Jane's Walk NYC returns:
I will be leading two walks as part of the annual celebration of the life and legacy of Jane Jacobs in May:
- Saturday, 5/4, 11:00 a.m.: Quenching Gotham's Thirst: New York Before the Croton Era
This tour (another iteration of my tours in development on the New York City water supply systems) begins at the city’s origins at the southern tip of Manhattan, and will make its way north (as did the city), passing by all three sites of New York’s City Hall and tracking the path to the Croton water supply (with an epilogue looking towards the watering of Brooklyn in this era).
- Sunday, 5/5, 1:00 p.m.: Ray Carney's Harlem: 1959–1976
This tour (offered for the first time as part of Jane's Walk) is an unauthorized love letter to Colson Whitehead’s novels Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto. Following along some of the locations (real-life and fictionalized) in the two books, this tour will look at 25 years of Harlem history and understanding the context of New York in that greater period.
In anticipation of Jane's Walk NYC, I had the chance to speak with Ryan Kailath at Gothamist/WNYC about Jane's Walk and these two tours.