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SOUNDING LIKE a mafioso wanna-be, he recounts the history of his beloved burg. “So how did New Amsterdam become Noo Yawk City? Well, basically, the British sailed into da harbor and told Peter Stuyvesant—he was dis Dutch guy—to fuggedaboutit. And Stuyvesant said, ‘I’m outtaheah,’ and that was how the British got Noo Yawk from da Dutch.”
The sightseeing season is upon us. You can always tell because the magnolias bloom at the botanical garden and the sidewalks sprout meandering, camera-toting fatties from the Midwest. To get a tourist’s-eye view of how our city presents itself, I’d hopped on Rosato’s bus. My motive was not mere curiosity. The city recently announced that all its 1,300 tour guides must be retested if they want to retain their licenses. And believe it or not, Rosato is considered one of New York’s good guides.
Now, I know that tour guides often have an unsavory reputation. But is testing them really necessary? Maybe in Turkey, I thought. Visiting there once, a would-be guide accosted me at the bus station and offered to be my personal escort. He ended up taking me only to his uncle’s carpet store, where I was expected to be fleeced. That wouldn’t happen in New York, of course. Here it’s the uncle’s delicatessen, not a carpet store. But hey, there are plenty of guides who will blithely tell tourists that Central Park is the city’s largest. It ain’t.
“A bad tour guide can ruin your trip,” says the city’s Consumer Affairs commissioner, Gretchen Dykstra. To protect visiting innocents from the Big City’s bad apples, she has therefore devised a demanding new test. Gone are the easy quizzes of yore, wherein prospective guides were asked such stumpers as “What river is to the east of Manhattan island?” (The answer, natch, is the East River—sort of like asking “What color is the old gray mare?”) The new test is definitely more difficult. Who are Paolo d’Angola, Simon Congo, Anthony Portuguese and John Francisco? Most New Yorkers couldn’t identify them as African slaves brought to New Amsterdam in 1626. In fact, most New Yorkers don’t even know slavery was once legal here.
With the city’s economy in free fall—the mayor’s budget includes firing cops, closing firehouses, drastically reducing garbage pickups and even closing some zoos—New York is desperate to hang on to its image as a revived, restored Fun City. After all, tourism is New York City’s second biggest industry, after that big Ponzi scheme commonly known as “Wall Street.” So appearances (and good tour guides) count.
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