Pied Piper of the Tour Guides
In the cinnamon-colored lobby of the Chrysler Building, eight adults are running at full speed in a single file, holding their hands up as though they were clutching invisible steering wheels. Occasionally pausing to admire the ceiling, painted with garish images of a bustling construction site, they snake through the orange marble-paneled halls. Alarmed bystanders jump out of their way. At the center of the lobby, the group of pretend-drivers stops, smiling sheepishly at their leader, Justin Ferate, one of New York City’s most respected and idiosyncratic tour guides.
Ferate is an urban historian and a former director of adult education at Cooper Union. Now 54, he has been giving walking tours of New York and teaching touring classes for more than 20 years. In an industry dominated by double-decker buses and overly perky, microphone-toting guides, Ferate takes a distinct approach. He injects wit, passion and scholarship into the tourist experience. In place of a microphone, he carries a beat-up old binder filled with historical photos of New York streets and yellowed newspaper clippings from 19th century gossip columns. Like any good tour guide, he loves to make his clients chuckle - and he does this often - but he also likes to challenge them, posing questions about everything from Beaux Arts architecture to the most authentic recipe for New York cheesecake. For Ferate, every tour is a quest for knowledge.
Ferate mourns what he perceives to be a trend toward passive tourism – he cites Times Square – where people just absorb images without interacting with their environment. ”It’s a suburbanized aspect I find puzzling,” he said. ”I always try to physically involve the people, so that they form literal connections with their surroundings.” In Ferate's view, an ideal tour is more a dialogue than a lecture. During his tours, he often persuades his clients to walk up to vendors and people on the streets and talk to them. He sees his role as that of a mediator: ”I’m like a matchmaker between the visitors and the locals," he said. "People will see all the great buildings, but they will remember the person who helped them find their way on the subway."
There are some 1,300 tour guides in New York City. An estimated 40 percent of them have been trained to some extent by Ferate, according to Anthony Bowman, a guide who specializes in Harlem and knows Ferate well. ”If you scratch any guide in the city long enough, you will find Justin,” he said. Marta Cooper, formerly the president of the Tour Guides Association, concurred and likened Ferate to ”the pied piper of the tour guides."
At least part of the reason behind Ferate's popularity is that he's able to elevate the tour-taker above the slightly pejorative term "tourist." He treats everyone as a student rather than as a passive consumer, making each participant an integral part of the tour. He loves to make his charges reenact historical moments, such as Cornelius Vanderbilt asking his mother to borrow some money so he can finance the building of Grand Central. His customers seem to like it. ”I think it’s great how he makes you a part of his stories,” said Nancy Davis, a visitor from New Jersey, who toured Grand Central Terminal with Ferate. By involving the visitors in the tour, Ferate hopes not only to spark their curiosity, but also to get them to think independently. ”I want all my tourists to become tour guides,” he said.
With the rise of the internet, Ferate said, a class of better-informed, more demanding tourists has emerged. And he's not the only one who has benefited. Some of the larger companies have begun taking cues from creative, specialized guides like Ferate. Gray Line, for instance, recently expanded its repertoire to include a show biz tour. And like all other companies, New York Gray Line now operates well beyond the boundaries of Manhattan.
According to Reagan Stulbaum, the director of tourism for NYC & Company, the tourism industry is not the same as it was ten years ago. Although big companies are able to spend far more money on advertising, smaller companies and individual guides are now gaining plenty of exposure via inexpensive internet sites. ”The structure of the industry is changing," Stulbaum said. "It's become more democratic."
Ferate said that 20 years ago no one wanted to take tourists to Brooklyn or even to Harlem. He was one of the first guides to create a comprehensive Harlem tour. According to Bowman, Ferate has had a profound influence on New York's tourism industry: ”Today people are operating all over the city because of Justin," Bowman said. "The industry is finally catching up to him.”
To get a sense of Ferate’s own tours, imagine a graduate seminar in urban history crossed with an elementary school field trip.
At noon on a bright but chilly Friday in February, Ferate is standing in front of the crowded main entrance to the Grand Central Terminal. A flock of 23 tourists - from Japan, Germany, Ireland, Argentina, as well as Ohio, New Jersey and even New York - has gathered around him. All they know about the tour they are about to take is that it is free - sponsored by the Grand Central Partnership - and that the wildly gesticulating, fast-talking gentleman up front is to be their guide.
Oblivious to the swarms of commuters and Midtown businessmen that rush by, Ferate prepares to tell a story. Out of his worn black canvas Strand bag, he pulls a yellowed book titled Alice’s Adventures Underground, by Lewis Carroll, the British mathematician and children's author. "There once was a young British girl who had marvelous adventures after following a white rabbit down a rabbit hole," he began and then pointed to the unimposing entrance of the Grand Central. Apparently, it works on the same principle as Carroll's book. ”It only gets interesting once you get inside,” Ferate said and then winked mysteriously. ”Come and follow the rabbit.” And with that, he led the group through the entrance.
With his dark mustache, twinkling brown eyes, salt and pepper gray hair and a slightly ruddy complexion, Ferate himself could stand in for a character in a children’s storybook. Over his creamy yellow silk shirt that day, he sported a well-worn tweed blazer. Around his neck, he wore a red and blue striped bow tie. Add a top hat, and he could have been Willy Wonka pointing out the wonders of his chocolate factory to a group of visitors.
Once Ferate ushered his group through the entrance, he abruptly called a halt. ”Pretend you’re on a diving board,” he said, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. The passageway slopes downward, and standing at the entrance gives the sensation of tremendous depth and space. Slowly, Ferate backed down further into the hall. ”Now come toward me in baby steps, so you can take it all in,” he continued. The tourists slowly shuffled toward him. As they walked down the hall, their gazes automatically turned upward, toward the imposingly high, cream-colored ceiling. Ferate looked satisfied. The slope of the floor, he explained, is what causes people instinctively to look up, creating an even greater appreciation of the terminal's grandiose interior. ”Those tricky, tricky architects,” he muttered.
Inside the Grand Concourse, Ferate's eyes lit up and his sweeping hand gestures became even bigger. He plopped down on the cold marble floor to demonstrate that each tile is roughly the same length as a human leg, while the width is roughly as long as his forearm. ”Everything in here is based on the body,” he explained, looking around lovingly. Suddenly, Ferate leaped up and grabbed the arm of a one of the shyer women on the tour. She looked startled but complied, and then Ferate was off, racing with her in a loop around the perimeter of the concourse.
”How many people did we bump into?” he asked, slightly out of breath, on their return. Not one. The hall is so spacious that commuters are able to stream through without getting into one another's way even during the busiest hours.
The group looked impressed, except for Elsie Hansen. "He's too fast for me," she stage whispered to some of the others. Clutching her imitation quilted Channel handbag, she headed toward the exit. Hansen has a point: Ferate does talk fast, the information tumbling out in a continuous stream of quips, anecdotes and little nuggets of wisdom. At times, some of the tourists, particularly the foreigners, look confused. But no one ever appears to be bored.
”The stairs in this place are like good sex. Always fun, but you never know where it will lead,” Ferate joked as he led the group down to what was formerly the commuter hall. The tourists exchanged amused glances.
Once downstairs, Ferate made a beeline for the cheesecake display at Junior’s restaurant. The tourists listened as Ferate ticked off all the key characteristics of the New York delicacy. ”Real cheesecake has no graham cracker crust. Dr. Graham created graham cracker to curb illicit sexual appetites,” he said stabbing his index finger into the air near the offending dessert. He pointed to a plain-looking mound of cream cheese right next to it. ”This is a real cheesecake,” he said. Then he tapped the glass near a version of the dessert with a luscious looking strawberry glaze. ”This," he said with obvious disdain, "is tourist food.”
Along with the sweeping hand gestures and rising and falling tone of voice, storytelling is key to the Ferate performance. ”There’s a reason why I do all these silly things,” he explained later, adjusting his bowtie. ”I don’t want people to ever walk out of that building again, looking at it the same way as before.” ”Many tours are based on the premise that people are stupid,” he said. ”I base mine on the simple premise that people are intelligent.”
Robin Lynn is a Municipal Arts Society Tour Program coordinator who has worked with Ferate on and off for 18 years. She appreciates the amount of freedom he gives to the tour taker. "He always leaves a blank, so that people can make up their own minds," she said. Maria Prince, a fellow guide, agreed. Prince gives multi-lingual tours and has attended one of Ferate's free tour guide enhancement classes at Gray Line. She said that Ferate has a gift for making his tour-takers feel important as individuals but also for creating group cohesion.
Sometimes making tourists feel as though they are a part of a single group is as simple as instructing them all to do the same thing at once. Like wave to commuters as they rush through the main hall of Grand Central Terminal until one of them responds. When someone finally waves back, Ferate tells his group, ”now you’ve made someone’s day. And he made yours. This place is all about interaction.”
Ferate didn't always feel so connected to his environment in New York. He recalled his move to the city from Seattle in 1978 and the alienation he felt at the time. "I moved in deep winter," he said. "I had never been so cold in my life. The skies were gray and the neighborhoods felt suspect."
Then he stumbled upon a sightseeing tour book titled New York: A Guide to the Metropolis. The in-depth, scholarly treatment of the city's even most obscure landmarks immediately appealed to him. He called up Gerard Wolfe, the author of the book, and went on one of his tours. By the time the tour finished, Ferate had been converted into a devout New Yorker. "Gerard put a face to the city and provided me with tools to better understand its development, its transformations and its cacophony," Ferate said. These days he rarely leaves the city. His Christmas gift to his family back in Washington state is the same every year: a big cheesecake from a New York deli (without graham cracker, of course). ”My family thinks I’m crazy to be living here,” he said, shaking his head.
Born in Port Orchard, Washington, a small logging town near Seattle, Ferate grew up on a farm, where he, his parents and his seven siblings grew their own food, raised livestock and even made their own soap. Ferate recalls that his going off to Antioch College in Ohio resulted in a mild culture shock. At Antioch, Ferate earned a Bachelors degree in education. Later, he also pursued graduate studies in architectural history at the University of Washington.
”No matter where I lived, I was conducting tours on some level. It was not something I calculated or consciously set out to do. It just came naturally,” he said.
Since coming to New York, Ferate had worked as a tour guide instructor at Gray Line, NYC & Company, as well as at Cooper Union. Eventually, he developed Tours of the City, his own touring company. In 1995, the Governor of New York State and the New York State Tourism Council honored Ferate as New York’s ”Most Engaging Tour Guide.” When the Department of Consumer Affairs decided to introduce a new tour guide-licensing exam last year, Ferate was the obvious choice to write it.
As the sole creator of the new exam, Ferate had the opportunity to shake up a little the city's stale tourism industry. His new exam replaced what many considered to be an oversimplified and outdated test. Rather than asking obvious questions like, "What's the name of the river on the east side of Manhattan?" (an actual question on the old exam), Ferate placed greater emphasis on the outer boroughs and included more questions about history and landmarks. On the new test, tour guides might be asked practical questions, like which subway routes to take to major tourist attractions, as well as more esoteric ones, which require an in-depth knowledge of local history. One question, for instance, asks the test taker to name a famous Greenwich Village speakeasy, known as the ”Literary Hall of Fame,” whose walls are lined with book-jackets of books written by noted patrons.
Although many guides resented being retested, those who took the new test found it to be an educational experience in itself. "If you take the exam, you will come out knowing more than you did before whether you pass or fail," said Bowman.
And quite a few guides fail. Andrew Sydor, the union leader for Gray Line New York tour guides, is distraught by this trend. ”The industry doesn’t take itself seriously enough,” he said. According to Sydor, aside from the failing scores, there were also a lot of low grades on the exam (The original passing score was 120 out of 150 possible points. A few months ago this was lowered to 97.). ”I wonder if there are really awful people out there who have found a niche in the tourism industry,” he mused. Sydor emphatically supports Ferate’s new version of the exam. He sees rigorous testing as the best method of establishing and maintaining high standards in New York’s tourism industry.
Of those who oppose the new test, many haven't even taken the exam but are against it on principle, such as Marlayna Franklin of the tour company Savor the Apple, ”The test is just about what Justin thinks you should know,” she complained.
James Dykes, a guide who specializes in New York’s social history, disagrees. Although he found some of the questions to be daunting and verbally dense, he enjoyed taking the test. ”The new exam is definitely an improvement,” he said, adding that in a constantly changing city like New York, it’s important for guides to keep up.
Keeping up with Ferate, is another challenge. The crowds inside the Grand Central have become even denser as end-of-day rush hour approached. Ferate and his flock, that is to say, the remaining eight tourists who were able to keep up with Ferate’s pace and stick out the entire three-hour whirlwind of a tour, have finally came to a stop. They stood on the east balcony of the terminal, leaning on the marble railing, overlooking the teeming life in the Grand Concourse below. ”Look down, and you feel like a king with the world at your feet,” Ferate intoned. Coming down the stairs, most of the tourists appeared elated. Was it the uplifting effect of the grandiose Beaux Arts architecture or the impact of Ferate himself? To Ferate, it is of no consequence. ”I only act as the mediator between the people and their environment,” he said.
