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The Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York
Everyone wants to visit New York at least once. The Big Apple is a global tourist destination with a dizzying array of attractions throughout the five boroughs. The only problem is figuring out where to start—and that’s where the city’s tour guides come in.
These guides are a vital part of New York’s raucous sidewalk culture, and, as The Tour Guide reveals, the tours they offer are as fascinatingly diverse—and eccentric—as the city itself. Visitors can take tours that cover Manhattan before the arrival of European settlers, the nineteenth-century Irish gangs of Five Points, the culinary traditions of Queens, the culture of Harlem, or even the surveillance cameras of Chelsea—in short, there are tours to satisfy anyone’s curiosity about the city’s past or present. And the guides are as intriguing as the subjects, we learn, as Jonathan R. Wynn explores the lives of the people behind the tours, introducing us to office workers looking for a diversion from their desk jobs, unemployed actors honing their vocal skills, and struggling retirees searching for a second calling. Matching years of research with his own experiences as a guide, Wynn also lays bare the grueling process of acquiring an official license and offers a how-to guide to designing and leading a tour.
Touching on the long history of tour-giving across the globe as well as the ups and downs of New York’s tour guide industry in the wake of 9/11, The Tour Guide is as informative and insightful as the chatty, charming, and colorful characters at its heart.
These guides are a vital part of New York’s raucous sidewalk culture, and, as The Tour Guide reveals, the tours they offer are as fascinatingly diverse—and eccentric—as the city itself. Visitors can take tours that cover Manhattan before the arrival of European settlers, the nineteenth-century Irish gangs of Five Points, the culinary traditions of Queens, the culture of Harlem, or even the surveillance cameras of Chelsea—in short, there are tours to satisfy anyone’s curiosity about the city’s past or present. And the guides are as intriguing as the subjects, we learn, as Jonathan R. Wynn explores the lives of the people behind the tours, introducing us to office workers looking for a diversion from their desk jobs, unemployed actors honing their vocal skills, and struggling retirees searching for a second calling. Matching years of research with his own experiences as a guide, Wynn also lays bare the grueling process of acquiring an official license and offers a how-to guide to designing and leading a tour.
Touching on the long history of tour-giving across the globe as well as the ups and downs of New York’s tour guide industry in the wake of 9/11, The Tour Guide is as informative and insightful as the chatty, charming, and colorful characters at its heart.
- GenresNonfiction
240 pages, Paperback
First published July 5, 2011
About the author
Jonathan R. Wynn
5 books12 followersJonathan Wynn is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He works at the intersection of urban and cultural sociology.
Bluesky: @jonwynn.bsky.social
Twitter: @wynnsociology
His major publications include Music/City: American Festivals and Placemaking in Austin, Nashville, and Newport, The Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York, The City and the Hospital: The Paradox of Medically Overserved Communities, and his sociological thriller, The Set Up. The Set Up is a ‘Most Anticipated Book of 2025’ by the Chicago Review of Books.
The Contexts magazine review of his work to date, “Jonathan Wynn, Sociological Detective” provides a surprising–both in its existence and in its insight–overview of the connections between his sociological and fiction writing:
“[I]f there is a common thread across Wynn’s books, it is this: Sociologists do well to find their concepts in use in the world—among the expert practitioners of daily life. This is not just an interpretive point, but a methodological one. Wynn’s work suggests that some of the most durable insights of our discipline emerge when we sociologists recognize that people are already doing the work we claim to analyze—and often with more skill, nuance, and improvisational awareness than we might otherwise give them credit for. […] In some of its classic forms, a good detective story does not uncover hidden facts so much as piece together the answer that was always already there. The joy of the reading lies in your discovery of what you had passed over or ignored—what was obscured by any number of other possible answers. Sociology, in Wynn’s view, seems to work the same way. It gets us to attend to what has been happening all along—whether in the hospital parking lot and cafeteria, the distribution of music venues across a street grid, or the mystery and surprise that lurk around every corner.”
His work has also been published in City & Community, Media, Culture & Society, Sociological Theory, Qualitative Sociology, Sociological Forum, Socius, Contexts, and Ethnography. He was the co-editor of the ASA Culture Section Newsletter (2011-2014), a 2017 Public Engagement Project Fellow. He was co-chair for the UMass Amherst Common Read committee (2014-2016), an advisory board member for the Penguin/Random House First Year Experience, supports the UMass Amherst Emerging Scholars program, wrote for the Everyday Sociology blog (2011-2024), and is on the Editorial Board for the University of Massachusetts Press starting Fall 2025.
Bluesky: @jonwynn.bsky.social
Twitter: @wynnsociology
His major publications include Music/City: American Festivals and Placemaking in Austin, Nashville, and Newport, The Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York, The City and the Hospital: The Paradox of Medically Overserved Communities, and his sociological thriller, The Set Up. The Set Up is a ‘Most Anticipated Book of 2025’ by the Chicago Review of Books.
The Contexts magazine review of his work to date, “Jonathan Wynn, Sociological Detective” provides a surprising–both in its existence and in its insight–overview of the connections between his sociological and fiction writing:
“[I]f there is a common thread across Wynn’s books, it is this: Sociologists do well to find their concepts in use in the world—among the expert practitioners of daily life. This is not just an interpretive point, but a methodological one. Wynn’s work suggests that some of the most durable insights of our discipline emerge when we sociologists recognize that people are already doing the work we claim to analyze—and often with more skill, nuance, and improvisational awareness than we might otherwise give them credit for. […] In some of its classic forms, a good detective story does not uncover hidden facts so much as piece together the answer that was always already there. The joy of the reading lies in your discovery of what you had passed over or ignored—what was obscured by any number of other possible answers. Sociology, in Wynn’s view, seems to work the same way. It gets us to attend to what has been happening all along—whether in the hospital parking lot and cafeteria, the distribution of music venues across a street grid, or the mystery and surprise that lurk around every corner.”
His work has also been published in City & Community, Media, Culture & Society, Sociological Theory, Qualitative Sociology, Sociological Forum, Socius, Contexts, and Ethnography. He was the co-editor of the ASA Culture Section Newsletter (2011-2014), a 2017 Public Engagement Project Fellow. He was co-chair for the UMass Amherst Common Read committee (2014-2016), an advisory board member for the Penguin/Random House First Year Experience, supports the UMass Amherst Emerging Scholars program, wrote for the Everyday Sociology blog (2011-2024), and is on the Editorial Board for the University of Massachusetts Press starting Fall 2025.
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