A Grand Opening, New Tours, and So. Much. Pizza.
Nicky Tours Lifts Off
It’s been a sizzling summer here in New York City, and it’s even hotter because NYC’s newest, freshest tour company is officially off the ground: Nicky Tours.
My name is Nicky Shapiro, and I’m a lifelong New Yorker with generations of family history here in the city. After a lifetime spent living amongst city legend and lore, I served as a public school teacher in Harlem, backpacked around the world for a year with my surfboard, and became an officially licensed New York City tour guide after realizing the power of great local guides through my travels (you can read all about me here).
After several years guiding for various larger, contracted companies around town, I’ve decided to launch my own venture, Nicky Tours, a small company (me!) leading private, boutique, personalized walking and food tours of New York City. I created Nicky tours for people who want to experience the city personally, with context, care, and humor, not through a megaphone or mass-market script. These are private, custom, and small-scale tours designed to feel like walking the city with a local friend (me) who actually knows and loves the places like I do.
In addition to the custom tours I’m being hired to lead (including a pizza and beer crawl through the East Village which I crafted for a bachelor party this past weekend where things got just a little crazy), I’m offering seven signature tours all across the city:
🏙️ Downtown Highlights
🍕 NYC Pizza Experience
🌳 West Village Backstreets
🫕 Upper West Side Food Tour
🌮 East Village Food Tour
🏞️ Central Park Insider
🗽 Midtown Highlights
And they’ve been a HUGE success! In just a few months, Nicky Tours has racked up 37 Five-Star reviews across Google and TripAdvisor, adding to the hundreds of five-star reviews I received as a contractor (no tour I’ve ever given, for the record, has ever received less than a five-star review…and don’t be that person…).
I always get asked to tell stories about “disaster tours,” or tours-gone-wrong—the truth is that I haven’t really had such an experience. Nicky Tours is attracting curious, intelligent, and thoughtful guests who care about learning the city in the right way, be it through history, architecture, food, culture, or sports. The greatest joy of my job has been meeting hundreds of guests from all over the world and learning from the perspectives they bring to me each and every day.
So I want to personally invite you and your family and friends to come along for the ride, and join me on a Nicky Tour the next time you’re in the city (use the code IHEARTNYC25 for a 10% discount on all tours at checkout).
In the meantime, you’re free to enjoy this newsletter, which I’ll be sending out monthly, where I’ll feature fascinating city stories, updates from the NYC streets, and the best of the new writing I put out every month.
Happy Summer from NYC’s hottest tour company!
-Nicky
(P.S: Follow Nicky Tours on Instagram here, and subscribe to my writing Substack, TRIAGE, here)
Pizza Pizza
It’s Hot Pizza Tour Summer here at Nicky Tours HQ—July’s most popular tour was the NYC Pizza Experience, a tour I crafted to highlight four top-tier pizzerias in what’s become the city’s pizza mecca: Greenwich Village.
Picking “only” four pizza stops in the Village is actually a pretty difficult task. For one, anyone who’s spending any time in Greenwich Village these days knows that the lines for a slice can get out of control. Luckily, I’ve had a late-night slice or two in my day, and I know which local spots are worth the wait and which aren’t (a general rule: real New Yorkers aren’t waiting more than ten minutes for a slice of pizza). To avoid the tourist traps of the neighborhood, I build relationships with local pizzerias to avoid lines for my guests and learn the histories which give each slice joint its own unique character and flavor.
The world-renowned slices at Bleecker Street Pizza, for example, come with an amazing history. The pizzeria was founded in 2004 as the dream project of retired NYPD captain Douglas Greenwood, a 9/11 first responder who spent 40 days at ground zero, collecting bodies in the wake of the September 11 attack. The classic Bleecker slice is the “Nonna Maria”—the grandma slice—named after the Greenwood family matriarch’s signature recipe. Tragically, Doug Greenwood passed away in the late 2010s, leaving the pizzeria in the hands of his brother, Greg, who past Nicky Tours guests will undoubtedly recognize as the tall, older gentleman who comes out of retirement every Friday to regale guests with tales of his brother and celebrity appearances at his restaurant.
Going on more than 20 years in business, Bleecker Street Pizza doesn’t just have an amazing story, but is home to what may just be the best, most consistent overall slice of pizza in New York (Nonna Maria didn’t mess around with her red sauce).
On every Pizza Experience, my guests and I rank our pizza stops from one to four, and Bleecker Street is consistently at or near the top of the list, right alongside [redacted], [redacted], and [redacted]! (You thought I’d give away all my secrets in the first newsletter?)
Invite friends and family along to the NYC Pizza Experience today to find out the rest.
Nicky’s Writing: Will We Ever Swim in the East River?
In 1679, a Dutch journalist named Jasper Danckaerts visited New York City, looked around, and started writing.
“It is not possible,” Danckaerts recorded, “to describe how this bay swarms with fish, both large and small, whales, tunnies and porpoises, whole schools of innumerable other fish.”
I think of Danckaerts, whose account is conveyed in Eric Sanderson’s essential New York natural history Manahatta, every day during my walks along the East River, a body of water whose status over the course of modern history has been relegated to the butt of a Seinfeld joke. In fact, the current state of New York’s unapproachable waterways is a historical aberration, a blip in the long natural history of the region. And I, more than anything, want to jump in.
I’ve been thinking about all of this as the weather warms up here in New York City and I’m reminded yet again of the force of nature, its indomitable presence both on the street and in my heart, especially after witnessing the spectacular beauty of the California coastline on a visit last month. It’s a fallacy to presume that nature doesn’t exist here—the island of Manahatta would have been the most ecologically biodiverse of any of America’s national parks had its environment been preserved—but there’s a certain day-to-day integration of the natural world in urban life on the west coast which is sorely lacking here. I’d like to remind readers that such cohesion, as surprising as it may seem, is indeed achievable here in New York, too.
This premise undergirds my latest essay, “Will We Ever Swim in the East River?” published last month in Vital City. Do New Yorkers have it in us to reimagine the city as one embedded in, and not separated from, the natural world? Will we ever dare to jump?
I want to thank the team at Vital City for supporting the piece. You can check it out here, and, as always, spread the word if you like what you read.
Happy summer, everyone—see you again in August!
-Nicky
