Big Onion Tours, the word “onion” being a play on the Big Apple, offers tours of neighborhoods of NYC. We chose the “immigrant tour” which shows how different ethnic groups variously settled and replaced other groups around the island over the years—a continuum to the present. For example, Chinatown has almost completely taken over Little Italy and Christian churches have now become Buddhist Temples. The Church of the Transfiguration on Mott St, originally an Episcopal church dating from 1801 was transformed into a Catholic church in 1827 to attend to the needs of local Irish. As they moved out Italian immigrants dominated the parish. These days Mass is still said but services are in Mandarin and Cantonese.

Big Onion tour leaders are generally university grad students working on New York historcal theses and their presentations offer detailed historical information spiced with antedotes and humor. Our tour began near City Hall and included early history of the lower island evolving to the corruption and shananigans of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall–much of which is not too different from the current modus operandi. At the time a nearby pond was a reservoir for unwanted blood-and-guts from area butchers. When its stench became overpowering its contents were removed by a canal, built for the purpose, and now known as Canal Street.

As the pond became filled the overlying area became the “Five Points” –the former Irish slum depicted in the Martin Scorsese film “Gangs Of New York” where five streets had converged–representing the five burroughs. Now two of the streets are obliterated by skyscrapers.

Nearby is the site of the African Burial Ground, a cemetery for the city’s early black residents most of whom were slaves. Black residents eventually moved further up the island to Harlem. Remains of over 400 bodies were found on a site that was slated for a government building in 1991. Following much protest, construction ceased and the ground was declared a National Historic Site. Most of the remaining nearby graves had already been covered over by skyscrapers years ago.

In the early 1900s millions of immigrants called the Lower East Side, Little Italy and Chinatown home and the area became “one of the world’s most densely populated neighborhoods,” said the tour guide. Bob and I looked at each other and we both said at the same time…”he’s never been to China!” However, the horrors of the tenements were real and are documented at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

The Bowery is a long avenue that was named by the Dutch for their word for “farm” as it linked New Amsterdam to the farms in present-day East Village. Horse drawn cable cars moved people and produce. In the early 1900’s the Bowery was lined with rough bars and flophouses and was the de facto border between Jewish Lower East Side and Little Italy. Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky helped organize rival gangs on both sides. A young grad student at Columbia, recently, researching the Bowery, found that Jewish prostitutes would frequent the Italian side of the street and the Italian prostitutes would parade the Jewish side….for the purpose of not running into family or friends of their own communities!

Recent gentrification has inspired the makeover of many original tenements and these days, the Lower East Side (LES) has become the new hip area with bars, restaurants and condos opening regularly and is our son Josh’s favorite neighborhood to visit when he gets off work at the Tocqueville Restaurant.

In this neighborhood, we ate a meal of grilled fish, sweetbreads, creamy cheese and bread and a glass of wine at a restaurant called Prune, whose chef was featured as one of the few respected female chefs in New York today. However, we had been walking all afternoon in the wind and we entered the restaurant with bags full of knishes, creme cheese, dried fruit and wine and hair blown all over. The manager met us at the door and very cooly asked what we were doing there. I wanted to curtly say “this is a restaurant isn’t it?” but I didn’t. I just said that we would like to be seated. The NY attitude strikes again. However the meal was ordinary at best and horribly overpriced. (I hope they read this review!)

Probably the biggest surprise yet in New York is discovering that Harlem is not the ghetto as depicted in years past. Sprucing up campaigns have left streets spotlessly clean…little old men with brooms like those ubiquitous to China and other Asian countries…sweeping up on every block.

We followed the walking tour recomended in the Lonely Planet guidebook which, from the 135th St. subway station, took us past Columbia University in the distance to Striver’s Row between Frederick Douglas Blvd and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd. These two blocks of 1890’s architecturally interesting townhouses got their nickname in the 1920’s when aspiring African Americans first moved here. We passed the Abyssinian Baptist Church which had its origins from 1808 when a Lower Manhattan church was formed in response to segregated services. It moved here in 1920. Previous pastor and namesake of the nearby boulevard, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., became the first African American congressman. On the other side of the block we saw the Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (also originally in lower Manhattan) which played an important role establishing the underground railroad in the mid 1800’s. (Acres of African-American graves were covered over by skyscrapers in lower Manhattan that used to be populated by thousands of black slaves…a small area has been left open there as a memorial.)

On the NW corner of Adam Claton Powell Jr, Blvd and W 135th St. is the site of the Big Apple Jazz Club sometimes credited for how New York got its nickname. On another corner was the site of Ed Small’s Paradise, a hip spot in Harlem in the past and where management once fired a young waiter here named Malcolm Little, aka Malcom X. It’s now an office building. Nearby, the Harlem YMCA provided rooms for those denied a room in segregated hotels. Notable guests include James Baldwin, Jackie Robinson, Jesse Owens and Malcolm Little.
We headed south to Marcus Garvey Park, named for the unique Jamaica-born founder of the Back to Africa movement who lived in Harlem from 1916 to 1927. The park was filled with older black gentlemen playing chess.

We headed to 125th St, the main hub of Harlem activity where Bill Clinton has his offices. West on 125th we passed signs of Harlem’s “new renaissance” department stores and chains that are very controversial in Harlem today. Unfortunately the street as become another commercial mall–undistinguished and not much different than Lancaster Dr. in Salem, Oregon. The famed street peddlers are a thing of the past.

A giant white building at the corner of 125th and Adam Clayton Blvd was once the Hotel Theresa sometimes known as the “Black Waldorf-Astoria.” Entertainers playing the nearby Apollo stayed here. Fidel Castro insisted on staying here in 1960 because he thought he was being spied upon in lower Manhatten (suspect he was under equal scrutiny here).

We stopped at the famed Apollo Theater which usually has amateur nights on Wednesdays but this night was preempted by a play about Dorothy Height…a national figure I was familiar with when I volunteered for the Salem YWCA in the early 70’s. We were hungry and tired by this time so we skipped the Apollo and found a packed Amy Ruth’s Restaurant on W 116th St. where we thoroughly enjoyed soul food: gravy smothered pork chops, corn bread, fried catfish, collard greens– topping it all off with sweet potato pie. Then home via the subway.

A good way to get a good overview of New York and to get a good look at the architecture is to sit in the upper level of one of these buses and if you are lucky you will be able to understand the tour guide. Each guide has a definite personality…one having to duck down to the bottom level when we went over the Brooklyn Bridge because she was afraid of heights. Often the attitude is one that believes wholeheartedly that New York is the center of the world…one such comment made Bob and I wince as we glanced back at the European, Asian and Australian tourists on board.

One route we took included Brooklyn and a local retired teacher was the guide. His brassy Brooklyn attitude was funny until a question got an answer that made fun of the question. For example, one European asked if the lake in Prospect Park was man-made. Of course it is, New York is bedrock (you stupid person!). We got on the bus in Brooklyn, which amazed the guide. He asked question after question…over the loudspeaker…the sense we got was that he was looking for a way to make us the straight man and to give him something funny to say at our expense.