October 6, 2003 -- With a whisper in your ear, they lead you behind closed doors.
New York has layers upon layers, and most tourists only skid along the surface. But a new series of audio tours by Soundwalk (www.soundwalk.com) pride themselves on using the voices of local "insiders" to guide you into spaces you'd never otherwise see -- places you might never know are there.
The five Soundwalks, each $12.95, come on 50-minute CDs that you pop into a Discman and carry with you. They cover New York's DUMBO, Lower East Side, Chinatown, Bronx and Times Square areas and the Left Bank in Paris. The Bronx tour is an especially great value, as it's actually three CDs -- one tour each themed on graffiti, hip-hop and baseball.
The tours were inspired by the work of Janet Cardiff, an artist who creates immersive soundscapes where phantom cars, kids and parades pass you as you walk the streets of London or New York. On SoundWalks, you're accompanied by a phantom narrator: elevator bells ring when he presses the button, his footsteps clop along the pavement and invisible cars pass him (and you) by on the street.
Hitting the Streets with SoundWalk
I'm a fourth-generation New Yorker, so I'm pretty hard to please. But my eyes opened wide when I roamed Chinatown and DUMBO with SoundWalk.
DUMBO (that stands for "Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass") is a former industrial wasteland now crawling with artists, on the cusp of turning into an unaffordable hangout for the young and well-heeled. (In other words, it's about five years behind Williamsburg and 30 years behind SoHo.) Many of Dumbo's streets are trash-riddled, and it can be a slightly creepy (though safe) neighborhood if you don't know where you're going.
Narrator Asa Mader, a young local filmmaker, took me into warehouse warrens of artists' studios, up onto a roof with a fabulous view of the Brooklyn Bridge, and into a seminal performing arts center. He was the typical young artist -- brash, egotistical, madly in love with his neighborhood and the art being made there. He sprinkled his tour with "clips" of a "film" he's making, a Mafia story starring a small-time local actor. By the end of the tour, I felt like I'd peeled behind the curtain of New York's artist community and seen -- and feared -- what gentrification will do to a precious place.
The Chinatown tour was even more spectacular. Jamie Gong, a third-generation Chinatown resident, took me to "places you're not supposed to be" -- a sweatshop, an employment agency for new immigrants, an all-Chinese shopping arcade and even the supposed home of a Chinatown mob boss. I later had to check with SoundWalk to make sure that Gong's coy warnings were just theater -- they are, but they're great theater. (SoundWalk works with community organizations and gets permission from everyone they visit, they said.)
I found the Lower East Side tour a bit less satisfying, for personal reasons. The tour is told from the point of view of one of the "hipsters" who have revitalized the neighborhood over the past decade, enhanced by other interviews which peer into the area's Hispanic and Jewish history. Maybe the Lower East Side is too layered to cover in a one-hour tour, but I felt the narrator left out key elements of the area's immigrant past (and dismissed its cultural importance) as well as skimming over important aspects of its present, like the restaurant row along Clinton Street and the transformation of a former Yiddish theater into the city's newest art house.
Still, I'd recommend the tour heartily to anyone who hasn't been to the Lower East Side before: it may not be perfect, but it beats wandering around with a guidebook.
I couldn't take the Bronx tours, but they're hosted by true insiders: the director of Yankee Stadium tours, an early hip-hop DJ and some very prominent graffiti artists. If you can get up the guts to go walking in the crime-ridden neighborhoods the Bronx tours cover, it looks like SoundWalk will give you the red-carpet (or maybe the red-spray-paint) treatment.
Now Hear This
SoundWalk's tours are probably the most immersive of any audio-tour provider, but they're not the only ones doing audio tours.
My desire to hear more about the immigrant Lower East Side may have been satisfied by listening to Talking Street, a 13-stop, cell-phone-based audio tour which covers many of the same streets as the SoundWalk tour, but focuses entirely on Jewish immigrant history. The tour is free, and narrated by the actor Jerry Stiller. Walkers with cell phones access the tour by dialing an 800 number. To get the map and phone number, go to www.talkingstreet.com. It's not as immersive as the SoundWalk tour -- Stiller acts as more of a storyteller than a co-conspirator -- but it covers a very different aspect of the neighborhood.
For $12, walkers on Boston's Freedom Trail can rent special audio devices from the Boston Common visitor center (for more details, go to www.thefreedomtrail.org), which lead them on a 16-stop tour of many of America's most historic sites. The Freedom Trail tour, once more primarily storytelling rather than immersion, is conducted with narration from Sen. Edward Kennedy (who tells family stories), the local Freedom Trail Players and others.
The guides provided by CarTours (www.cartours.org) aren't walking tours, but you have to drive to cover the hundreds of miles of roads they describe in Pacific Northwest national parks. The tapes or CDs, meant to be played as you drive, cover parts of the Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail, the Olympic Peninsula, Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, and the North Cascades Highway. Each one costs $10.95-12.95.
Wandering through Europe, I've found cell-phone and device-based audio tours at many other sites as well -- not just museums, where you'd expect them, but in Barcelona's Parc Guell and on the streets of Dublin (www.reservationsnetwork.ie/respag/audio.htm). Ask around at local visitors' centers to find out if there's an audio tour where you're visiting.
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