Experience New York City's strangest holiday stories on a walk through Lower Manhattan with "The Dark Christmas Tour" presented by Purefinder New York. The tour begins in the daylight and ends as the city enters dusk as you explore how colonial faith, immigration tradition and urban unrest shaped the city's idea of Christmas, moving from sacred ritual to civic holiday and eventually to spectacle and commerce.
With your guide, you can explore The Church in the Fort, the place where St. Nicholas first arrived in New Amsterdam and faith stood beside fear on the edge of empire. Also learn about the holiday riots where winter festivities would spill onto the streets and the city struggled to contain its own cheer; a Methodists congregation caught between devotion, discipline and the contradictions of goodwill; and how imagination turned old legends into the city's most enduring holiday myths.
All tours are 90 minutes long and span one mile, starting at the meeting point by The National Museum of the American Indian (One Bowling Green) and ending at City Hall Park.