Jeffrey Young

You might know it for having one of the best nightlife and art scenes in the city, or if you’re Jewish, it could be where your ancestors lived when they first arrived in this country. After all, 1 in 3 Jewish Americans trace their roots to the Lower East Side. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews crowded into tiny tenements here and built more than 500 synagogues and religious schools. Newspapers and banks flourished and went bust, and the nation’s system of social services grew out of a desperate need. We’ll see the buildings and institutions that are the legacy of this period and sample delicious foods made from traditional Eastern European recipes. But we’ll also step into some of the 100+ art galleries that have recently sprung up like wildfire, and we’ll check out the food shops, clothing stores, condos, music venues, and even a pharmacy that showcase the extraordinary creativity of the neighborhood and make it one of the coolest places in the city to live…and to explore.

Contact me about the Lower East Side tour.

I find Chinatown endlessly fascinating, bustling with energy and full of unfamiliar sights and sounds. I have family roots there – my Chinese-American grandmother grew up above what is now the snack food store Aji Ichiban on Mott St, and she attended the still extant church school next door. On this tour, I’ll talk about the local history, and how the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and similar laws drastically shaped the neighborhood (and my Chinese-born grandfather’s life). We’ll visit Aji Ichiban and a popular tea shop, step into the oldest Buddhist temple on the Eastern Seaboard, and compare the Cantonese part of the neighborhood with the newer area dominated by Fujianese immigrants. We’ll also see how Chinatown has expanded into Little Italy, New York’s most famous Italian neighborhood, where from 1880-1920, Southern Italians settled by the thousands, and where in the mid-twentieth century, mobsters like John Gotti and Joey Gallo ruled the roost. We’ll see Italian businesses from both eras that continue to thrive, but we’ll also observe how the neighborhood as a whole is disappearing. Finally, we’ll stop by a couple of key sites related to older immigrant settlements in the area: the notorious Irish slum Five Points, and the oldest cemetery of the first Jewish congregation in America – the oldest preserved structure on Manhattan Island!

Contact me about the Chinatown and Little Italy tour.

When you hear about Williamsburg these days, you usually hear about the Northside, Brooklyn’s uber-gentrified center of hipster culture. But Williamsburg has two equally fascinating portions to the south: one called Southside, and one called South Williamsburg, and the cultural differences between these areas are staggering. We’ll start our tour in the southernmost part of Northside, in an area with an excellent nightlife and food scene and a small quirky museum dedicated to artifacts from NYC’s past. We’ll learn about the beginnings of Williamsburg, and pass through its only designated historic district, a single block of row houses developed in the late 1840s. As we cross into Southside, we’ll observe the dramatic gentrification that has come to the area since the 1980s, when a one-bedroom apartment cost $250 a month and a majority Latino population battled a drug epidemic, violence, and environmental injustice by creating groundbreaking social service organizations that serve the neighborhood to this day. We’ll explore some of Williamsburg’s greatest architectural treasures, including the Williamsburgh Savings Bank, Williamsburg Trust Company, and Kings County Savings Bank. Finally, we’ll cross into South Williamsburg, an area inhabited by the extremely insular Satmar sect of Hasidic Jews, who live a life apart, in radical opposition to the secular, multiethnic community around them. We’ll see the house of the spiritual leader they followed to Brooklyn from Hungary and Romania, as well as other historic buildings adapted to serve as Hasidic institutions. We’ll walk down Jewish Williamsburg’s main street, and see shops selling traditional Jewish baked goods, kosher wine, and special clothing, as well as modern technology and everything else needed to keep the community self-contained. We’ll end with a meal at a family-owned kosher restaurant that has served the neighborhood for more than fifty years.

On this tour, please wear long-sleeve shirts, long pants, and closed-toe shoes to avoid offending the Hasidic Jews, who dress very conservatively, and can be put off by outsiders who do not respect their customs.

Contact me about the South(side) Williamsburg tour.