Eat to Blog, September 14, 2012
by Donnie Tsang
[I]t wasn’t just a food tour but also an educational one. I love history. I love learning about things that we normally overlook or just don’t have the time to notice. I also love the chance to chat with the vendors themselves and to hear from them (and Brian) the struggles of running a food cart/truck in NYC.
Once a leading Naval shipyard, the Brooklyn Navy Yard is today a mission-driven industrial park and a nationally-acclaimed model of the viability and positive impact of modern, urban industrial development. The 300-acre Yard is owned by the City of New York and managed by the not-for-profit Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation (BNYDC). Now home to over 400 businesses employing more than 7,000 people, BNYDC strives to provide an environment in which businesses and careers can take root and grow. Through its public programming at BLDG 92, the visitor, exhibition, and employment center, BNYDC continues to honor and preserve the site’s rich history. The Turnstile Tours team has been collaborating with BNYDC to research, develop, and operate Tours and public programs since 2008.
The Street Vendor Project is a membership-based project of the Urban Justice Center with nearly 2,000 vendor members who are working together to create a vendors’ movement for permanent change. The organization does outreach to vendors and stakeholders to educate about rights and responsibilities, campaigns for changes to laws and policies that unfairly target street vendors, provides legal representation to vendors in court, and helps vendors grow their businesses by linking them with small business training and loans. As part of their mission to elevate street vendors and their positive contributions to the city, the Street Vendor Project hosts the annual Vendy Awards competition, the “Oscars of street food.” Since we launched the Food Cart Tour in 2010, Turnstile Tours has donate 5% of all revenue from these tours to the Street Vendor Project.
The Prospect Park Alliance is a nonprofit organization founded in 1987 to restore and maintain Prospect Park after a long period of steady deterioration and decline. The Alliance works to preserve the natural environment, restore historic design and provide public programs and amenities for the 585-acre landmark park, which receives more than 10 million visitors each year. We launched our tours of Prospect Park in partnership with the Alliance in the spring of 2017 to mark the 150th anniversary of the Park’s opening. If you would like to become the member of the Alliance and support their work, you can add a membership to your purchase when reserving tour tickets.
The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) is a non-profit organization with a mission to encourage economic growth throughout the five boroughs of New York City by strengthening the City’s competitive position and facilitating investments that build capacity, create jobs, generate economic opportunity, and improve quality of life. The NYCEDC manages hundreds of city-owned properties and related economic development programs, including the Brooklyn Army Terminal and the city’s network of public retail markets, where we partner with them to offer public programming and tours.
All Turnstile Tours experiences are available for private groups. We have experience hosting a range of audiences, from college classes to birthday parties to company outings, and we customize our tours to meet your group’s interests and needs. If you are locals looking for a fun afternoon with friends, working professionals looking to learn more about various industries, or a domestic or international tour operator organizing a group trip to New York City, we can help you find experiences to fit your itinerary. Below you will find specialized information for different audiences.
Turnstile Tours offers highly-specialized tours of lesser-known places and stories of New York City that can be adapted to complement undergraduate, graduate, research, professional development, and industry-related programs. Built around rigorous research and close connections to the communities in which we work, each tour is offered in partnership with a non-profit organization and explores topics ranging from the the history of New York City’s industrial waterfront and military infrastructure to contemporary stories of the city’s manufacturers, immigrant entrepreneurs, urban planners, and architects.
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