Back in 1972 I started a business called Third World Tours. The idea caught on in San Francisco and seems to have spread around the world.
The Wall Street Journal had an article on it Wednesday 11/5.
The article reports: "...tour operators around the world are leading visitors to some areas that their local convention and tourism bureau would previously have spurned -- neighborhoods like Anacostia in Washington, D.C., and north Philadelphia."
My Third World Tours, the original wrong-side-of-the-city-tour, grew out of a confluence of three separate forces.
First, I had ridden on a standard Gray Line Tour of San Francisco, with a few drunken friends, in 1964. We did it as a lark.
I never forgot that tour. I was offended that the tour bus stopped at several junky places, including a Chinatown pseudo-temple that Gray Line owned, and encouraged tour passengers to put money in the little temple pond and buy trinkets. It was a foggy night so the driver could get away with telling passengers that we were on Montgomery Street "financial capital of the West" when we were actually on Sansome Street. Everything else I heard from the driver was equally wrong and applied equally well to a bland description of St. Louis as it did to vibrant San Francisco.
I was determine to fix that piece of fraud, some day, if I got the chance.
Second, I got the chance in 1972. I was business manager of Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in downtown San Francisco. Third, Gray Line employees went on strike that spring.
At the time, the police department licensed tour operators and the corrupt police only licensed one company: Gray Line.
Being a church, a powerful church with a big endowment, I said fuck the cops, let them try and stop a church from running a tour on Sundays. The cops never said 'boo.'
I hired and trained ten mixed-ethnicity people in their early 20s to be tour guides. I hired a 50-seat bus and did some promotion for Third World Tours directed at our large Sunday congregation. The first tour filled up. We spent three hours driving and stopping in Latino, Black, Lesbian, Gay, Hippy and Chinese neighborhoods.
The tour was a success. I hired a PR person (Nan Hohenstein). By the next Sunday I filled up three buses and the press that came along with us went wild. The story of the Third World Tours was covered in nearly every corner of the world. After a month, I stopped giving radio and press interviews. We were a stunning success.
The bus company I rented from got smart. They sent different drivers every week to learn the pitch and route.
Within two years, the police department had been forced to license 90 different tour companies, all modeled on Third World Tours.
I created this unique tour business because I love cities, I'm a city boy. I hope the spread of my tour idea to the whole planet has been positive.