Walking Tours As Narrative Recovering the Spatial and Experiential

WALKING TOURS AS NARRATIVE: RECOVERING THE SPATIAL AND EXPERIENTIAL DYNAMICS IN THEORIES OF CULTURE JONATHAN R. WYNN CUNY - GRADUATE CENTER [email protected] ABSTRACT Through walking and talking, tour guides weave together an array of stories and facts in order to reproduce the varied urban cultures and local histories of New York. Recent studies of culture have turned to narrative as a powerful way to transcend culture-as-system and culture-as-practice positions to address the circulation of culture but, as the oral and historical components of narrative and culture gain their places in prestigious collections and essays, they avoid the spatial dynamic. This essay offers an empirical reminder of the spaces of narrativity—an ethnographic study of urban characters who use storytelling in the city, tour guides evince the reproduction of the urban landscape, of history, culture, and meaning. In so doing, this talk is aimed at redressing the neglect of experience, engagement, and investigation, and in the end, recall the spatial as a powerful element of narrative, culture, and education. Wynn, J. Page 1 of 15 INTRODUCTION: THE PRESENTATION OF THE CITY So proud of his 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, chief designer and architect Daniel Burnham would personally show dignitaries around through a walking tour of its exhibits and buildings. He had a particular way he felt visitors should experience the main promenade, a patchwork quilt of the world’s cultures, falsity and all. The fair, aimed at overshadowing the 1889 Paris Exposition, served as a storytelling of cultures, a metanarrative of the world. It is interesting that the master architect’s fair-city of over 200 buildings across a square mile, was not enough: compelled as he was, he “sought to orchestrate the journeys so that his friends saw the fair the way he believed it should be seen, the buildings presented from a certain perspective, in a particular order” as to present them in the best possible light (Larson 2003: 253). While his scope might have been vast, Burnham was neither the first, nor the last to offer up a narrative of a city and its cultures. Ancient Greek guides, called exegetai (‘explainers’), were professional storytellers who would often pose the offer to sea-weary travelers, “Give me a copper coin, and I’ll tell you a golden story.” Egyptian guides, for hundreds of years would ‘read’ the hieroglyphics for travelers long after the ability to read them was lost. The walking tour guides of today’s New York City, walking and talking through the city’s spaces, cultures, and histories, reproducing the urban landscape through storytelling. For dwellers and visitors of any age, a metropolis and its history can be confusing and overwhelming; this diverse group teaches about the public histories, spaces and cultures of Gotham, using storytelling to contribute to the urban fabric. In New York City there are, for example, walking tours about the edible flora of Prospect Park, the Radical Left history of the East Village, the Native American History of Manhattan, and the filming locations of ‘Sex in the City.’ The walking tour, as a social form, has become ubiquitous: Central Park and the New School University use tours as educational programming, the city government has them for jurors on lunch break, as does the hip health club ‘Crunch’ as a way to “work out the mind and body.” And it is curious that this practice of walking and talking—a hybrid of education and entertainment, of high culture and low, of ways of thinking about cities and ways of being within them—serves so many functions and institutions, is so multivalent and popular, yet wanders on, largely unscathed by academic inquisition. Wynn, J. Page 2 of 15 This presentation, a segment of a three year ethnographic study of 50 walking tour guides in New York City,1 presumes that narrative, in the words of Bonnell and Hunt “provides a link between culture as system and culture as practice…an arena in which meaning takes form, in which individuals connect to the public and social world, and in which change therefore becomes possible” (1999: 17), and provides evidence for the notion of narrative is a spatial as well as temporal mechanism of cultural reproduction. THE ‘VAST, HERITABLE GENOME’ OF THE CITY Cities are a fusillade of overlapping meanings, histories, symbols, interactions, and practices.2 To say so isn’t exactly a revelation: Walt Whitman, who died the year before the splendor of the Chicago Fair, called New York City’s landscape a ‘shifting tableaux.’ The wonder of urban culture wasn’t lost on Suttles, who saw a “vast, heritable genome of physical artifacts, slogans, typifications, and catch phrases… most appropriately called collective representations” (1984: 284). Theories on culture often polarize and reify structuralist-phenomenologist, order-action, system- practice, production-reception, and high-low dichotomies (inter alia Alexander 1990; de Certeau 1984; DiMaggio 1992; Gans 1999; Peterson and Anand 2004; Sahlins 1985; Sewell 1999; Swidler 1986). Theoretical positions that energized studies heavily structural, theoretical, and macro-sociological concerns (see Logan and Molotch 1987, Zukin 1991, Sassen 1990), have contributed a great deal to the discipline,3 but have spurned some to remind us that cities, and their heterogeneous cultures, are still man-made (Suttles 1990). This project, as a whole, positions the storytelling of guides as standing between these poles (see Davies 1994; Sewell 1999; Ginzburg 1982; Benzecry 2002), and offers an empirical foundation for the circulation of the cultures of cities. 1 This essay is taken from a larger study and, thus, does not illuminate many key aspects of this social world. The study is exclusively of walking tour guides, a segment of the 1,300 licensed guides in New York City, as they maintain a less scripted path and talk than bus tour guides, draw equal parts visitors and locals, and are, obviously, more connected to walking. Exhaustive analyses of content, biographies, histories, and cultural capital of the guides, is not included here. All names are pseudonyms. 2 Studies have, since the era of classic ethnography, have countered presumptions to find culture as potentially contradictory, loosely integrated, contested, subject to change, and weakly bounded (Sewell 1999: 53-5). 3 In particular places, like South Street Seaport, Disneyland, and L.A.’s Citywalk, urbanists like Boyer and Crawford (1992) have lamented the commodification, homogenization of their content. Wynn, J. Page 3 of 15 Just as Burnham needed to provide a more grounded presentation of his fair, the complex context of New York City has led hundreds of visitors and locals4 to turn to walking tour guides to educate, investigate, or re-enchant the city. Shils believed that “[e]very society has a need for contact with its own past… Where this cannot be provided by the powers of individual memory within the kinship group, historical chroniclers and antiquarians are required” (1972: 4). It would appear that walking tour guides would fall into this category. Mr. Washington, an autodidactic guide, echoing Shils, is fond of saying that “No place, and no people are without history,” and he and his fellow guides, make the urban fabric complex, rich, multifaceted, by unearthing old histories, pitching new ones, and sewing together disparate components for the pleasure of their participants, and themselves. THE WALKING TOUR AS THE PRACTICE OF AN URBAN CHARACTER Walking guides are not singular. History is rich with individuals who wrestled with cities. Urban ethnography, in turn, has produced a long succession of studies that focus upon such ‘urban characters:’ from Park (1925) and Anderson’s (1923) hobo, and Cressey’s taxi-hall dancer (1932), to Duneier’s sidewalk vendors (2001), Grazian’s blues musicians (2003), and Wacquant’s boxers (2004).5 Robert E. Park saw his characters as “products of the conditions of city life; each, with its special experience, insight, and point of view determines for each vocational group and for the city as a whole its individuality” (1925: 25). Inspired by his teacher, Georg Simmel, Park’s conception of social actors eschews many of the dichotomies of culture that have hamstrung ethnographies of culture by fusing the city, mentalities, and practices. Guides, as a urban characters, and in talking about what they do, will often portray touring as a practice, as an investigative method The largest company in New York, Big Onion Walking Tours sees walking tours as historical investigation and education—as the name of the company indicates, these guides examine the city as a series of layers to be peeled away. According to one guide: 4 Walking tour guides, as compared to bus guides, report that anywhere from 60 to 100 percent of their participants are locals—and some are surprised that visitors find them at all. In addition, it ought to be noted that walking tour participants are referred to as ‘tourists,’ regardless of whether they are from four states of four blocks away. 5 It should be noted that the lines of influence made here are neither distinct, nor consistent. Simmel’s social types—the Stranger, the Miser, the Nobility, etc.—were never paired with the systematic participant observation that quality ethnographic work provides, but was interested in general categories and the “terms of the characteristics of a particular position in an interactional structure” (Levine 1971: lxiv). Wynn, J. Page 4 of 15 At the heart of it, in order to be a guide, you’re naturally- You’re an inquisitive person, you’re probably mostly intelligent, you’ve got a liking of people, you have some sort of representation because if you didn’t it would be mortifying to try to stand in front of them.

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