Stan O'Connor's Bus Tours
Bring your tour bus into NYC, or charter one here and let me step on as your guide for the day. A standard four-hour tour includes Harlem, Midtown, Greenwich Village, Ladies Mile, SoHo, Chinatown, the Financial District, Lower East Side, Times Square, Rockefeller Center.
How do I charge? A standard uptown-downtown four-hour tour costs only about $5 per person on a 45-pax bus, or $200.
Bus tour side trips:BROOKLYN HEIGHTS
Over the bridge to Brooklyn Heights for a dockside view of the skyscrapers of Manhattan. You can see everything from The Statue of Liberty to the Empire State building, a four-mile span. It’s a great spot for group photos!
STATUE OF LIBERTY & ELLIS ISLAND
Get off the bus at Battery Park for the Statue of Liberty Ferry. The full event includes a ferry boat stop on Liberty Island and Ellis Island, the Immigration Museum. Roughly three to four hours.
Personally, I no longer recommend a trip to Liberty Island, for several reasons, the foremost of which is the ultra-tight security. For one thing, you get searched twice. For another, you can no longer go inside the Statue itself. Ellis Island is nicer, and food and restrooms are available there. Group photos with Miss Liberty are easy, as Ellis Island is just a few hundred feet from Liberty Island.
GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL
This out-of-bus excursion starts with the bus crossing Park Avenue at 58th Street. A look to the south shows all the blocks down to the New York Central Building, just beyond which is Grand Central Terminal (GCT). All those blocks were developed as part of “Terminal City” around 1913.
We turn south onto Lexington Avenue, noting such beauties as Central Synagogue, the original GE Building (blown up via CGI in the film Mr. & Mrs. Smith) and the Waldorf=Astoria Hotel along the way.
Then we disembark, enter the terminal, and wonder at a palace dedicated to the golden age of American railroading.
A short sample of the tour is seen here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNn9SMA5FtU
ROCKEFELLER CENTER
Disembark for a ten-minute turnaround in Rockefeller Plaza as shown here www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYCoMghAHgg&mode=user&search= It pretty much speaks for itself: 18 buildings in the complex itself, surrounded by The Roman Catholic Cathedral of Saint Patrick, the Time Magazine Building, and Saks & Company.
The Skating rink runs through the cold months, from mid-October to mid-April annually. It’s replaced by the Rockefeller Center Café in warm weather months.
The studio of NBC’s Today program are easy to see into, and you can stand in the area where Al Roker does the weather.
Optionally, you could take the elevator here, to Top Of The Rock, a nice alternative to the Empire State Building (ESB). Lines are much shorter here, though it’s not quite as tall or as famous as the ESB.
