City Expert Joyce Gold Reflects on Nearly 50 Years of Guided Tours

When asked how she came to be one of Manhattan’s earliest independent tour guides—almost 50 years ago, well before the New York Times deemed her “the doyenne of city walking guides”—Joyce Gold looks back to the moment that she says changed her life. It was during the days when she still worked as a computer analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York downtown. She’d gone into the Isaac Mendoza Book Company on Ann Street, which was once the city’s oldest bookstore.

“I picked up a book, and since it was set in the area that I worked in, I could picture the Indians on Broadway, the Dutch on Pearl Street, and so on,” Gold said.

“Nobody I worked with knew anything about the past. I didn’t know anything about it—New York has always been a future-looking city — and I couldn’t get enough of it.”

Gold started leading walking tours around the city in 1976. Since then, by her estimate, “tens of thousands” have taken her tours. Her walks cover 45 neighborhoods in Manhattan, and eight in Brooklyn. She’s written two guidebooks—one about Chelsea and the other about Greenwich Village—which she’s seen other guides use. She has over 35 different tours of Greenwich Village alone, and she’s constantly coming up with new tours. Even after 48 years, she hasn’t forgotten why she does it.

“The idea was to make New Yorkers’ lives better, by having them realize the depth of everything around them,” Gold said.

Gold comes from a small town in Pennsylvania. When she was in the ninth grade, she and her family moved to Queens. Gold received a B.A. from Queens College in English Literature, and an M.A. in Metropolitan Studies at New York University. She’s worked as a teacher, a computer analyst, and was even involved in the stained glass business. While she was able to draw on a lot of her past experiences when she started touring, it wasn’t something she’d done before.

“My first tour I ever did, I invited friends to take a tour of Greenwich Village, Washington Square, and I had them pay me $3 each and then I asked them for feedback,” she said.

When she leads a tour, Gold talks about the people who once lived or worked along the tour route. She points out buildings, odd lamp posts, and even the construction of a particular stretch of sidewalk.

“I’m a historian,” Gold said during one of her tours. “Everything looks out of place to me.”

Even now, after five decades of touring, she still seeks feedback from people she trusts. “I have a partner who will come on every tour before I give it to the public and it’s very helpful with editing towards tweaking,” she said.

At first, the tours were a side hustle. She did them on the weekends, researching the places she’d tour in her free time. She started sending information about her tours to newspapers, and relied on word-of-mouth to promote herself. Eventually, the tours grew so big that she was able to do them full time.

Most of the people who accompany her on her tours are locals. “The more you know, surprisingly, the more interesting these tours can be,” Gold said.

“Because maybe you’ve passed that fence a million times, and oh! But I can tell you about that fence to make it much more interesting.”

When Gold designs a tour, she spends hours in research. She says she owns over 1000 books about New York, and makes frequent use of the library. She constantly combs through newspapers for information, cutting out sections and keeping the clippings, in case she decides to craft a new tour in the future.

“So if I’m going to do a new tour—say, something in Brooklyn that I don’t usually know that well—I have a file on every neighborhood in Brooklyn. And so that’s where I’ll start and see what grabs me as the most interesting.”

Her tours tend to be about half a mile long, which she completes over roughly two hours. The content of her tours vary greatly, depending on her audience.

“The same route can be very different if it’s a fourth grade group or if it’s a bunch of lawyers,” Gold said. “So that keeps me fresh and excited about what I do.”

Gold tailors her tours to whatever is currently in the public’s eye. She created a Hamilton tour, for example, when the Broadway musical exploded in popularity. One of her current recurring tours, “The Gilded Age—Grandiose Yearnings From Untaxed Earnings,” is aimed at viewers of the HBO show.

“I love the Gilded Age series,” said Emilia Estrela, a New Yorker who took Gold’s Gilded Age tour after hearing about her from a Gold tour group regular.

“Walking tours were never something that I was so interested in,” Estrela said. “It’s a nice way to spend an hour and a half.”

Gold’s upcoming tour, “Macabre Greenwich Village,” is one of her most popular ones. Gold has had as many as 125 people taking the tour at the same time.

“It was half a block of people wearing their little orange dots,” Gold said. “And that was a thrill!”

One time, Gold led David Schwimmer on a private walking tour for his then-fiancée's birthday. He’d chosen her “Immigrant, Radical, Notorious Women Of Washington Square” tour, which, she’d thought, “said a lot for David Schwimmer.”

“But what I must say tickled me,” Gold said, “is that walking around Washington Square, where I often am, two people recognized me. And nobody recognized him, because they didn’t expect to see him. If we passed a group of kids, he would put his hand over his face. But boy did I enjoy that.”

What Gold enjoys the most about her tours is connecting with the people taking them. “Some people have invited us into their homes,” she said.

Gold hopes that, through connecting with people about the city’s rich history, they’ll want to help preserve it.

“We are kind of busily knocking down a lot of our connection to the past in this city,” Gold said.

“[New Yorkers] knowing this stuff is very good for the city, because maybe they’ll want to not see it as some old crumbling building, but a connection to 1790, to all that was happening.”

While Gold is planning to pause her public tours between early December and March, she has no plans to stop.

“I’ve always said I’ll do it until I break an ankle, which I don’t intend to do.”