We Research

We get a little hashtag crazy on the tour sometimes. When we started 26 years ago, a hashtag was called a “pound” and it was of little use in the world. Sometimes it was useful after the transition from rotary phones to touch tone, but otherwise it was just 4 lines. We’re slowly getting savvier with ours. When we started posting the #weresearch, it was partially in response to the March 29th NY Post article entitled “Everything You Know About the Village is Wrong”. In it, they discussed much of the standard fare of legends in the Village that have been covered by tours over the years that are incorrect. We were 100% accurate. Maybe 99.9%, I might need to go back and look.

We’d actually also debunked several other myths in the Village over the years that the Post did not mention. #weresearch

To be fair, there’s a lot of misinformation out there in legitimate sources. Mistakes can easily happen. We usually say right off at the beginning that there’s as much legend as fact on the tour. Stories change over time. It’s been scientifically proved that our memories are unreliable. A bartender tells a customer, who goes back a year later and tells her cousin, she mentions something to a young writer for a guide book... with each retelling the story changes.

We started trying to find the root of the story. We started to dig, and thus the book collection expanded.

You can say that 26 years of Greenwich Village history is 26 years of collecting books. What interests me is that many of these books discuss the same stories in much the same way. Which has me wondering, how many other legends still have mysterious roots? How many of these books reference each other that the actual story has been lost. Or never happened.

To quote one of the greatest TV shows ever made: The Truth is Out There. (That was X-Files if you didn’t get the reference). We’ll still keep digging. We promise. If you come drinking, we’ll keep talking, but we’ll also keep digging. One day you’ll have a drink with us and learn the truth. I relish that day. And I relish the process.

That’s the passion we bring. Please come #getlitwithus. (That is a hashtag that says Get Lit With Us. [it’s a double entendre. It means both get literary, as well as to “get lit” as in to “tie one on”, “get buzzed”, “become inebriated”, or “intoxicated.” You get it.])

I hope you enjoyed my use of brackets and parenthesis.

I need a new bookcase.