BootsnAll Travel Network



Big Onion Tour

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!)



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