Big Onion Tours of NYC

[Orig. posted to H-Ethnic]
From:Edward Thomas O'Donnell

Dear Fellow H-Ethnic Subscribers,

At the suggestion of Prof. Jensen, I am posting the following description of a historical guide company that a fellow graduate student, Seth Kamil, and I founded three years ago.

BIG ONION WALKING TOURS:

Big Onion offers over 20 different walking tours in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The subject matter includes everything from architecture, to politics, to riots, to famous people. The majority of our tours, however, focus on the city's many ethnic enclaves (both past and present), especially those of the Lower East Side.

Our most popular tour is "Immigrant New York" which covers the long gone Irish, German, African, and Dutch neighborhoods; the mostly gone Italian and Jewish quarters; and the booming Chinese and Latino enclaves. Stops include everything from the birthplace of Al Smith, to the Jewish Daily Forward, to the apartment once used by Dr. Sun Yat Sen, to the church where St. Frances "Mother" Cabrini first arrived in America. All this and much more in less than two miles!

As one can imagine, this range of material, the physical and visual evidence of a multi-ethnic society (ex: an 1850 church that, became an 1890 synagogue, that is now a Buddhist Temple) is extraordinarily effective with students. We have taken classes as young as first grade on up to graduate-level history seminars (UC Santa Barbara, for instance, sends 25 international students to us two or three times per year).

Variations on the ethnic tours include: Irish New York, The Jewish Lower East Side, Little Italy, Chinatown, Harlem, and last Summer's big favorite -- "From Naples, to Bialystock, to Beijing": The Multi-Ethnic Eating Tour. We also run tours of Ellis Island.

Many of our tours include stops at three unique museums on the Lower East Side: 1) the Lower East Side Tenement Museum: an 1863 tenement in which each apartment is being restored to different eras, ethnic groups, and functions. Social history at its best. 2) The Eldridge Street Synagogue: the first and oldest grand synagogue built by Eastern European Jews (1887), open as a musum while slowly undergoing restoration. 3) The Chinatown History Project: dedicated to preserving an accurate portrait of the Chinese experience in New York, it collects oral histories and features small changing exhibits. Big Onion guides serve as historians and consultants to all three projects.

Our non-ethnic tours include Greenwich Village, The East Village, Brooklyn Heights, Lower Manhattan/Financial District, The Bowery, and Governors Island.

Today Big Onion is the largest guide company of its kind in New York City. Last year we led nearly 600 tours. Perhaps most importantly, it provides or supplements a living to nine graduate students working on Ph.D.'s in US history.

If anyone is interested in learning more about these tours please feel free to e-mail your postal address to me and I will send along a brochure and some literature.

Ed O'Donnell

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