deco & Architecture Midtown Landmarks tour (available many weekday mornings each month). So we created another tour to help people discover one of the city’s best pockets of art deco architecture, in a place they wouldn’t expect… The Bronx.

In the early 20th-century, French immigrant Louis Aloys Risse dreamed of a grand boulevard running through the Bronx, to be modeled after the Champs-Élysées in Paris. The “Grand Concourse”, as it became known, stretches over four miles (6 km) in length, south to north. The area experienced a population boom after the subway opened nearby in 1917. Going into the 1930s, it became the largest concentration of art deco buildings in New York. But they weren’t the skyscrapers of Manhattan that we associate with NYC art deco… they were gorgeous apartment buildings built for the area’s growing middle class families. Famed art deco architects like Horace Ginsburn and Emery Roth built mile after mile of those amazing buildings, most of which still stand today in protected historic districts. There are other types of gorgeous buildings of this era there as well, from the Bronx County Court House further south up to the (former Loew’s) Paradise Theater up by Fordham. The area has had its up and downs over the last century, but the grand architecture remains, as new waves of families have filled these beautiful buildings.

Interested in discovering more about the history & development of the Bronx, and seeing its amazing landmarked architecture? Contact us to arrange your own private art deco adventure… just blocks from Yankee Stadium!

Top 5 Favorite NYC Spots Outside Manhattan

The new buzzword in travel is “overtourism”. This is the idea that travel has increased so much, it now has become a burden on many cities and national parks. First discussed in cities like Venice or Barcelona, these concerns have spread across the world. Because locals have always tended to hate tourists, no matter the amount, local governments are largely not responding in a smart way, with better urban planning, but rather with knee-jerk bans. Amsterdam has instituted several bans on tours. Paris is banning sightseeing buses in their city center. Even here in NYC, the National Parks Service has banned organized tours inside the structures on Liberty & Ellis Islands. Here in NYC, better city planning is the real key… ie. pedestrianizing more areas, like Times Square was a decade ago.

One solution New York is trying is to encourage more visitors to venture outside the Manhattan areas where most tourists tend to congregate. I wholeheartedly endorse this initiative. Most of what people think of when they hear “New York City” is just core Manhattan… but it is actually the smallest borough by size, and only third-largest by population. We are a city of 5 boroughs, and there is plenty of room for all, and so much to explore that even most locals never get the time to see it all.

So, on that note, here are my top 5 recommendations of fun ways to spend a day outside Manhattan:

1. Flushing Meadows-Corona Park: Best known to most as the site of the annual US Open tennis tournament, this 897-acre park began its life as as the home of the 1939 Worlds Fair, and more famously later re-used for the 1964 Worlds Fair. Numerous remnants of those fairs remain, most famously the Unisphere, and towers of the New York State Pavilion. Part of the site now houses institutions like the Hall of Science, Queens Zoo, a boating lake, and of course the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. But the must-visit is the Queens Museum, a building retained from the ‘39 Fair, and the original home of the United Nations General Assembly. Besides many great exhibitions, the museum also houses the must-see Panorama of the City of New York, a scale model of every block and building in the entire city. It is amazing to behold. And, if the Mets are in town, a pop over to adjacent CitiField for a ball game is another must. If there’s no home game, hop back on the 7 train to explore any of the other amazing immigrant neighborhoods along the line… there’s a reason Queens is called “the world’s borough”!

2. The Bronx, Belmont area: Take a quick ride on Metro-North rail to the Fordham station from Grand Central, and you’ll be in the Bronx neighborhood of Belmont… aka, the Bronx’s Little Italy. The Bronx as a whole has many great places to explore— Yankee Stadium, Wave Hill gardens, City Island, numerous historic districts— but this area has the best concentration of attractions for visitors. After getting off the train, take a quick detour west to see the former cottage home of Edgar Allan Poe. Then, double-back and head down Arthur Avenue, the area’s old-world-feel main stretch of restaurants, shops, and bakeries. The indoor Arthur Avenue Retail Market will be your main stop, where dozens of vendors congregate selling everything from cheese to beer to pastas to fresh-rolled cigars. A short walk away from this stretch is the Bronx Zoo, one of America’s largest zoos. A great spot for families to spend several hours. Just north of the zoo is the New York Botanic Garden, a wonderful open space with many great seasonal events and attractions. This area of the Bronx alone can eat up an entire day… Mangia!

3. Street art: An increasingly popular attraction in New York City, and a specialty of mine, is that— as the birthplace of graffiti— it has some of the world’s best spots for street art and other types of graffiti art. You can find amazing street art along the 6 line in the Bronx, at Welling Court in Astoria Queens, or Manhattan’s Lower East Side. But the best neighborhood to explore for unique art lovers is Bushwick, Brooklyn. The main hub in this vibrant community is off the L train, where the “Bushwick Collective” organizes sanctioned murals over several blocks, replacing each wall every year, ensuring fresh art even for return visitors. This project alone encompasses dozens of huge, gallery-quality murals. All the gaps in between in the area have been filled with independent street art works and raw graffiti. The art tourism has led to a great explosion in the area of bars and restaurants. If the Collective scene isn’t enough, more art can be found further west on the L line, and another big hub along Brooklyn’s Broadway for the “JMZ Walls” project. A whole days worth of urban art exploring in just one (large) neighborhood.

4. Prospect Park + beyond: The most famous park designed by the team of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux is Central Park, but they said their favorite was Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. With great trails, a massive lake, and the sprawling Long Meadow, it is Brooklyn’s backyard. The park also houses an old Dutch farmhouse, a skating rink (ice in winter, roller in summer), and a small zoo. Across Flatbush Ave from the Grand Army Plaza entrance to the park are three significant Brooklyn institutions: the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and the Brooklyn Museum. The latter, founded in 1895 and designed by McKim, Mead and White, was Brooklyn’s answer to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Besides a great collection of American and European art, the museum also houses the city’s second largest collection (after the Met) of Egyptian works, as well as the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. These institutions, and the park, are surrounded by numerous gorgeous historic districts such as Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, and more. Well worth a day of exploring.

5. Red Hook, Brooklyn: My favorite Brooklyn neighborhood was once the busiest port in the United States. Popularized in such works as Arthur Miller's “A View from the Bridge” or the 1954 film “On the Waterfront”, the area has a great past as a major industrial hub… numerous buildings & structures from this era remain today. Known to most New Yorkers are the home to the city’s Ikea, it has seen a larger resurgence trading in on its seaside & industrial legacy. Tours can be found there of whiskey distilleries, two chocolate factories, small-batch wineries, glass and woodworking facilities, and much more. Stroll along old Belgian block streets. Visit Pioneer Works, a fantastic art studio and gallery space. Grab groceries inside a beautifully-restored Civil War-era warehouse building. Grab a great meal at any of the popular eateries, such as Brooklyn Crab. Or just sit on a pier, watching boats go by, and soak in the amazing view of the harbor and the Statue of Liberty. For a slightly more authentic experience, walk over to Defonte's Sandwich Shop, operating in Red Hook since the 1920s. The area is a quick trip from Wall Street on the South Brooklyn ferry line.

Bonus!: Technically part of the borough of Manhattan, so I didn’t put it on this main list, but I’d be remiss not to mention Governors Island, my favorite in-city New York day trip (open May-October). A very quick ferry ride from lower Manhattan, the harbor’s largest island has a whole grove of hammocks waiting for you. In 1783, it became a US Army base, and then a Coast Guard in its final decades, before being shut down in 1996. In 2005, the island reopened as a public space and has been growing & evolving since. For history buffs, you can tour the Governors Island National Monument side of the island, passing old Army & Coast Buildings, and tour historic forts like Castle Williams or Fort Jay. Those seeking just a relaxing day can lounge in the plentiful park space, rent a bike, or eat & drink away the day at Island Oyster. A must-do is the Hills, which features the best panoramic view in the harbor. Art fans will also find numerous exhibitions around the island. For those looking to expand their time here, the Collectives Retreat offers a fun overnight “glamping” experience (just avoid Saturday nights, when party boats in the harbor will make sleep difficult). We recommend arriving early in the day, before the boats fill up.

And that’s our list. Feel free to send us any feedbacks or your own recommendations & faves!

Tour-tle Power

Here at Custom NYC Tours, my specialty is, of course, custom tours. Many tour guides have a niche specialty in their realm of NYC tourism— food tours, gangster/crime tours, Broadway tours, etc. I certainly have my own NYC passions, but my real specialty is a little bit of everything. Name me a topic or theme, and I promise you I can craft you an amazing custom tour out of it. I sincerely believe that is not something most NYC guides can do, and my goal has always been to provide people with unique New York experiences.

I’ve gotten some great custom tour requests in the past— helping people trace their family’s ancestry & heritage in Brooklyn, TV & movie site requests, & more— but I got my favorite request so far last month. I was asked to create a tour themed around the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as the customer’s two children were huge fans. This would be a fun family tour. My first instinct was to think of the filming locations for the original 1990 live-action TMNT film, but since that came 20+ years before the kids were even born, I guessed correctly they hadn’t seen it (my own nephews love the current cartoon series, and I knew that’s the current way most know that universe). Since-- don't tell the kids, shhh-- the Turtles don't actually exist, I decided to approach the tour as "the New York City that the world of TMNT inhabits". So more of that old-school New York.

The goal was to make the tour as enjoyable for the adults, as well as the kids.

The tour began in Tribeca by the Ghostbusters Firehouse (always a fun destination) to discuss historic old New York, and how it is represented in pop culture. This, not Times Square or Hudson Yards, is the type of New York we see in TMNT. Beautiful old cast-iron buildings, smokey streets, windy alleys. We then headed toward Chinatown, via Cortlandt Alley, NYC's most filmed & photogenic alleyway. Now the TMNT are supposed to be of Japanese origin, but there is no Japanese neighborhood like this in NYC, so Chinatown did the trick, and the adults loved the neighborhood. Our main stretch was Mott St where we stopped at a martial arts store that sells authentic ninja gear (costumes, swords, nunchucks, etc). Kids loved that. Then, we headed to historic Doyers St (aka: "the bloody angle") and talked about the old clans and gangs of Chinatown and that bloody history, as well as the related history of the Five Points. From there, it was a short walk down to the scenic Civic Center. Our final stop: the Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall subway station, to take the 6 train loop through the old, decommissioned 1904 City Hall station (in the second movie and other iterations, they depict their lair as being in that station). Everyone loved that. Then we wrapped up at a nearby pizza place as the Turtles, living every child’s fantasy, subside on a diet of entirely pizza.

This was a wonderful tour on a lovely Spring evening, creating a unique experience for my Canadian visitors, and was the type of experience that made me want to be a professional guide in the first place.

Looking for a similar experience? Contact me today to begin planning your own custom tour!

This ad was part of a recent initiative by the NYC tourism bureau to encourage family tourism into New York. The Turtles were chosen as the official ambassadors of this campaign which featured numerous ads around the region.

Victorian Flatbush, Brooklyn

Time Out New York magazine listed our popular tour of Victorian Flatbush, in Brooklyn, as one of “10 fascinating architecture tours in NYC”. We were honored to be included there, and hope you will join us sometime to see why it was spotlighted as a unique NYC experience.

Flatbush itself is one of the original six towns of the formerly-independent city of Brooklyn, dating back to the Dutch colonial era. Remnants of this heritage are seen on the tour, including one of the city’s oldest cemeteries. After Prospect Park was built in the 1860s (back when much of Flatbush was still farmland), developers took notice of the potential for new neighborhoods in Flatbush. Just south of the park, starting the 1880s, several developers worked to build a wealthy suburb that would be different from the brownstone & row-house trend of the rest of Brooklyn. Instead, they aimed to build a more suburban neighborhood, filled with huge homes and mansions, private sporting clubs, all within walking distance of this new park (and a short train ride away from the beaches of southern Brooklyn). Thus was born “Victorian Flatbush”.

Half of these developments across the area were destroyed in the 1930s to make way for middle-class apartment complexes, but several historic districts preserve its more picturesque and historic parts.

Recently, the Brooklyn real estate blog Brownstoner published some unique, birds-eye view photos of the area as it had grown, circa 1907. These are great shots, and experts on this neighborhood’s history will spot some unique finds in the photo, which I’ll spotlight here.

In this large, panorama shot, on the upper right, I’ve circled a pedestrian bridge across the railroad tracks (today the tracks are used by the NYC subway). This bridge was placed along the most scenic road— Albemarle— to connect one end of the Victorian neighborhood to the other. Today, the rail tracks largely (with a few exceptions) mark the dividing line between the preserved section of the neighborhood and the post-1930s section. The bridge was demolished about 40 years ago, to meet the angry demands of the wealthy mansion-dwellers to better separate themselves from the working-class populations starting one block over. You can read the fascinating history of this rail line, and the forgotten bridge here.

The Brownstoner article also includes a close-up of the area near that bridge, the intersection of Albermarle and Buckingham Roads:

Circled by me there is a mansion that no longer exists. It was built by developer Dean Alvord as his personal new home. He had decreed that, after his death, the home be razed and the land donated to the community for common use. Today, the lot is the home of the Flatbush CommUNITY Garden. If you look at the site today, the driveway and the foundation of the home are still intact, but otherwise it remains a (now membership-only) community garden.

Want to see all of these sites, and the larger neighborhood, as they look today? Take a look at the slideshow of images on our listing page for our Victorian Flatbush tour, and see our calendar of public tour dates. We can also do this as a private tour on many other dates.

Come see gorgeous suburban blocks, Victorian-style mansions, and history in central Brooklyn!

My Tour Philosophy

In the FAQ section of this website, the first question I ask and answer is "Why should I choose you?". After all, there are many options for tours in New York-- walking guides, double-decker buses, water taxis, & more-- and all provide an amazing service. So, again, why me? The answer, I believe, is that I am providing something more personal. As my home page says, I aim to create memories.

I've seen guides leading big groups that will spend 2 hours covering only a few blocks in a circle. Stopping every few minutes to stand ahead of the group and give them a 10-15 minute static history lecture on a corner. I admire the amount of time & scholarship that goes into such a tour. But, I also see the participants staring at their phones, shuffling their feet, whispering among themselves, and I wonder... is this tour a lasting memory for them?

I travel a lot myself, and love taking tours in the cities I visit. But one thing that I found, and my fiancé concurred, was that in the days after the tour, I had only fleeting memories of the facts, dates, and other information thrown at me during the tour. But in a good tour, we had a clear memory of specific things that we saw, the basic historical context for what we had seen, and some of the little secrets the guide imparted onto the group. Plus, great photo opportunities. That is what lasted. So I decided to give tours that aim to maximize that experience.

An example: When I started doing High Line tours, as I pointed out the Hudson River at the start, almost every tour group has asked me to show them where on the river Sully landed the plane (answer: parallel to the USS Intrepid and the Manhattan Cruise Terminal). I realized almost of them would remember that. And the art pieces & design flourishes that I showed them. And the general experience of the park. But probably not the fact that the original High Line rail viaduct opened in 1934, or that the Friends of the High Line's annual operating budget is $11.5 million dollars.

In short, I focus more on show versus tell.

(Or, think of my tours like an Aaron Sorkin show: Walk and talk.)

I limit most of my tours to 10-12 people max to make sure everyone has a personal experience, and is able to talk to me and ask questions (or have me take pictures of them!). I provide customers with the basic history they need, show them some historical photos for reference, and encourage follow-up questions as we go. The tour is a conversation, not a lecture. 

I aim to cover as much ground as possible in every tour, to maximize how much a visitors sees in their limited time in NY. For instance, the Financial District and the World Trade Center? That's one tour for me, not two tours... after all, they're right next to each other, and part of the same (continuing) story of downtown. So you will walk a lot on my tour. But you will see so much more than on many other tours, and (I hope) have a real lasting memory of the experience.

For some visitors, that's not what they want. And that is fair, and I am happy to point such visitors toward other great companies I know who can give them the experience they need. But if you are a traveler (or a local) who prefers the type of tour that I've described, then... that's why me.

I love doing these tours. And I hope that passion will be contagious.