At first, I thought this was surely a joke or perhaps an edgy skit performed on a webcast of The Onion... or some sort of sick, perverse publicity stunt. Then I found out I was wrong. Oh, it's a stunt all right. But it's a stunt acted out in a business model -- for profit -- and exploitation of the disenfranchised who are too busy to notice the class war mockery at their expense because they're preoccupied with carving out meager existences, deep in the slums of the nation's largest city.
Real Bronx Tours in New York City is currently booking tours billed as “a ride through a real New York City ‘GHETTO’.” So far, mostly foreign tourists have taken the tours.
Three times a week, Real Bronx Tours takes riders — mainly white Europeans and Australians — on a trip that includes stops at food-pantry lines and a “pickpocket” park.
Last week, on the first stop of the $45 tour, guide Lynn Battaglia, from Pittsburgh, pointed out a housing project. She then mocked the Grand Concourse, modeled after a Parisian boulevard.
“Do you feel like we’re on the Champs-Elysées?” she teased a couple from Paris.
Battaglia talked the tourists through their next highlight of the tour, a food pantry inside a church with people lined up outside.
“I don’t know what that line’s about, but every Wednesday we see it. We see them go in with empty carts, and we see them come out with carts full.”
What, no snicker? Oh... wait. I know why she's not laughing. Apparently, the tour is about to enter a danger zone.
The New York Post has the story (via) Alternet:
The tour guide warned of the dangers of going to a park in the Bronx, and also gave inaccurate information about the origin of the word “pig” to describe a police officer. While Battaglia claimed the word came from the Bronx, in reality it originated in London.
If you ask me, I'd say the "pigs" are back at the corporate offices of Real Bronx Tours.
Bronx Borough President, Ruben Diaz, harshly criticized the guide and the tour.
The guide is “the biggest fool on the planet,” said Ruben Diaz, the borough president. “To have foreigners come and gawk at a long line of people who are less fortunate than they are and to make money off of that and to view them as they are some sort of entertainment is pretty disgusting.”
Indeed
If so inclined, you can contact Real Bronx Tours and show 'em some love scorn and contempt.
I know I did.