Readers,
Touring with kids is always a challenge. You need a guide with a grasp of how to connect with students, to link them to history and its place in their current lives. That said, here's an example of the sort of story I tell students when on the tour bus heading for the Statue of Liberty:

John Adams, puritan, spent a few uncomfortable years in cosmopolitan New York City.
You have to hear his wife's wonderful quote about our town. But you have to hear the backstory first.

The United States government was founded in New York City when the British moved out of town at the end of 1783. Congress got elected in 1785 and met at City Hall on Wall Street, uncomfortably close to rich guys who used their connections to enrich themselves at the expense of other states, like Virginia and the Carolinas.

Alexander Hamilton was walking down Broadway one day when he chanced to meet VA Senator Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson asked Hamilton to dinner the following night at his house, where he unloaded on Hamilton all his fears of rich New Yorkers corrupting the government. Jefferson wanted the influence stopped! Hamilton saw the opportunity for a compromise.

Hamilton the New Yorker and Jefferson the Virginian worked out this deal: The US Treasury (Hamilton was its Secretary) would back bond sales by New York State to pay off its debts from the War.

(Now I ask the students, "What war?")

Congress was to pay a French landscape architect to design a Federal City, somewhere along the Potomac (closer to Jefferson's Virginia) and move the government there.

(Does anyone know the name of that city?)

Congress and the government departments got ready and moved there in 1790.

Abigail Adams packed up her house and her four kids, and had wagons carry it all out of town. She had lived as a New Yorker for five years and came to love our comparatively warm winters, and the nightlife that never ends.

About to leave forever, Abigail Adams wrote to a friend, "When all is done, it won't be Broadway."

TourguideStan
www.oconnorgreentoursnyc.com
917 716 4521