Radical Walking Tours of New York City, Third Edition

by Bruce Kayton

Too often, tours of New York City are paeans to power--extolling the fabled New York skyline and the robber barrons whose wealth built it up, praising the marvels of a city built largely on finance.     

But New York has also, since its founding, been a city of struggle, a place where workers lived, created wealth, and spun out the rich cultural tapestry that has put the small island of Manhattan at the very center of the world's imagination. It is a city of proletarian uprising, of abolitionist rebellion, of civil rights demonstrations, and radical futures.     

This is Bruce Kayton's New York, the town of Emma Goldman and Langston Hughes, of Margaret Sanger and John Reed, of demonstrations and shootouts, of community gardens and marches.   

 Now in an expanded third edition with a new Upper West Side tour featuring the Berrigans, Maxim Gorky, Lucien Carr and others, and updated sites reflecting recent anti-war and police-brutality protests, Occupy Wall Street and Zuccotti Park, and more, these thirteen walking tours, taking us from Battery Park to Harlem, from the Lower East Side to Central Park, offer a vital new perspective on the history of New York City and its place in the traditions of American radicalism.

Genres: New York, History, Nonfiction, Walking

256 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1998

Reviews

[Valerie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. Interesting and wryly funny at times, but it's kinda repetitive. I do want to check out some of the sites it highlights, though, and read more about some of the people mentioned in it.

[Tracy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I definitely learned from the book, but the narrow scope made for a depressing tour through the historically rich Lower Manhattan. Too much of what went wrong (who was oppressed and how) without much social and cultural context. What could have been uplifting, especially given NYC's role in major social movements, left me rather depressed -- and in no small part because I have read so many other NYC history books that I knew what wonderful details could have been added to paint a fuller picture.

[Masked · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you've got folks coming into town who want to see the sights, you can get on one of those awful busses and hear how a bunch of rich guys built things on the backs of the people they exploited or you can stroll through streets alive with echoes of struggle, from the labor movement to civil rights. a great tool for teachers who want to do something other than take students to the stock exchange or the court house.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I visit New York City three or four times a year, but I hate being a tourist, so this book has come in handy. It gets four stars rather than five only because it can be a bit outdated, mentioning certain buildings are X when they have since been converted into Y, but that's certainly not the fault of the author.

[Rebekah Burgess Abramovich]

1/3/2019

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can't wait to try these tours!

[Mackenzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A interesting collection of tours of New York neighborhoods with parts of history not often acknowledged in the main stream tours of the city.

[Chuck]

This is a fun book. Kayton is extremely well-informed about the Big Apple's radical past.