Until recently, European tourists seeking poverty-porn have been crowding onto buses to ride through “a real New York City ‘GHETTO,’” i.e., the Bronx.
The controversy that erupted over the tour caused the operator, Real Bronx Tours, to drop it today.
But the NY Post tagged along last week as one tour guide, Lynn Battaglia,made snide comments and gazed at impoverished locals.
As the bus idled across from historic St. Ann’s Episcopalian Church, Battaglia launched into a description of the crime, poverty and violence that plagued the South Bronx during the 1970s recession.
As she spoke, a line of two dozen poor people — including one man visibly agitated by the onlookers — waited for handouts from the church pantry.
“I don’t know what that line’s about, but every Wednesday we see it,” Battaglia told the tourists. “We see them go in with empty carts, and we see them come out with carts full.”
Bronx Borough President slammed Real Bronx Tours last week:
“To have foreigners come and gawk at a long line of people who are less fortunate than they are and to make money off of that and to view them as they are some sort of entertainment is pretty disgusting.”
![How fun is this: In the middle of their workday, office employees in Midtown Manhattan have started trekking to lunch-hour dance parties held at nightclubs.
These include Laurie Batista, 31, an executive assistant at an advertising agency…
… she was wearing purple lensless Wayfarer-style glasses, waving a footlong foam glow stick and mouthing the words to Warren G’s “Regulate.”
Around her, hundreds of other revelers did similar things: a guy in Chuck Taylors moonwalked across the dance floor, a man in a hoodie threw up his hands to form the “W” that stands for the rap group Wu-Tang Clan. Strobe lights bounced off a giant disco ball. Sweat glistened on foreheads. “Gin and Juice” thumped. Cheers erupted. It was midday, but inside Marquee, it could have been 2 a.m. [NYT]
Sounds far less pathetic than eating over my keyboard.
The DJ’s at these affairs include Questlove of The Roots, and aside from the all the twenty- and thirty-something attendees are some retirees.
“I just happened to be walking by and a young lady gave me a flier and I said, ‘O.K., I have nothing else to do for lunch,’ ” said Dorothy Vazquez, a 68-year-old resident of Brownsville, Brooklyn, who happened on the latest Lunch Beat. Ms. Vazquez said she normally dances at her local seniors center. She smiled, surveying the people filing into the club. “I’m looking forward to boogieing,” she said.
Photo by Benjamin Norman for the New York Times](http://24.media.tumblr.com/117103a8469d8e86f6161651081598a4/tumblr_mmjfg9qow91rbynwco1_400.jpg)
![In the 1800s, part of the West Village was known as “Little Africa, or less kindly as Coontown,” writes John Strausbaugh in his fascinating new book “The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village.”
“Little Africa also drew free blacks and ‘mulattoes’ who’d come to New York from the West Indies. Often better educated and with more skills than the city’s freed slaves, some of them thrived, within the limits imposed on them. One [William Henry Brown] started America’s first black professional theater company in Greenwich Village in 1821….the African Grove, with an all-black company….Its first full-lengthproduction was Richard III.”
“As other productions followed — Othello, some farces and pantomines, and most controversially Brown’s own The Drama of King Shotaway, about a slave rebellion in the Indies — whites began to join blacks in the audience. They didn’t sit in respectful silence. Black actors performing Shakespeare represented to them an amusing novelty. A newspaper from 1822 reports that ‘the audience was generally of a riotous character, and amused themselves by throwing crackers on the stage, and cracking their jokes with the actors.’
“The seating policy at the African Grove, amazingly, instituted reverse segregation: whites were relegated to the back rows because, as a handbill stated, they didn’t know ‘how to conduct themselves at entertainments for ladies and gentlemen of color.’”
Brown closed down the Grove in 1823, but one of the company’s star actors, Ira Aldridge (shown above, in Titus Andronicus) moved to England, “where he became renowned for his Othello, as well as his Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, and Shylock, the latter roles sometimes performed in whiteface makeup.”
More on “The Village,” by John Strausbaugh](http://25.media.tumblr.com/973dcbe491a97fc20e93c89c71f07815/tumblr_mmhobosbRQ1rbynwco1_400.jpg)
