January 2012 Tours
New Year’s Day
Sunday, January 1, 2012, 2:00 PM
Life on the Lower East Side
Beginning in the 1840s, waves of Irish, Italian, Eastern European, Hispanic and Asian immigrants landed at Castle Garden and Ellis Island. The majority settled in the Lower East Side. Come along on a nostalgic walking tour of the neighborhood. View the tenements where fires escapes served as bedrooms on hot summer nights. Packed within a 1.5 mile radius, you will see the past and present Lower East Side. Among the many places we’ll visit are the Jewish Daily Forward building, the historic Eldridge Street Synagogue and the Henry Street Settlement
Tour Leader: Marty Shore
Meet at: S.E. corner of East Houston and Ludlow streets, across from Katz’s Delicatessen
Cost of Tour: $15, $10 MAS members. Pay at tour.
Transit: Check MTA TripPlanner and MTA Weekender for up-to-date transit information
Stay off the Street Series
Saturday, January 7, 2012, 10:00 AM
Explore and Shop: Wintertime in the Atlantic Avenue Bazaars (SOLD OUT)
Bask in the afterglow of the holidays as we learn about winter holiday celebrations in the Arab American community that was established around Atlantic Avenue over a century ago. Mary Ann Haick DiNapoli, writer, historian and genealogist, will guide us through her neighborhood and its shops, discussing the history of the area as well as the traditions and foods that are special to this time of year. This tour provides an opportunity to explore Atlantic Avenue’s stores and their unique offerings.
Tour Leader: Mary Ann DiNapoli
Note: Reservations required, limited to 25. Please RSVP online or call (212) 935-2075.
Cost of Tour: $15, $10 MAS members.
Transit: Check MTA TripPlanner and MTA Weekender for up-to-date transit information
Stay off the Street Series
Saturday, January 7, 2012, 2:00 PM
Keeping Off Midtown Streets (West Side) Time Warner to Times Square
In the “post-modernist era”, NYC planning principles encouraged innovative new public spaces to be maintained by private entities. These new spaces typically offer shelter and shortcuts and add to the connections already provided by transit, stores and hotels. We’ll beat winter by connecting public atriums, passageways, building lobbies and walkways that reveal a more intimate side of Midtown.
Tour Leader: Jack Eichenbaum
Meet: inside the “The Shops” of the Time Warner Building, first floor, in front of the “Pink” store at the 60 St/Broadway entrance
Cost of Tour: $15, $10 MAS members. Pay at tour.
Transit: Check MTA TripPlanner and MTA Weekender for up-to-date transit information
Sunday, January 8, 2012, 12:45 PM
Pierre Toussaint and Friends
Pierre Toussaint remains old New York’s most celebrated hairdresser. Arriving at the port of New York in 1797, a teenage slave from the Berard plantation in Haiti, he was soon apprenticed to Mr. Merchant, a leading coiffeur in town. Almost immediately he began to build an impressive clientelle of Anglo women and French refugees. Yet he did so much more than simply satisfy the demands of the fashionable; he became a one-man-social service agency. Yellow Fever victims, the sick and lonely, prisoners in the Bridewell, homeless youth, orphans and the poor, all begged his help and received it. Today his cause for canonization is being reviewed at the Vatican. He would be New York’s first black saint.
Learn about Toussaint’s career in Federalist and Republican New York. Visit old monuments: St. Peter’s Church, Trinity, St. Paul’s, Old St. Patrick’s and the site of the original Grace Church and learn “new things” about New York’s own saint-in-waiting. Bring Metro card.
Tour Leader: James Sullivan
Meet: Toussaint Square, Barclay and Church St.
Cost of Tour: $15, $10 MAS members. Pay at tour.
Transit: Check MTA TripPlanner and MTA Weekender for up-to-date transit information
Winter Favorite
Saturday, January 14, 2012, 2:00 PM
Edith Wharton’s New York
One of New York’s greatest novelists was born at 14 West 23rd St. on January 24, 1862. The building still stands; it is now home to a Starbucks. We will explore the neighborhoods—Madison Square and Gramercy Park—in which Wharton spent her formative years and where she set several of her most important fictions, including The Age of Innocence, NewYear’s Day and The Old Maid. We’ll also discuss her friends, acquaintances, and contemporaries such as Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt, and Jennie Jerome.
Tour Leader: Francis Morrone
Meet: near the NW corner of Fifth and 23rd, in front of the former Toy Center South
Cost of Tour: $15, $10 MAS members. Pay at tour
Transit: Check MTA TripPlanner and MTA Weekender for up-to-date transit information
Stay off the Street Series
Sunday, January 15, 2012, 1:00 PM
Downtown Connections
Wherever possible we will stay off the streets, as we learn about the continuing struggle to keep Downtown connected to it’s multi-layered history at this time of much redevelopment. Above ground we’ll view sites connected with preservation gains and losses, including the nation’s first memorial and New York’s first Roman Catholic parish. Walking underground through various subway stations, we’ll look at major Arts for Transit projects that connect with Downtown’s diverse history, such as the murals of trade, treasure and travel by Margie Hugto that were recently reinstalled in the now reopened Cortlandt Street underpass. Also we’ll see where connections will be for the new Downtown transit centers. We’ll end by exploring the ongoing major transformation of the interconnecting maze of four different subway stations at the Fulton Street/Broadway Nassau subway complex. Bring a metrocard with at least two fares.
Tour Leader: Joe Svehlak
Meet: Meet outside St. Paul’s Chapel, Broadway at Vesey St.
Cost of Tour: $15, $10 MAS members. Pay at tour
Transit: Check MTA TripPlanner and MTA Weekender for up-to-date transit information
Martin Luther King Jr., Day
Monday, January 16, 2012, 11:00 AM
Bedford Stuyvesant
As Harlem is to Manhattan, Bed-Stuy is to Brooklyn — a memorable Victorian era neighborhood undergoing a dramatic Renaissance. Discover some of the finest residential blocks, churches, and apartment houses in New York City, as well as structures associated with F.W. Woolworth, Aaron Copland, and Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Tour Leader: Matt Postal
Meet: S.W. corner of Fulton Street and Franklin Avenue, outside the turnstiles in the C,S Franklin Ave. subway station
Cost of Tour: $15, $10 MAS members. Pay at tour
Transit: Check MTA TripPlanner and MTA Weekender for up-to-date transit information
New Tour
Saturday, January 21, 2012, 1:00 PM
South Hell’s Kitchen Revisited
A decade ago we led a tour in South Hell’s Kitchen examining many proposals and counter proposals for development in the neighborhood. Since then much has happened either for the better or worse depending on who you talk to. In the last ten years many new luxury towers have come to grace the Hudson River in what had been historically a low rise and low rent neighborhood. Governor Cuomo has announced that the Javits Center will be torn down and the eighteen acre waterfront site will be redeveloped along the lines of Battery Park City. A stadium will not be built on the Westside Rail Yards and now the area has been re-christened as “Hudson Yards” where a major development with more office space than Baltimore or Portland, Ore., and as many apartments as Stamford, Conn will take it’s place. What will be the impact on the area? Can 9Th Avenue’s many ethnic restaurants survive gentrification? Can low income residents be protected? Can an extension of the 7 train into the area adequately service the massive influx of people that is expected, and what of other infrastructure needs? Will the already heavy traffic in the area only increase? Join us for an examination of the many changes that have happened and will happen in the neighborhood.
Tour Leader: Laurence Frommer
Meet: In front of Holy Cross Church on W42nd St between 8th and 9th Avenues (north side of street)
Cost of Tour: $15, $10 MAS members. Pay at tour
Transit: Check MTA TripPlanner and MTA Weekender for up-to-date transit information
Park Slope Series
Sunday, January 22, 2012, 2:00 PM
Three Ways of Looking at Park Slope: Part 1 of 3 Park Slope Northwest
This is the first of three tours (others to follow in the spring) looking at different areas of Park Slope and aspects of the neighborhood’s history. The first walk looks at Park Slope’s western edge and its relation to the Gowanus Canal. We will discuss the history of the canal and its bridges, cross over for a brief peek at Carroll Gardens, and return to touch down in the Park Slope Historic District.
Tour Leader: Francis Morrone, architectural historian and author of “The Park Slope Neighborhood History Guide” published by the Brooklyn Historical Society.
Meet: In front of the Old Stone House in J.J. Byrne Park, just off 3rd St. between Fourth and Fifth Avenues
Cost of Tour: $15, $10 MAS members. Pay at tour
Transit: Check MTA TripPlanner and MTA Weekender for up-to-date transit information
Saturday, January 28, 2012, 10:30 AM
9/11, Irish Hunger and Holocaust Memorials (Members-Only, RSVP)
The 9/11 Memorial, designed by Michael Arad and Peter Walker is one of the most important commissions realized in New York during the past decade. Highly controversial, it had to fulfill several challenging tasks: remember and honor the many people killed on that day, recognize the rescue workers, respect the site itself as sacred grounds, offer a place for all to mourn, to hope, to believe. Brian Tolle, Gail Wittwer-Laird, and 1100 Architect’s nearby Irish Hunger Memorial fulfills its own challenge: taking us back in time to an abandoned Irish cottage and also making us aware of the continued threat of hunger in our time. Further south on the esplanade, Andy Goldsworthy’s Holocaust Memorial is less ambitious in size, but equally powerful in its symbolic gesture, offering a serene place for contemplation.
Tour Leader: Sylvia Laudien Meo
Note: Members-only tour, Reservations required, limited to 24. Please RSVP online or call (212) 935-2075. No refunds or exchanges.
Cost of Tour: $10 MAS members.
Transit: Check MTA TripPlanner and MTA Weekender for up-to-date transit information
Stay off the Street Series
Sunday, January 29, 2012, 2:00 PM
Subway Art and Architecture, Historically Speaking (SOLD OUT)
From the beginning, the people who planned the subway’s construction considered it, in words actually written into the contract, a “great public work” worthy of attractive design. On this tour, we will ride the rails from the Battery to Midtown, and consider the three major phases of subway design: the original 1904 IRT, the Dual Contracts extensions of the ‘teens and the modernistic Independent Line that opened in 1932, with a peek at a ‘70s redesign by Philip Johnson. Bring an unlimited MetroCard or one with at least three fares.
Tour Leader: Tony Robins
Note: Please RSVP online, limited to 25. No refunds or exchanges.
Cost of Tour: $15, $10 MAS members. Pay at tour
Transit: Check MTA TripPlanner and MTA Weekender for up-to-date transit information