The guy under the beanie.

A man in a dark jacket and green shirt holding a large owl with orange eyes, standing on a city street with historic buildings and a crowd of people.

I was born in New York, which means I take it personally.

I spent my early years at the oldest school in the country, which probably tells you something about how I was raised. History was a conversational habit. I never really grew out of it.

When it came time to figure out what to do with that, I went in two directions at once. I studied history at Ithaca College, then Portland State,  and drama, in Oregon, and eventually at the Actors Studio in New York. I kept waiting for those two things to stop making sense together. They never did.

I've also traveled a lot, which has given me a useful sense of how New York fits into the larger story of the world  and why that story keeps circling back here.

A man smiling, holding a pint of dark beer with foam on top, sitting in a pub with wooden decor and a person with a guitar in the background.
A man smiling, holding a pint of dark beer with foam on top, sitting in a pub with wooden decor and a person with a guitar in the background.

I come from a family that itself reads like a chapter of New York history. My grandfather Victor Elmaleh came from Morocco and developed some of the city’s landmark buildings. My grandmother, Sono Osato, was a Japanese-Irish dancer and Broadway actress who performed on these stages in the 1940s at a time when that required a particular kind of courage. On my mother's side, I'm Cajun. When I talk about New York as a city built by people who arrived from somewhere else and made something entirely new, I'm not speaking theoretically.

A young boy sitting on ruins in front of the Parthenon, an ancient Greek temple, with tourists walking around in the background.

What I believe about history

History is not a list of dates and dead people. It's an argument about power, about identity, about who gets to decide what a place becomes. New York has been having that argument louder and longer than anywhere else in America, and most of the evidence is still visible if you know where to look.

A young man with brown hair is smiling and standing on a double-decker tourist bus in Times Square, New York City, with tall buildings, billboards, and neon signs in the background. Another person with glasses and a colorful shirt is seated nearby.

A few things worth knowing

I have a photographic memory, which helps. I speak several languages, which occasionally surprises people mid-tour. I love museums with the kind of enthusiasm that makes some people uncomfortable. If you ask me after the tour where to go next, I will have very specific opinions.

I keep my groups small, which I’ll know your name by the second stop, and the tour can go where the conversation takes it.

If any of this sounds like your kind of afternoon, I'd genuinely love to show you around.