Jim Kaplan writes:

I am pleased to report the historical walking tours and lectures that I expect to undertake this spring and summer.

1. HELL’S KITCHEN: A POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK IRISH ­

Sunday, March 17, 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm–Leaves from St. Patrick¹s Cathedral

On Saint Patrick¹s Day (this year a Sunday), I will for the third year be giving my annual tour on the political history of the New York Irish. It is now 41 years since I was assigned by the political operative Dick Morris to work for George McGovern at the McManus Midtown Democratic Club, whose leader James R. McManus has been the Democratic District leader in the Hell¹s Kitchen area for 50 years. In this unique tour I provide an inside view of the political history of Hell¹s Kitchen, from its settlement by the immigrant Irish in the 1850s to its recent rise as a trendy New York neighborhood. I also discuss the rise of
the theater district, the fight against blight and pornography in the 1970s, and most interestingly, based on original research, how Frances Perkins, FDR¹s Labor secretary and the creator of the New Deal social
welfare policies, got her start with Thomas J. McManus in 1910. In fact, Frances Perkins’ grandson Tomlin Coggeshall of the Frances Perkins Memorial Foundation has agreed to come on the tour.

The tour is sponsored by Culture Now, and you can sign up on their website, culturenow.org. If you want more information about what I cover on the tour, you can run a Google search on “Tammany’s Last Stand” to access my 10,000-word companion article, which covers most but not all of the tour. Also find the article my daughter Olivia and I wrote on Frances Perkins in Financial History magazine by doing a Google search on our names and Frances Perkins.

2. PHILADELPHIA AND INDEPENDENCE HALL–June 29, 2:00 pm.

This year, in conjunction with the summer meeting of the New York State Bar Association Tax Section, I will be leading a group to view Philadelphia¹s Independence Hall, and possibly Congress Hall as well. This will be the fourth year that I have given a historical tour in connection with the summer meeting of the New York State Bar Association Tax Section, and I anticipate that this tour will be even better than the previous highly acclaimed tours.

Independence Hall is the site where two of the most important legal documents in American history, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, were written. As in prior Bar tours, the participants
will hear a lecture on the building by a highly trained National Park Service guide. I will supplement this presentation with my own introduction describing the founding of Pennsylvania with the treaty in
1682 between William Penn and Chief Tammany of the Delaware Indians; how a young printer from Boston named Benjamin Franklin became one of the leading figures in the colony and its representative to the English in London; and how Franklin encouraged a failed and fired English excise tax collector named Thomas Paine to come to America, where in his pamphlet “Common Sense” he convinced the colonists that they should declare independence from England.

3. JULY 4 ALL NIGHT TOUR OF LOWER MANHATTAN–July 4th, 3 am to 7 am.

For the 17th consecutive year, I will be giving my highly acclaimed all-night walking tour of Lower Manhattan sponsored by the Fraunces Tavern Museum (the audio of which for 2012 can also be heard on the Culture Now website). On the tour, as in prior years, we will visit Thomas Paine Park, where I will discuss Paine’s historic contributions to American liberty, and City Hall Park, where I will recount the July 4th history of the City of New York and my daughter Olivia will give a short talk on the historical significance of Nathan Hale. I will also discuss the role of General Horatio Gates in the critically important Battle of Saratoga. As you may know, as a result of this tour, the New York State Daughters of the American Revolution last October placed a marker in Trinity Church graveyard rescuing General Gates from 150 years of obscurity in an unmarked grave.

To honor General Gates’s role in the history of the City of New York, I have moved the time of the tour up one hour to 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. in the hopes that the tour might be followed by a wreath-laying ceremony on the graves of Gates, Alexander Hamilton and Marinus Willett. Col. Willett is a new addition to my tour, who I now believe is as historically important as General Gates.

As in the previous four years, this year I will be giving a pre-tour lecture at the Fraunces Tavern Museum. This year the lecture will be a lunchtime lecture at 12:30 on June 18, and I will be speaking on important Revolutionary War Generals buried in Lower Manhattan: Montgomery, Hamilton, Gates and Willet. I intend particularly to discuss Marinus Willet, who in many ways is as important as Gates and probably more obscure.

For tickets, check with Fraunces Tavern Museum closer to the date: call 212-425-1778 or visit the museum’s website at www.frauncestavernmuseum.org.