Tour Guide Barry Levine

Barry Levine was a New York City doubledecker bus tour guide.  

I trained with Barry in 2006.  A group of tour guides-to-be practiced over the mic on a coach bus doing the Downtown Loop.  Barry intoned with a sheer Canarsie accent, “useda work in the gahment district, my ex-wife had a job at Bloomingdales for twenty yeahrs…"  Barry had a pushbroom mustache, wore a Gray Line ball cap, and spoke highly of the pastrami sandwiches at Adelman’s Deli on Kings Highway.

Barry did the Brooklyn Loop, and when Barry talked over the mic the passengers took a trip to Brooklyn whether they looked around or not.  As a doubledecker bus tour guide, Barry had the fortune to discover how to give back to his hometown.

The Brooklyn Loop crossed into a core part of Brooklyn off the Manhattan Bridge, downtown Jay Street to Schermerhorn at the Criminal Courts building and then a right back up Adams where at one side the Juroress atop Borough Hall is glimpsed and at the other the Marriott Hotel edifice; a left on Tillary at the Barry Levine-sized Post Office to a turn on Fulton past Cadman Plaza onward the base of the Brooklyn Bridge.  Passengers soon get a look at Fort Greene, along Vanderbilt Ave passing wood homes and Mayor Giuliani alma mater Bishop Loughlin High School plus the Gothic terracotta eikonography of Queen of All Saints Church, then a stop at the old Paramount Theater now the campus of Long Island University, where Barry informed passengers he once took classes. 

There was a time when the Brooklyn Loop was the best bid a Gray Line tour guide could get.  An hour and a half trip twice a day with a brisk tail-end loop back up the West Side Highway to Times Square, at least to point out the riverscape of New Jersey on the other side of the island.  A more inquisitive and roll-with-it crowd; the inspired daily street bustle of downtown without the skyscrapers or monuments of rabid tourist attraction; the fragrance of the Botanical Gardens along Washington Ave; the fragrance of quick-bite lunch joints across Willoughby Street.

From 2004 to just after the Bailout us tour guides had health benefits.  After the dismal 2011 union negotiations, I hope Barry was covered when he got sick.  Barry had a hard time getting up and down the stairs in the bus, a sinewy trap for anyone.  For some tour guides, the job was perfect if one enjoyed talking against but not to people.  Barry talked to with at over for and near but never against.  Like all tour guides off the bus he talked about himself, and once confided a provocative secret about himself to me in between afternoon Brooklyn Loops, Barry sitting and I standing downstairs in the idle doubledecker parked at South Street Seaport.  I divulged the secret to tour guide Norm, who in the heyday called himself Rockwell, but no one else... 

I never took Barry’s tour.  I knew that tourists sometimes complained to the company about getting stuck with Barry as their tour guide.  What creeps.  Most tourists loved him.  And tour guide headquarters at 777 Eighth Ave loved him.  Barry hung around 777 when he could get there, and sat down at the table in front of the dispatch desk, while tour guides ate lunch and bitched about Brazilian tippers, and Barry continued his tour.  He took the L train back home to Canarsie, and was once captured in a New York Times photo:

The passing of Barry Levine last July damaged the ancient voice which speaks the future of New York City.  Brooklyn doubledecker bus tourists suffer.  So do us that knew the guy.