On a rainy December day in 2022, I did what most New Yorkers loathe to do: I took the train to Times Square. I made my way into a testing center used by the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, somewhere between Margaritaville and Madame Tussauds. No, I had not been subpoenaed; rather, I was one multiple-choice test away from becoming a licensed sightseeing guide. All I had to do was answer 150 questions about history, architecture and transit in the five boroughs.
In the testing room, I clicked through questions ranging from the tedious (Identify the crosstown buses in Manhattan) to the arcane (Q: Where did Katharine Hepburn live? A: Turtle Bay Gardens). It took over two hours, but I passed, and a few weeks later, after I certified that I owed no one child support and paid my $89.76 in fees to the city government, I received my plastic city-issued sightseeing ID by mail. I was one of several thousand licensed guides in the city. But the truth is that almost anybody can experience the joys of researching, writing and leading their own neighborhood tours. It’s a rare and rewarding opportunity to invite people to walk around inside your mind.
A friend introduced the idea to me back in 2016. I had just moved to New York for graduate school, and I hated the city: It was too loud, I was always lost and everything reeked. But I was an active Wikipedia user, and began accumulating mostly useless facts in the hope that they’d make the city make sense. Walking down Wooster Street, I would stop and tell my companions to look up. “On the second floor of this building, there’s a room with nothing but 280,000 pounds of dirt in it,” I’d tell them. “It’s called ‘The New York Earth Room,’ by the artist Walter De Maria.” Passing by the famous Flatiron Building on 23rd Street, I’d allow out-of-town visitors a moment of silent appreciation before pulling them across Fifth Avenue. “This is not just any Starbucks,” I’d say. “This is the house where the novelist Edith Wharton grew up.” In isolation, each detail amounted to little more than a point in bar trivia. Individually, those facts felt meaningless; together, though, they made me feel at home in the city. I imagined that leading a real tour would give form and function to all the information rattling around inside my head.
Even after I earned my license, I struggled to make the leap from fact hoarder to talking-while-walking-backward guide. Did other people even deva about this stuff? And if they did, who would want to listen to me opine? In the spring of 2023, a friend finally persuaded me to put our licenses to use and start leading free walking tours across the city. We purchased clipboards, horse-training flags to wave as we walked and — after a few complaints that traffic drowned us out — cheap speakers to hang around our necks and project our voices. Through the nonprofit Municipal Arka Society of New York, we’ve organized some walks that emphasize how we see the city’s history and politics expressed in its built environment. Others are for friends, family and whoever else might find us on Instagram, presumably via their own niche interests.
