How do you get to Carnegie Hall (with a motor coach)?
And what was Gustave Eiffel listening to when he died?
It’s been hot. I do not care for the heat and, consequently, do not go outside when it is hot. A friend suggested recently that I ought to treat New York’s recent heat wave as a blizzard and just stay indoors. Aside from the fact that I quite like going out in blizzards, I took the advice and stayed in last weekend, working on a project I had started in the winter but abandoned in order to enjoy the cold weather: getting a New York City Sightseeing Guide License.
It is, according to Section 20-243 of the City of New York’s Administrative Code, unlawful for any person to engage in the business of guiding or directing people to any place or point of public interest, or to describe, explain, or lecture concerning any place or point of public interest to any person in connection with a sightseeing trip within the five boroughs. That is, tour guides must have a license.
I do not know what transpired in this city that resulted in statutory requirements for the licensing of tour guides. One calls to mind, perhaps, the image of a Department of Consumer Affairs commissioner watching in horror on their lunch break as a tour guide points to City Hall and calls it the Stock Exchange, and resolving that something must be done. Maybe an out-of-town visitor wrote to the municipal government to complain that their tour guide had been too slow in telling them where they might find an original copy of Audobon’s Birds of America (the New-York Historical Society on Central Park West at 77th Street). Perhaps too many tour guides appeared at Kennedy Airport to collect guests while inappropriately attired (Consumer Affairs recommends professional dress). No matter what it was, somebody, at some point, decided that the tour guides of the Nation’s Metropolis needed to be in lockstep on these issues.
While I did my share of tour guiding in college, I have no professional aspirations in the field. Still, tour guiding is also an important skill for people who live in Manhattan and give off a warm midwestern aura since we carry most of the weight when it comes to providing subway directions and pointing people toward landmarks. Each year, the tourist trade saves each New Yorker $1,350 in taxes, so it seems like the right thing to do.
Most appealing, though, is the draw of professional licensing and its associated bureaucracy. Finally, in the sightseeing guide license, I have a chance to count myself among the NYC-regulated ranks of such revered professions as pawnbrokers, auctioneers, debt collectors, process servers, and secondhand automotive dealers.
The process of acquiring a tour guide license is simple. The City’s checklist calls for an application form, a fee of $102 ($50 for the license, $50 for the pleasure of taking the test, and $2 for paying with a credit card — the only payment option), a photograph, and a form concerning one’s child support payment obligations. Finally, there is the test.
The sightseeing guide exam for New York City is 150 multiple choice questions. A score of 97 correct answers is considered passing. An “exemplary” score of 120 correct answers means that “a star will be placed next to your name on the DCA website!” What a thrill.
So, which details of the capital of the world make it onto the test? What does the City of New York decide is the appropriate curriculum for those who will interpret the metropolis for its visitors? The City offers a three-page guide to prepare test takers.
Item two on the list, for example, is “Basic information oriented toward visitors to NYC” and item three is a daunting “history from the Algonquin Indians to the present day.” The literature category is mercifully limited to a “very general recognition” of nine authors.
The test comes more into focus in a series of study aids prepared by other test takers, most of whom appear to have prepared under terrible duress and without great concern for a star appearing next to their name on the DCA website. (Flashcard question: “What are the crosstown bus routes.” Flashcard answer: “Don’t try to learn.”) Looking for something more comprehensive, I purchased a special study book written by a man who, as I discovered when I looked him up later, lives in Toronto.
Theater, the study guide tells us, is the main tourist attraction in New York. It is surprising, then, that the rest of the guide and test seems geared toward a locale in which the principal draw is lists of architects.
Most of the information is not terribly practical. It is, in my estimation, the rare arrival at the Port Authority Bus Terminal who steps out with a dollar, a dream, and a burning desire to know which is the most convenient subway line to reach the city’s second largest collection of Egyptian artifacts (it would be, for the record, the 2 or 3 train). On a similar note, none of the multiple choice options for “What would you find on Roosevelt Island?” include “the Duane Reade that always has multi-packs of Sensodyne in stock,” which has always been of greater use to me (and I hope this will continue to be so) than the crumbling smallpox hospital.
Some of the test is completely outdated. Online forums warn test takers that the number of daily passengers through Grand Central Terminal is, for the test, 30% lower than the actual figure. Test takers are also required to learn the particulars of a Bloomberg-era Midtown traffic control program and the location of a gallery that closed some years ago.
The prospective sightseeing guide is treated to all these pearls of knowledge and more. For example, I now know that the Italian Government credits a Staten Island resident called Antonio Meucci as the inventor of the telephone and that Gustave Eiffel not only designed the interior of the Statue of Liberty but also died while listening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
Armed with these facts, I appeared at a testing center in Times Square at lunch on Tuesday, where I learned that the testing computers would not connect to the City’s testing system. I called 3-1-1 — the City’s general line — to see about making alternative arrangements and, after four transfers ultimately landing with a very nice woman who seemed to be quite high up in the world of professional licensing testing, felt that perhaps such a 3-1-1 call alone ought to qualify me as a New York expert. It did not. I returned to a different Midtown testing center on Thursday afternoon.
Most of the people at the testing center are not in it for the joy of professional licensing bureaucracy. Most of the people are taking nerve-wracking, life-altering, high-stakes nightmare tests. The mood reflects this, as does the pre-test ritual of placing all of one’s worldly possessions in a locker and the CCTV cameras pointed at each test-taking station.
Test takers are permitted three hours for the exercise. I knocked out 150 questions in about 50 minutes, including a couple of curveballs. (I thought I knew everything about Mayor Jimmy Walker, his bombastic life in the 1920s, his fall from grace amid corruption charges at the beginning of the Depression, and his flight to Europe with his Ziegfeld Girl mistress, but I still found myself guessing — correctly — on the street where he had lived.)
I missed six questions, mostly involving motor coach parking regulations (which I suspect would be dreadfully boring to most visitors anyway). This places me — and I say this only to gloat — well above the “exemplary” score. “Congratulations!” whispered the test proctor, who seemed glad to have a customer who was not yearning for their own death.
For the next two years, my bragging rights will be enshrined in the test score on the license card which is to be delivered this week. The tragedy, of course, is that such marvelous talent should be wasted on someone who is not a tour guide and who, with another week of highs in the nineties, will be sitting merrily inside during the peak of the tourist season, waiting for better weather.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
Derry Girls on Netflix.
I have only recently started Derry Girls, the third season of which will reportedly come to Netflix later this month. It has been a pleasure. A show set against the backdrop of Northern Ireland’s Troubles should not be so wildly funny, but here it is. The show is a lot of things, the best of which right now being a sort of teen comedy version of Mad Men — showing us how great historical horrors almost always seem subordinate to the daily drama of human life.
“Edward Feiner, 75, Dies; Revolutionized Look of Federal Buildings” in the New York Times.
The General Services Administration, which this obituary explains as being “essentially the federal government’s landlord,” does not seem terribly exciting on its face. I — the sort of person you might expect to know who runs something like the GSA — had never heard of Mr. Feiner until I came across his obituary last Monday. I am glad that I did.
The Newsletter has included in previous editions my thoughts on government design and the damage that unnecessary austerity does to our civic life (remarks on Amtrak French toast and State of Michigan pens come to mind). There is a specific kind of austerity when it comes to government architecture. Working in government buildings exposes a person to the sorts of people who will call their office building the “Taj Mahal” and cite the extraordinary expense of the carpet or the width of the hallways in their complaints. The underlying belief is that government should be performatively stingy. Feiner spent his career fighting this notion, bringing in some of the world’s best architects to design federal buildings.
“Bad design, he said repeatedly, could only diminish the public’s respect for government and what it could achieve; good design, on the other hand, was critical to creating a vibrant civic culture.
‘If we’re not willing to portray our government institutions as dignified and stable,’ he told The Washington Post, ‘what sort of services can we expect from them?’”