The Big Onion Guide to Brooklyn is an entertaining and informative walking guide to the historic people and places of Brooklyn. Ten fascinating, fact-filled walks are featured, inviting the reader to take an intimate tour through Brooklyn's important historic sites, neighborhoods, cultural institutions, and shops. From the iconic brownstones of Brooklyn Heights to the famous piers on Coney Island, this book covers all of Brooklyn's notable terrain, plus many of the not-so-well known treasures of New York's much beloved borough. Beautifully illustrated with over fifty photographs and complete with maps and easy-to-follow directions, all peppered with informative side-bars and fascinating tales of Brooklyn lore. Over two-and-a-half million New Yorkers call historic and vibrant Brooklyn home and thousands more are drawn to this borough every day. Whether you're new in town or a native New Yorker exploring Brooklyn for the day, this exceptional walking guide to the historic people and places of Brooklyn is essential reading. The Big Onion Guide to Brooklyn offers you a chance to explore: Downtown Brooklyn and Brooklyn Heights: Take a walk through the oldest urban section of Brooklyn with more than 600 Antebellum homes. Coney Island: Frolic in Brooklyn's playground, the great "Sodom by the Sea."Prospect Park: Stroll over intricate bridges, past the boathouse, sculptures and monuments of Brooklyn's emerald jewel.Williamsburg: Explore this ever-changing neighborhood that is Italian, Latino, Hassidic, and Hipster all at once.Park Slope: Discover one of the best loved residential neighborhoods in Brooklyn, the "ninteenth-century suburb on the subway."Green-Wood Cemetery: Learn about famous Brooklynites buried within this historic garden cemetery.

"The founders of the acclaimed Big Onion Walking Tours outline 10 historical walks in their home borough, from America's first pencil factory to Bedford-Stuyvesant's beautiful row houses to Coney Island."--"San Francisco Chronicle,"

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

"One could scarcely find a more informative and engaging guide than this book, distilled from the award-winning tours developed over the last decade by Big Onion Walking Tours...It is a delight, deeply knowledgeable, presented with wit and style. Would that more historians engage the public so well."
-- "New York History," Spring 2002

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 Kamiland 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.