6/6/13 – Walking Tour of Soho with CityRover

Last Christmas, one of my students gave Peter and me a ‘Tour of NYC’ voucher as a gift. Good effort Adrian Pal – we really enjoyed the tour we took – thanks very much for paying for it. We had the choice of many different tours but, as we hadn’t explored Soho very much up to now, we decided to take the ‘City of Dreams Tour’ with Max Vishnev. His company CutyRover runs walking tours of NYC and we would highly recommend them to anyone who wants to know more about the history and culture of a place. Max and his guides are articulate and present a thoroughly research and well-constructed commentary of the area being explored.

We had been bitterly disappointed with the city bus tours where the guides merely read out the street signs and told tales of gossip about the rich and famous and then pressured you for a tip as you left the bus. So well done Max – keep up the good work and we hope your business flourishes. As the tour progressed I was busily taking some excellent notes on my iPhone and was feeling pretty pleased with myself until I accidently pushed the ‘delete’ button on the notemaker. Someone should invent a cu program that says ‘are you sure you want to delete’ because once you touch that symbol it is not just placed in a trash bin, it is gone forever! As Hugh Grant would say….Bugger! Bugger! Bugger! So here I go from memory.  

Stable bank

Mulberry street neighbourhood bank

Police building Manhattan

Queens Brooklyn

Richmond - Staten Island

NYC  seal - windmill

Cast iron in soho

Prefabricated buildings stores and factories

Howard store

otis passenger elevator

1st landmark status

Jane Jacobs fought Robert Moses re urban renewal

1967 Artists in soho

Gentrification Art shows

Bring the bars and stores

Moved to Chelsea and Brooklyn

Further writing to be done here