Walking NYC

If you are in NYC and want to explore it by foot, I suggest you look up Big Onion Walking Tours. This is a company that has walking tours of all different kinds of neighbourhoods in Manhattan. Their guides all have advanced degrees in history or related fields, and they design their own tours. I took a 2 hour tour of Harlem. Our guide brought photos with him showing the various people he was telling us about, or places as they looked 'in the day'. During our tour, he showed us sites of some less well known history, such as the offices of militant activist Marcus Garvey. We saw a street of older rundown homes, but another a few blocks away was lined with gorgeous brownstones. As with many working class neighbourhoods in NY, this area is being gentrified and much of it's history is in danger of being bought up by outsiders. As we started our tour, a local resident, seeing a pack of mostly white folks (2 young black women and I were the only minorities) led by a young white guy, immediately came up to us and started asking us questions. We later learned that it's not uncommon to find a realtor leading a bunch of potential investors through the area, and the gentleman was concerned that we were such a group.