I’m a sucker for guided tours. I love a CliffsNotes condensation of a place. All of Rome in ninety minutes gave me a Visigothic sense of accomplishment, untarnished even when my tour bus’s automated audio commentary got out of synch, implying that the Pope lived in the Trevi Fountain. I was once shepherded through Beijing’s Forbidden City by the voice of Roger Moore, coming from a stuttery tape recorder; while visiting the Teotihuacán ruins, outside Mexico City, I was de-toured to a basilica housing the cloak of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which we viewed from a moving sidewalk. It looked like a dry-cleaned blouse still covered in plastic. I was fascinated to learn, therefore, that some consider Herodotus the father of the travel guide. His​ fifth-century-B.C. account of Egypt arguably invented the form, and it even included the obligatory section on public rest rooms: “[The Egyptians] established for themselves manners and customs in a way opposite to other men in almost all matters . . . the women make water standing up and the men crouching down.”

Until recently, though, it never occurred to me to be a tourist in the city where I’ve lived for forty years—namely, New York, which received almost sixty-five million visitors in 2024. So, during a span of a few weeks, I went on seven guided tours. I learned so many factoids that I am practically a walking almanac of New York City, with a useful appendix listing Some Amusing Things You Can Say at Cocktail Parties.

The options were bounteous. Among the tours I didn’t take were “Smelling Bushwick,” “Death in New York,” and one of Ellis Island Hospital, for which tourgoers must wear hard hats, and traipse through infectious- and contagious-disease wards, the mortuary, and the autopsy room. In other words, as Samuel Johnson said of the Giant’s Causeway, in Northern Ireland (some forty thousand volcanically formed basalt columns sticking out of the sea), “Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see.”

New York: A Centenary Issue
Subscribers get full access. Read the issue »

My tour of tours began on a freezing February morning. For three hours, I trekked through the streets of Hasidic Williamsburg along with two Swiss sisters, a married lesbian couple from Argentina, a Jewish Lebanese woman now living in New York, two friends of hers from Romania, and a Frenchman living in England accompanied by his mother (Tours by Frieda, $99, includes noshing). Frieda Vizel, our cicerone, was raised in the ultra-Orthodox upstate village of Kiryas Joel. (“It’s a different planet,” she said.) Vizel was set up at eighteen with a man she married after a thirty-minute meeting; fifteen years ago, when she was twenty-five, she left the community for a secular life, taking her five-year-old son with her. An outsider who knows the ways of the insiders, she is the amphibian of tour guides. She has two hundred and sixty-four YouTube videos, on topics ranging from female head shaving to Hasidic wedding-night sex, which have been watched millions of times; 2.3 million have viewed her TikTok on kosher phones (i.e., flip phones or browser-free smartphones that can’t access social media, streaming, or gaming).

Vizel, a pert, petite blonde whose face was partially concealed by sunglasses, a scarf, and a ski hat, was a fount of Hasidic semiotics. Of the three Hasidic Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Vizel told us, Williamsburg is the “most Amish.” She meant the most insular. Pointing to a squat building across the street from a luxury high-rise where Justin Bieber used to live, she asked, “Does anyone know what architectural detail tells me this is a Hasidic apartment house?” Answer: the balconies are arranged in a staggered pattern, so that the terrace on one floor is never directly above or below the terrace on another. Why? The observance of Sukkot, a weeklong fall holiday, stipulates that you must eat all meals in a hut open to the sky. (“Camping vibe meets Christmas vibe,” she said.) We stopped at Brachsoni Shirts, a pickleball-court-size store carrying nothing but stacks of identical-looking men’s white button-downs, then paused in front of a parked B110 bus to Borough Park—D.O.T.-franchised, but operated by a private company and used mostly by Hasidim. In 2011, the line was investigated by the D.O.T. for making women sit in the back. Officially, the rule no longer exists, but, according to Vizel, any female passenger who dares to sit up front must be O.K. with males in the vicinity moving away.

My favorite stop on the tour was a variety store called Lee Avenue Photo—specifically, the toy section. Vizel explained how the assortment of playthings reflects Hasidic family values: for instance, instead of princess dolls, there are brides. A “Babysitter Set” of miniature dolls includes one baby-faced babysitter and nine very young children, which is three more offspring than Angelina Jolie has. Boys, how about a “Hat Store”? Five male dolls accessorized with seven different hats, each worn by various members of the Jewish diaspora—and a hat brush and box. Jealous, Ken?

If there were Michelin stars for tours, Vizel’s would get three. A standout was the crunchy fried lox on a bagel that we were given at Williamsburg Bagel, where we met Michael Stoessel, who helps his friends manage the store, and works as a diamond cutter.

The two-hour “Remnants of New Amsterdam” walk, an archeological take on the seventeenth-century colony that became Manhattan, began on the steps of the National Museum of the American Indian, near the Battery (Untapped New York, $39). Four hundred years ago, on this spot, the Dutch began building Fort Amsterdam to keep the Natives (and the English) out. Our guide, Mandy Edgecombe, a trained geologist with a background in archeology who is also a former park ranger at Ellis Island, livened up the tour by periodically pulling items out of her messenger bag, Mary Poppins style. She started by brandishing a giant oyster shell. (According to some biologists, in the sixteen-hundreds, half the world’s oysters were in New York Harbor, some so big that their shells were the size of a pro basketball player’s shoes.) Next came a nutmeg (the spice was so valuable that in 1667 the Dutch ceded control of New Amsterdam to England in exchange for a teeny Indonesian island called Run, which was then one of the only nutmeg sources in the world), and a copy of a map of New Amsterdam drawn in 1660 by the surveyor general of New Netherland. Edgecombe explained that when the British took control of New Amsterdam, in 1664, the colony’s Dutch director-general, Peter Stuyvesant, couldn’t get anyone to join him in resisting the invasion. “Eventually, he received a letter signed by ninety-three townspeople,” Edgecombe told us. “It said, ‘Please chill out. We don’t give a shit about New Amsterdam.’ ” She went on, “Life in the colonies was not so great. If you got kidnapped by a Native, there’s a chance that you wouldn’t want to go back home to your family, because life with the Natives was much more culturally warm and safe.” (The Patty Hearst story prefigured!) Edgecombe dispensed a bit of historical trivia that delighted me: the Lenape were called “the old women” by the neighboring Iroquois, who considered them too nice.

At the start of Rock Junket’s “East Village Rock n’ Punk” tour ($47), our guide said, “I’m your host, Bobby Pinn, and I thought I would tell you I made that name up, because the majority of people I’ll speak about today had stage names—all the Ramones, Dylan, Bowie. I thought, What the hell, man, I’ll go with the flow, right?” Pinn, who said that he worked in marketing and sales at various record labels from around 1990 to 2010, speaks with the relaxed cadence of a late-night radio announcer who needs to inhale only once an hour. He had on a baggy Rolling Stones sweatshirt and a pair of jeans, and his platinum-blond hair was styled in punky spikes, à la Billy Idol. Pinn preferred not to divulge his age (“Rock and roll’s a young business,” he said), but if I had two guesses I’d say “Sixty-three but looks fifty-three” or “Fifty-three but looks sixty-three.” “You guys have any favorite bands?” Pinn asked me and my six tour-mates. They included a d.j. from Chicago; the C.T.O. of a software company from Raleigh, North Carolina, accompanying his seventeen-year-old drummer son and a sixteen-year-old guitarist nephew; and a guy studying music theory at Juilliard.