Michael Nagle
This ghoulish walking tour may send chills running down your spine.
New York locals and tourists alike can instead get a glimpse into the city’s macabre history of death, disease and burials — at sites like Chinatown’s funeral row – through an off-beat lower Manhattan walking tour.
“It’s 400-plus years of municipal management and mismanagement of death in New York,” said Purefinder tour guide and journalist K. Krombie, who founded the Death in New York walking tour in 2022. “It’s what the city doesn’t want you to see.”
The uniquely morbid tour – which takes the curious through Battery Park, the Financial District, Tribeca, the Civic Center and Chinatown – was conceived by Krombie during the pandemic lockdown due to the city’s emergency burial and sanitation process.
“The pandemic happened, and to get fresh air I would walk around Randall’s Island — where they had about 50 or 60 refrigerated trucks to store the dead,” the Astoria, Queens, resident said. “So that got me thinking about the history of sanitation and epidemics because I had nothing else to do during the pandemic, so I just started writing about it.”
The result was first a book published in 2021, dubbed “Death in New York: History and Culture of Burials, Undertakers and Executions,” which evolved into a real-life lower Manhattan tour the following spring.
Since then, the historian has expanded her offerings to include a tour of the Psychiatric History of the Upper East Side, Oppenheimer in New York and The Outlaws Who Built Manhattan.
A “Central Park: Scandal & Vice” tour focusing on lesser-known crimes in and around the park will debut next week.
“There’s a lot of Central Park tours, but nothing like this one,” Krombie said.
The weekend walking tours are mostly frequented by New Yorkers looking to see a new side of their city — but visitors have come from as far as Russia, Switzerland and Thailand, Krombie said.
Attendees can expect a nearly 3-mile trek across nearly 400-year-old grave-robbed African burial grounds, a view of the island that hosted the state’s last public execution, the oldest existing Jewish cemetery in North America and Manhattan’s only funeral row – complete with a florist and funeral supply stores.
“The last time I did this tour, we saw a lady’s leg hanging out of a body bag,” she said while at a tour stop in Chinatown’s unofficial funeral road on Mulberry Street. “The group was so excited.”
The three-hour journey through lower Manhattan used to be even longer, Krombie said — but segments were cut due to the strong reactions attendees would have when recalling the events of the Sept. 11 attacks of the macabre tour.
“Because it’s mostly New Yorkers who do my tours, I could see that the New Yorkers who remember [Sept. 11], their body language would change,” she said. “They would get uncomfortable … of all the things I talk about, that’s the only significant thing in living memory.”
The seasoned tour guide contends that, while there are plenty of New York sightseeing and even ghost tours, her macabre history lessons will pique the interest of even longtime Manhattanites.
“We’re offering something unusual: reconnecting with the city in a new way,” Krombie added.
”It’s about finding out why we are the way we are.”