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These NARRATED TOURS are bound to become more popular in every vacation spot.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Weekend in New York | MP3 Narrated Tours / Your Ear Can Be Your Guide / By SETH KUGEL / September 30, 2007

For the last few years, everyone from for-profit companies to nutty students have been recording narrated neighborhood walks and museum art talks that can be downloaded as MP3 files, converting your iPod into a nano-sized tour guide that doesn't ask for tips.

The genre is raw and wide-open, with plenty of material to cover and a few questions to be settled. Should tours guide you across every street or assume you can find your way between the attractions they describe? Will people pay for smoother production quality? And should the narrators be local characters, casual conversationalists or smooth-talking Mr. Voiceover?

But let's leave those issues to travel futurologists. For New York visitors of the present, the current offerings can add texture and entertainment as you traipse through town.

LITTLE-KNOWN PLACES: The most complete offerings, and the ones that are probably the most fun, are from Soundwalk (www.soundwalk.com; $12). Their 13 tours from Williamsburg to Times Square to the Bronx are led by quirky New Yorkers who direct you to places and enter doors where you would otherwise neverbe.
They also play realistic street sounds over the narration, an advantage over others that offer narration and music only and sometimes make it seem as if you are a detached observer seeing your surroundings on television.

In the Chinatown tour, for example, Jami Gong, activist, comedian and Chinatown native, leads you on a refreshingly disorienting jaunt to semihidden shops, into alleys and through Doyers Street, a jagged block no Chinatown visitor should miss but most do.

He'll guide you into a teahouse and tell you to look for the owner, Mr. Wong, reading the newspaper. “He's been sitting there and reading the newspaper forever,” Mr. Gong says into your ear. And there's Mr. Wong reading the newspaper in front of your eyes. This stuff doesn't always work, but when it does, it's amazing.

At one point, he leads you down an alley and into a door marked with Chinese characters only. A gambling den? No, you find yourself in a Chinese senior citizens center, where you might find musicians plucking Chinese stringed instruments before a small audience.

Also quirky, but in a more intellectual way, are the three tours offered free by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (www.lmcc.net/art/programs/2006.9.1artwalkingtours/).

They're about public art, and the Art & the Body tour is good. It's not a first-time-in-New-York thing, but it is great for people who usually look at stoic statues of famous men from long ago and think, “Get me to the nearest hot dog vendor.”

For example, the two narrators compare the nearly deified larger-than-life George Washington in front of Federal Hall with the much more approachable John Ericsson (inventor of the screw propeller, duh) in Battery Park. They also explain why sculptors of the era portrayed men as individuals but used women as allegories, like the four “continents” in front of the old Customs House at Bowling Green.

As you listen, you feel a brief jolt of intellectual superiority as you watch your fellow travelers take quick snapshots and then head on.

ART IRREVERENCE: A few alternative museum tours have cropped up in response to the audio tours available from museums themselves. Because museum commentary is generally erudite and positive, be ready for backlash. The Marymount Manhattan College students and professors, whose irreverent, often sexually charged, layman-talking-about-art discussions: (www.homepage.mac.com/dave7/ArtMobs/FileSharing52.html) got a lot of news coverage when they were made in 2005, are still lots of fun.

And Slate's former art critic Lee Siegel has a comical-but-dead-serious, highly critical tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's modern art halls and its selection (on Léger's “Still Life”: “This my grandmother wouldn't even have bought at Macy's”). But Mr. Siegel's tour is dated, which is frustrating for two reasons: because several paintings are gone, and because Slate stopped doing the tours.

FIFTH ALL THE WAY: The Tourcaster guides, which cover much of the world, have only one for New York (www.tourcaster.com; $9.95). But if you can stand the Monster Trucks-like “Welcome to Tourcaster!!!” at the beginning of each track, it's a good one. Your host is a funny, opinionated, very New York guy named David, who takes you down Fifth Avenue for the length of Central Park to the bottom. He talks about the museums, of course, but he also obsesses about the playgrounds and happily tells you how his friend had two feet of small intestine removed at Mount Sinai Hospital.

FIRST-TIMERS: The four Sounds for Sights tours (www.soundsforsights.com; $6.99) are more for the first-time visitor who can handle the movie-trailer-guy-meets- Casey Kasem narrator. The descriptions of the sights are useful but can get didactic and lengthy, like standing for several minutes outside Fraunces Tavern and hearing the details of both George Washington's and Colin Powell's speeches there. Or silly, as when the Times Square tour describes the place as “so massive, so ostentatious that most New Yorkers don't ever dare visit.”

Neither guidebooks nor live guides need fear for their jobs anytime soon, but the MP3 tours have their advantages. You can go whenever you want, pause to wander, shop, rest or have a meal, but you still get to feel as if you have an expert along with you. And they're about an hour, so even when they're disappointing, you're not wasting a day.

And the image-conscious will benefit: instead of tagging along with a goofy gaggle of camera-toters, you're easing down the street with iPod buds in your ears, much cooler. (Unless you're sharing the earphones and bickering with your partner about when to pause, in which case you're back to goofy again.)