Product Review

Visit the Big Onion Guide to New York City site at www.nyupress.org/bigonion

Whether you're a tourist or a native New Yorker, you will appreciate this witty, informative walking guide to New York City, as authors Seth Kamil and Eric Wakin peel back the layers of New York's most popular neighborhoods. Here in one volume are their award-winning tours. In their "Immigrant New York" tour you can take a walk on the Bowery, the most infamous street in the city and learn how the city's finest roadway became America's "Skid Row." In "Before Stonewall" you'll discover the many facets of gay and lesbian history and trace the development of Greenwich Village as a cultural mecca. From SoHo to the Upper West Side; from Harlem to Brooklyn there's something in The Big Onion Guide for everyone.

The authors show how it was nothing new when Mayor Giuliani was unable to ban sales by immigrant mobile food vendors. The Guide takes us to the place where the Dutch tried to ban street side sales by Scottish peddlers 350 years ago, and where the great Fiorello La Guardia banned most of the pushcart salesmen at midcentury.

But Kamil and Wakin are not nostalgists or preservationists. Instead, their historical tours connect today's city with the snapshots of yesterday, blending social and cultural history with the evolution of different ethnic and cultural communities.

The Big Onion Guide includes ten walking tours, plus a 5-borough driving tour, peppered with informative sidebars, illustrations, and photos from the collection at the New-York Historical Society.