Real Bronx Tours, a company that took European tourists on a scenic tour of a "real New York City ghetto," has stopped all their tours in the South Bronx.

For $45 a tour, the group chauffeured tourists around the rough parts of the borough that still resemble the turbulent times of the '80s. The tour included trips past food-pantry lines, government housing projects and a area deemed "pickpocket park."

The guides promised the tourists that they were safe, as they kept customers at "a safe distance" from any danger, according to their now removed website.

Almost immediately after the New York Post exposed the tours, the community banded together against them. Grammy-nominated musician and Bronx resident Brian Sanabria told to the Huffington Post that the way the tours portray the Bronx is no longer accurate.

"Those days are over, the Bronx is being rebuilt, it's rising again," she told the website.

Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. along with New York City Council Member Melissa Mark-Viverito released an open letter addressed to Real Bronx Tours owner Michael Myers. The letter urged Mr. Myers to stop the tours that frame the borough "as a haven for poverty and crime, while mocking everything from our landmarks to the less fortunate members of our community who are availing themselves of food assistance programs."

Ellen Martinez, an anthropologist and Bronx resident, still gives visitor tours through the same neighborhood that Real Bronx Tours took their customers. She takes tourists through many of the theaters, halls, clubs where some of the most famous hip-hop, salsa, and jazz were created.

"Many young Europeans come here as a pilgrimage," Ms. Martinez told the Huffington Post. "This was the incubator for hip-hop, salsa, jazz, Afro-Cuban music, R&B." She believes that the same neighborhoods that Mr. Myers's tours made out to be disgusting and impoverished can be seen in a different light when viewed with their cultural significance.

Ms. Martinez, along with several of her neighbors have created a counter-campaign to the smearing image that Real Bronx Tours has created.

They plan to call their movement, "Bronx Rising."

The view for a few.

These days hard hats are the non plus ultra of chic accessories. They make a Birkin bag look so pedestrian! And having one's hair coiffed and colored to perfection at Frederic Fekkai is all well and good, but it's nothing without the windblown disarray that one achieves from standing on a high floor of an unfinished skyscraper.

Yes, the best way to show off one's money, powers of persuasion and impressive social connections is scoring a ride to the top of One57 or One World Trade Center. (Any other building that begins with "One" and recently had a topping out ceremony would also be a good bet). Why bother dropping names when you can drop an experience that illustrates you know all the names worth dropping?

The view for the rest of us.

Of course, visiting an open construction site is dangerous and the developers are naturally hesitant to allow guests to do it, but Extell and Durst have been known to arrange things for the right people.  Gary Barnett has been taking billionaires up in the construction elevators, sealing the deal with the breathtaking view of the city beyond the orange plastic netting, according to The Real Deal. Undoubtedly the exhilaration of taking in unmatched vistas and frightening winds might persuade a buyer left cold by renderings and promises. Sotheby's broker Nikki Field, who has, of course, been to the top, even told The Real Deal that one prospective buyer was so excited by the invitation that he flew into New York just to visit the construction site.

And while One57 may not be as wow-worthy as One World Trade Center, it is definitely more exclusive. As a Port Authority spokesman told The Wall Street Journal this summer:

"The World Trade Center site is a place of special significance for the region, the country, and people abroad. As such, we are always willing to accommodate tours when schedules permit us to give access to this remarkable project."

Willing to accommodate tours when schedules permit isn't exactly "come one, come all!" but it lacks the frisson of a firm no, followed by a whispered aside that on certain occasions, for certain visitors, exceptions might be made.

So who gets to go? It wouldn't be very exclusive if names were named, now would it? Certainly mere millionaires interested in settling on lower floors are not treated to such tours. But then, why would they be? They're never have a view from the very top. Of course, the city's biggest luxury brokers have been granted a peek. And a handful of reporters ( Naturally, The Observer has been). Probably some investors. And Tommy Hilfiger is definitely invited. NY Mag even captured Gary Barnett's offer to the take the fashion mogul and his Plaza-loving wife on a tour in their recent story on One57.

Of course, only Mr. Barnett gets the ultimate accessory: a hard hat with his name on it.

kvelsey@observer.com

That is part of the appeal of the weirdly beautiful High Line. Not the manicured park, with its concrete boardwalk and hordes of tourists but what came before on the 1.5-miles railroad trestle, the despoiled beauty of Mother Nature set loose in the wilds of Chelsea, undisturbed for decades but for the occasional trespasser.

More than 10 million visitors have taken in the breathtaking views of the city’s skyline and the Hudson River and traipsed through its minimalist landscape of historic tracks and native grasses since the High Line park opened in 2009. It has encouraged development in Chelsea and Meatpacking, inspired artists and filmmakers, and managed to polarize the surrounding neighborhood before it has even been fully restored.

Yet the thin strip of pre-post-industrial wildlands that made that all possible is about to disappear.

The feeling was inescapable during a bittersweet walk on the overgrown final half-miled of the trestle last weekend, one of the last chances New Yorkers got to visit the final untended piece of the High Line before it is recast along with its burnished siblings.

About 800 fortunate people traipsed through the half-mile stretch encircling Hudson Yards last weekend in an event organized by Open House New York and Friends of the High Line and sponsored by the Japanese retailer, UNIQLO. Tours continue this coming weekend, though they are totally booked up.

A better sponsor would have been Timberland boots.

The path begins on West 34th Street, next to the last set of idling Megabuses bound for Pittsburgh and Toronto. It unfolds through an arc of unpruned apple trees and Oriental bittersweet before curving gently toward 12th Avenue. It kinks again at 30th Street, running out to the spur that may someday become a theater at the base of great office towers. The renovated High Line, and the reality of New York, reemerge here.

The skyline, river, plant life and rail line all compete for your attention, forcing visitors to slow down to fully appreciate the park. This is a space for ambling.

It’s a nice problem to have.

“They did a beautiful job with this,” said Ellen Appleby, who made the pilgrimage on Sunday. “It’s not an English rose garden or a formal French garden. They kept the informal feel of all these weeds and created a wonderful place.”

Everywhere granite and quartz ballast stones are scattered about the tracks. Railroad spikes jut unevenly from weathered, garnet-colored rails. Deteriorated wooden ties bend and give under the weight of footsteps. Patches of wildflowers, native grasses, and peach trees that germinated on the rail beds are so thick they are nearly impenetrable.

The new plans for the third section call for retaining much of this wilderness, but it will no doubt bear the mark of the manicured.

Students of history can see remnants of the country’s post-industrial might.
The oldest section of the grounds was built in the 1930s and contains metal railroad parts emblazoned with the names of northeast steel companies. A hydraulic switch with is patent number clearly visible at the park’s 30th Street entrance was made by Racor, the Ramapo-Ajax Corp, a Hillburn, NY company near the Ramapo Mountains also known as the Ramapo Foundry Company.

A railroad frog, those junctions allowing trains to switch tracks, bears the handiwork of the Bethlehem Steel, the country’s second-largest steel company, which built ships for the U.S. armed forces and the steel used in the Golden Gate Bridge. Other rail parts have the name “Lackawana,” an Erie County steel company that became a Bethlehem subsidiary in 1922.

But other manufacturer parts that litter the High Line trail have more unusual origins.

Caramel colored ceramic insulators with no markings on them can be found above 31st Street. And several steel plates securing wooden planks on the rails contain a jumble of numbers perhaps indicating their date of origin or some other code.
Perhaps even more mysterious is the growth of a variety of native and non-native plant species along the inhospitable terrain.

Even when it comes to our invasive flora, New York is a magnet for immigrants.
Volunteers have identified dozens of flowers, grasses, and trees that have taken root since the trains stopped running on the line more than three decades ago.

On the path above 12th Avenue grow peach and crabapple trees, elegant branches of Frost Aster, dormant stalks of Queen Anne’s lace, fading yellow goldenrod, spiky white Thoroughwort, purple Centaurea or thistle, and a handsome Juniper bush. Friends of the High Line are well known for their creative fundraising efforts--Diane Von Furstenburg has made numerous collaborations--so perhaps a High line gin is in order.

Photographer Rick Darke, who was cataloguing the season’s growth, hoped that New Yorkers would equally welcome native and non-native plants growing on the High Line. “Invasive is a pejorative term, it should be really called hyperadapted natives from other places,” he said. “Some of these species have been in New York for over 300 years. How do you determine what makes a native New Yorker?”

Still, the tour evoked mixed feeling, as New Yorkers witnessed the last time the High Line will ever look this uncultivated. City officials already broke ground on the third leg of the park last month. Construction on its $90 million refurbishment will begin later this fall and the first phase of the new space will be open by 2014.

Landscape architect James Corner Field Operations and designers Diller Scofidio + Renfro will remove the rail spikes and wooden boards, and add scores of concrete planks creating a smooth pathway for people to stroll and linger. Planting designer Piet Oudolf will preserve many of the wild grasses and flowers above the rail yards, but he can’t save everything.

For access, we are paying the price.

The cost of creating a New York space for millions to enjoy is sacrificing a portion of the unkempt splendor that drew its early admirers to the site in the first place.
But perhaps that’s the way with all New York institutions. The elevated track could have been scrapped entirely and its preservation remains a great victory for the public.

“This is a wild garden that has survived without any chemicals or irrigation,” said Darke. “This is the most sustainable garden in New York. It is a triumph.” The current High Line costs millions of dollars a year to maintain, an amount Friends of the High Line has struggled to raise on a consistent basis.

When the park is finished, it will no doubt be a triumph, too, the kind of transformation the city has not known since Central Park. But we can still acknowledge the beauty that was there before, before it is gone for good.

Announcing your tour dates the same week as Madonna? Well, to paraphrase the dowager of pop, it just seems a little reductive. (Look it up.)

Still, early word has it that professional "pop art" misunderstander Lady Gaga will be touring the U.S. in 2013, after jaunts through Southeast Asia, Japan, Europe, and Latin America. Presuming any of us are still alive then, we'll be looking forward!

Adrian Morton sure hopes so. He's set up shop in the quaint Bucklebury, England, the wealthy and otherwise boring English town that will be known forever for its role in bringing up baby Kate, the future Queen of England. Whatever could Adrian Morton be doing? Well, he's making dreams come true, people -- he's inviting Waity Katie fans the world over dive headfirst into her adolescence with a bus tour that will hit up all the essential stops on the "Kate Was Here" parade.

And, as the April 29th wedding approaches, people will come, and they will come from America.

"There seems to be more interest in the States than in our own country," said Morton, who has long-standing ties to Bucklebury. "I've been contacted by an American tour operator about possible tours. You can see the places where she went to school and where she was christened. And locals are interested too."

The bus tour idea came from Morton's twin brother, who lives in the United States and has seen an explosion of public fascination with the royal wedding.

Public fascination with this wedding? From the United States? No idea what you're talking about, guy! No obsession here or anything!

All the evidence indicates that this will be a highly lucrative business model. Kate's mysterious seduction techniques invite stalker-grade investigations into her being -- "why her over me?" type stuff -- and the flurry of phone calls to local businesses confirm this fact.

Simon Kelly, owner of the popular Bladebone pub and restaurant near the Middleton family's home, said most locals are amused rather than upset by the attention.

"It's good because it will bring more trade in, but bad in the sense that people here like a quiet life, that's why they're here," he said.

The pub's phone rang as he spoke — a TV news reporter asking if Middleton would be at the pub that weekend.

Calling a random pub to see if the bartender knows where Kate is? Seems perfectly rational to us.

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

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