THIRTY-FOUR YEARS AGO, when I first began teaching courses about New York City at Columbia University, few walking tours of the city were available. The historic preservation movement was in its infancy, and Pennsylvania Station had only recently been yanked down. Although Gotham was the subject of dozens of new books each year, serious scholarship on the city was rare. The world has changed a lot in the past third of a century. I write this in the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster, at a time when New Yorkers are talking of both remembrance and rebuilding. I believe that New York will do both in ways that only New Yorkers can. Indeed, rebuilding is as much— perhaps more— a part of the city's history as building is. For what is New York but the world's greatest palimpsest, with each generation building on that which preceded it? Just as the city rebuilt after the fires of 1776 and 1835, just as it did after the Draft Riots of 1863, and just as it has done throughout the twentieth century, New York will rebuild, reform and remain. My confidence in New York's continued success derives in part from the history and accomplishments of Big Onion Walking Tours, which was founded by two graduate students of mine. They, like myself and many New Yorkers, came from somewhere else and grew to love the city.
Big Onion's founders began giving tours on an ad hoc basis in 1990 for museums and small groups with the idea to help pay for graduate school (no easy task) by sharing what they were learning about the city with other interested people. It was slow going at first. Then, one day in 1991 the New York Times called to ask if there were any public tours being offered that winter, so a schedule was created, regularizing what had been an occasional venture. By being out there at a designated time every weekend year-round, rain or shine, Big Onion was following a managerial concept pioneered in New York almost two centuries earlier by the Black Ball Line shipping company. On January 5, 1818, a passenger and cargo ship, christened the James Monroe, left a South Street dock right when the company said it would, even though this meant setting sail in a blizzard and without a full cargo. No big deal? Turns out it was. Guaranteed departure schedules were an innovation that helped make New York the most successful entrepot the world has ever seen. Impatient New Yorkers, ever in a hurry, loved regularity then and still do. Scheduled packet ship departures were what I call one of the dozen decisions that changed New York. You'll see some of the others on the walking tours in this book— the great democratic Central Park; the gorgeous Brooklyn Bridge; the grid street system; the remarkable subway; Robert Moses' successes and failures; tenements reformed by legislation; and an urban architecture restructured by the 1916 zoning laws.
New York is fundamentally a walking city, so what better way is there to see it? The reason Big Onion Walking Tours has succeeded is that it makes the city's history accessible and understandable— not to mention entertaining. This is no small feat given New Yorkers' unforgiving nature and the difficulty of running any business here, let alone one founded by graduate students. Big Onion began with only three tours— Immigrant New York, the Jewish Lower East Side, and Ellis Island. Today there are almost thirty, all of which peel back the layers, like an onion, to reveal what's beneath.
Big Onion's first great success was on Christmas Day, 1991, when just over twenty people showed up for the First Annual Christmas Day tour of the Jewish Lower East Side. They thought that was a lot of people. So many have come to the last few Christmas Day tours that multiple guides at staggered times are required! For the first few years, Big Onion had only two guides— its founders. By 1993 they started hiring others. They've made and kept a commitment to hire graduate students— especially in history and related fields— as guides. At first, guides came from Columbia University, where Big Onion was founded. Since then they've hired students from CUNY Graduate Center, Fordham, New York University, and the University of Pennsylvania. Big Onion's "veteran" guides have gone on to teach at Dartmouth, Holy Cross, Princeton, UC Santa Cruz, Union College, and Yale. In 2001, there are twenty- five guides on their way to becoming veterans. Big Onion offers two kinds of tours. Public tours— "show ups"— that anyone can join without a reservation for two hours of walking. These walks attract tourists as well as those from the city. Over 40 percent of those going on tours live within fifty miles of the city. New Yorkers are not an easy group to please, yet 60 percent of the people who take a tour are repeat customers. The other kind of tours Big Onion offers are private. Any and all of its tours are available for groups 365 days a year. Groups come from schools, synagogues, churches, unions, law firms, colleges and universities, investment banks and so on. And most of these groups book a tour every year.
Finally, Big Onion works and has worked for the premier cultural and educational institutions of the city. I'm proud to have Big Onion as the programming partner of the New-York Historical Society. This book illustrates the commitment of serious historians to the city we all love.
Kenneth T. Jackson
Jacques Barzun Professor of History and Social Sciences, Columbia University
President, New-York Historical Society
