Tour guide Zak Risinger shares true crime stories of the South Street Seaport Historic District and Lower Manhattan with tour guests.
Photo by Gabriele Holtermann
Guests at the South Street Seaport who expect a stuffy museum tour filled with boring facts are in for a surprise when they sign up for the Seaport Museum’s “Sinister Secrets of the Seaport” tour of the historic district in Lower Manhattan.
The 90-minute-long, interactive tour, led by tour guide Zak Risinger, director of engagement and public programs for the South Street Seaport Museum, takes crime enthusiasts to twelve historical crime scenes lurking in the cobblestone streets, historic buildings, and waterfront.
Risinger is entertaining and engaging when he talks about the area’s dark past. The sinister, dubious, and sometimes scandalous stories are ripped from the headlines of newspapers and publications from the 1790s to the 1990s and tell a tale about murder, arson, prostitution, blackmail, and illegal animal fights. The stories involve prominent business people, scorned husbands, New York politicians, crooks, and organized crime. Risinger even has “a bridge to sell.”
Risinger, who came up with the concept for the tour, explained they focused on stories with an “unbelievable” factor.
“It would have been really easy to find stories where people committed crimes out of desperation. There are tons of those,” Risinger said. “So it’s finding people who acted out of opportunity like they didn’t have [commit a crime].”
The tour was made possible with a grant from the Alliance for Downtown New York’s Walking Tour Incubator program, which presents five new walking tours of Lower Manhattan.
Jonathan Boulware, president and CEO of the South Street Seaport Museum, explained the museum has been conducting tours for years, and the current tour was an iteration of a previous tour that involved “tawdry and sinister things of the Seaport.”
“The seaport…
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