NYC Audio Tours

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Self-guided audio tours are a great way to see New York — or any other walkable urban core, for that matter. In the three weeks that I’ve been living here in NYC, audio tours have helped familiarize me with sections of the city. Surprisingly, I haven’t found a good consolidated list out there of NYC audio tours, so I am going to attempt my own right here! If I’ve missed any, please feel free to augment my list via a comment.

  • New York Times audio tours — quite a treasure trove of free audio tour content, with a number of short audio clips organized by neighborhood. Hell’s Kitchen is great — at one point, you’re standing in front of a bar, and the narrator explains how when the bar was under previous ownership in the 70s, it was a hangout for The Westies. They killed and dismembered their enemies in the bar, and supposedly a severed head once rolled down the bar. Not to worry, however; the bar is under new ownership and weekly karaoke nights keep the ghosts at bay.
  • New Yorker Goings On app (iOS / Andriod)  —  in the app, select “Critics’ Picks” and then “Audio Tours.”  Currently five tours are available; I’ve only done the one covering the High Line. It’s an excellent tour; you learn a lot about new architecture along the way, and other details of the High Line that I hadn’t noticed on previous visits. An interesting aspect of this tour is the narrator is walking along the path himself, so you hear all the ambient noise (people laughing, kids playing) of whenever he recorded it, at some point in 2011. So there’s this interesting phenomenon of taking a walk with someone else, but you’re doing it at different points in time.
     
  • Bryant Park — Matthew Broderick guides you around the park. A bit too much whimsy and not enough history for my taste.
  • New York Harbor Parks — I’ve listened to part of the New Amsterdam Trail, great stuff! Rich in historical detail. A notable bit: a historian describes Manhattan prior to the arrival of Europeans, how the Lenni Lenape, who lived there, called the island Mannahatta, “land of many hills.” 
    • 11/18/12 update:  Finished the rest of the New Amsterdam Trail tour today. It’s a high-quality tour — surprising that it’s free. As you visit each stop in lower Manhattan, you hear various sound effects emulating New Amsterdam life in the 17th century: chickens clucking, hammers on anvils, etc. At one point you learn about some of the earliest settlers in New Amsterdam: Joris Rapelje and his wife Catalina, who settled in New Amsterdam in the 1620s.
  • Lower East Side  — 10/22/12 update: Checked this out today. Just the first eight podcast chapters (up through “Heart of the Lower East Side”) are worth listening to. After that, they tend to ramble and there are long stretches that don’t pertain to anything you’re looking at. Also, the narrator’s singsong voice will drive you batty — she sounds like she’s talking to a kindergarten class.
  • Tours I haven’t checked out yet:

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