The Outernet: Manhattan's East Village

This is no ordinary walking tour. The Outernet is an experimental, intelligent guide to your immediate surroundings made up of over 300 published books, maps, and pamphlets about Manhattan. On every street and avenue, and at every corner, you’ll hear what the city’s most distinguished chroniclers and authoritative record keepers wrote about your exact location, including quotations from:

• Robert AM Stern’s five-volume history of New York’s architecture
• Moses King’s 1892 Handbook of New York City
• Fifth Avenue 5 AM, about how and where Breakfast at Tiffany’s was made
• The Personal Memoirs of Richard Nixon
• Our Firemen, the history of New York City’s legendary volunteer fire brigades
• 14 editions of Who’s Who in New York
• The three-volume biography Eleanor Roosevelt by Blanche Wiesen Cook
• Tough Jews : Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams

You can start the Outernet anywhere and go in any direction you like as long as you stay within the twelve blocks between Third Avenue, Avenue A, 11th Street, and 7th Street – for now, at least. We’re working to add new blocks, the whole East Village, and eventually all of Manhattan, filling the streets of this great city with secrets forgotten by the superficial internet age.