Tours
Tours
General Tours
92nd Street Y Tours & Excursions
Offers the most extensive tour program in New York, with hundreds of outings covering every aspect of city life and everything there is to see and experience in and around “the best of all possible cities.” Whether you’re interested in the arts, urban planning, gardens and parks, or grand homes; whether you’re eager to sneak a peak inside “members only” locations, visit off-the-beaten-path locales, look behind the scenes at New York’s theater, design, food and financial services industries, or check out the city’s many diverse, thriving neighborhoods, the 92nd Street Y has a tour to suit your taste.
Big Apple Greeter
These popular tours are led by more than 300 volunteers who lead custom-made tours of the city in over thirty languages. The guides will meet you at your hotel, or wherever else you want in any of the boroughs, and show you whichever neighborhoods you’d like to explore. The tours vary in time. Oh, and they’re free. Tip: You must book at least one month in advance.
Big Onion Walking Tours
Multi-award-winning student /adult group tours and lectures. Guides hold advanced degrees in American History. Can accommodate 100 - 200 participants per tour.
Free Tours by Foot
This tour explores a few of the city’s oldest neighborhoods from an historical perspective — SoHo, Little Italy, Lower Manhattan and Chinatown. Your well-behaved dog can hoof it, too! The guides function as “part professor, part performer” and while the tours are free, the company’s motto is “We’re so hip, we know you’ll tip.”
Guides Association of New York
Provides lists and links to New York City's accredited tour guides and tours.
Joyce Gold History Tours of New York
A history teacher at NYU and The New School, Gold has been giving walking history lessons for twenty-five years. Her 2- 2.5 hour “field trips” include twenty Manhattan neighborhoods. Day tours explore: Diplomatic New York, Rockefeller New York, Religious Manhattan, Colonial New York, Broadway Theatrical, A Day in Brooklyn, Ethnic New York, Noshing Manhattan.
NewYorkCity-Tours
If your interests are in the arts, politics, finance, business, nature (yes, nature), real estate, shopping, especially the new, unsung designers, NewYorkCity-Tours promises to fulfill your interests.
Tours of the City
Justin Ferate has earned a reputation for his informative and entertaining walking, limousine, and bus tours. As a noted guide and lecturer for over twenty-five years, he was hired by the City of New York to create the official NYC Tour Guide Licensing Examination. You can hire Justin to conduct a private motorcoach / walking tour or slide presentation for your group.
Parks & Nature
A Tour Grows in Brooklyn
Covers historical Park Slope and Prospect Park. Led by Richard Kadlub.
Central Park Guided Tours
One-hour tours that explore the history, ecology, design and beauty of the Park. Routes vary, and some tours require registration. Free!
Urban Oyster
Amazing as it is to imagine, New York Harbor may have once contained half the world’s oysters. Over time, these beds died from pollution and over-consumption. Urban Oyster was founded on the belief that, like oysters, the neighborhoods of New York are treasured resources that require nurturing and cultivation in order to survive and flourish. Our tours explore how we can live in ways that support and value local production and consumption, cultural diversity, historic preservation, and sustainability for the benefit of generations to come.
Culture
Context: Tours for the Culturally Curious
A network of scholars and specialists in archaeology, art history, cuisine, urban planning, history, environmental science, and classics who design and lead in-depth walking seminars for small groups of intellectually curious travelers.
Ghosts of New York
Helmed by CUNY professor Phil Schoenberg, this walking tour is led by costumed performers impersonating local historical figures, such as Edith Wharton and the writer O. Henry. These spirited forays into yesteryear have been known to focus on well-documented paranormal phenomena in Washington Square Park (a one-time potter’s field) and an NYU dorm supposedly frequented by the late Edgar Allen Poe.
Greenwich Village Literary Pub Crawl
Actors from the Bakerloo Theatre Project ply visitors with pints at the White Horse Tavern, Kettle of Fish, and other noteworthy pubs while filling their heads with lore about Village scribes Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dylan Thomas. One warning: If you don’t pace yourself on this boozy stroll, you might not remember much literary history.
On-Location Tours
Immerse yourself in New York City film history as you tour the sites from over 100 movies and television shows.
Soundwalk
Using snippets from movies, music inspired by various neighborhoods, and ambient street noise (beeping cabs, passing conversations), Soundwalk's audio recordings take you on urban tours no tourist riding atop a double-decker bus will ever see.
Theatre Talks and Walking Tours
From Victorian opera houses to vaudeville stages, opulent movie palaces, and the mini-multiplexes of today, theater historian Cezar Del Valle offers a series of entertaining and informative slide talks and walking tours.
Architecture & Planning
Geography of New York
Jack Eichenbaum's walking tours stress the historical geography of NYC, adaptation to the physical landscape as well changes in technology and demography. Subways and bridges are often used. More walking and more cityscape variation than most architecturally based walks.
Gotham SideWalks
A unique and intimate taste of Brooklyn, highlighting the political, social, architectural and cultural history of its diverse communities. All tours conducted by Lina Viviano, who holds advanced degrees in American history and law from Harvard and NYU, and has been researching New York City's history for over twenty years.
Municipal Art Society of New York Tours
Noted architects, designers, and scholars lead urban-planning buffs to some of the city’s best constructed landmarks. You’ll see Grand Central Station with new eyes after touring it with architectural historian Francis Morrone. Many tours have tie-ins with exhibitions, such as the "Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York" exhibit, which has a complementary component at the Municipal Art Society.
Neighborhoods of New York
Harlem Heritage Tours
Historical explorations of Harlem, with an additional focus on linking the history of the area with contemporary issues and trends. Themes include: Harlem Renaissance, Malcolm X, Gospel, and several tours oriented toward smaller neighborhood's within Harlem.
Harlem One Stop
A cultural tourism initiative of the Hamilton Heights West Harlem Community Preservation Organization (CPO) which is in the process of establishing a one stop network for Upper Manhattan-Harlem-based tourism through alliances and strategic partnerships.
Jewish Chassidic Walking Tours
The Chassidic Discovery Welcome Center sponsors walking tours of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, home to the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic Jewish movement’s headquarters. You’re unlikely to get a more personal look inside this culture than a stop at the Chabad rebbe’s private library, stocked with ancient manuscripts, religious articles, and a late-nineteenth-century clock that calculates months according to the moon. Visitors also see Torah scrolls being made by quill and parchment, then nosh on a kosher deli lunch.
Lower East Side History Project Walking Tours
School, group, and bus tours on: Architecture, Alphabet City, Astor Place: Old New York, Beat Writers & Poets, Bowery, Chinatown, Creating Bohemia, E. 4th Street Cultural District, East Village, Five Points, Historic Women: Movers & Shakers, Jewish Mob, Little Italy, Lower East Side, Mafia, Pub/bar crawl, Reel Life: Move & TV Tour, Sacred Spaces, and St. Marks Place.
Michelle Nevius Walking Tours
Personalized, private tours of Manhattan neighborhoods with emphasis on history, architecture, and interesting people and stories.
New York Like A Native
Norman Oder leads walking tours of Brownstone Brooklyn neighborhoods, which leave regularly on Saturdays and sometimes on other days. Tours of Williamsburg, Brooklyn's most diverse neighborhood, are given on some Sundays. Also on Sundays: tours of Coney Island, including a visit to the Coney Island Museum. The tours discuss the architecture, history, and landscape of Brooklyn, at a healthy fast past. Be prepared to walk!
Wall Street Walks
Every Thursday and Saturday, the Downtown Alliance sponsors a free walking tour of Lower Manhattan. Meet on the steps of the U.S. Customs House, at Bowling Green. Reservations are required for groups, but not individuals. Free!
Food
NoshWalks
Two-hour walking tours, held weekends, that focus on the food and cultural history of neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and, to a lesser extent, the Bronx. Leader Myra Alperson publishes a quarterly newsletter, NoshNews, which chronicles eateries and markets in NYC. She has been leading tours since 1983.
SusanSez NYC
Susan Birnbaum, "a native New Yorker obsessed with its history and food," licensed with GANYC.
City of Protest
Opening the Way: A Women's History Walk
A tour celebrating women's history in downtown Manhattan, developed by the award-winning nonprofit Women's eNews. Honors the achievements of twenty-one women in all, three centuries of writers, agitators, abolitionists, suffragists, and those we now call activists, plus three heroes who gave their lives of September 11. Few actual buildings linked to these women. "Yet, as you walk the streets, you will be able to absorb a sense of the world in which they worked and made themselves heard above the roar of the city."
Radical Walking Tours
Bruce Kayton's book, based on his many years of tour-guiding.