High-Tech Treatment Makes City Tours Hip
by Alex Goldfayn
September 4, 2006
The voice is tough, edgy, proud. It sounds like Chicago.
These streets, these streets made me
These people, these people influenced me
This city, this is my world
Chi-town.
These words kick off a new Chicago walking tour that launched in August, a one-hour, one-mile stroll through some of the best-known parts of the city.
The words come with a high-tech twist: The walking tour is downloadable as digital audio files that can be loaded onto your portable MP3 player to consume while you walk.
Your guide for this tour is 31-year-old hip-hop poet Kevin Coval, one of the country's top performers of his craft. He has appeared on HBO's Def Poetry Jam in four of the show's five seasons.
Rob Pyles, president of a Boston company called Audissey Guides Inc., started the business because he felt many travelers shared his sightseeing dilemma.
"It's really tough to see a city in way that's fun for young travelers," he said. "I don't think guidebooks are a lot of fun. You look like a tourist with those. And walking tours are less popular with young travelers, who want to be as inconspicuous as possible."
He looked to fill a niche with downloadable audio tour guides narrated by hip, trendy locals with a story to tell.
"We're trying to reach the young demographic via iPods," Pyles said. "To give them a way to connect with a city that really has never existed before."
Besides the Chicago tour, Audissey Guides offers walking tours of Seattle and Boston.
The Seattle tour is narrated by a late-night radio DJ Michele Myers, and the Boston tour features 14 different narrators, including "the FBI agent who personally busted the Mafia boss of Boston and an enormous Italian guy named Big Lou," said Pyles. "You walk into his cafe on the tour and hear him give you the lowdown on life."
In Chicago, Coval walks with you.
In the next month, Pyles will launch tours for Miami Beach ("An adults-only version," he warned), New Orleans and Hollywood. All will be about one-hour long and cover about one mile.
On Coval's Chicago tour, he reads a poem called "Mettle Respires" about Chicago's "L" trains:
And it comes / The roar of drums / 10,000 marching
A pendulum speeding through the body / Breath's pugilism
The champ's cry / Rocking iron / Thunder rumbles to a standstill
Steel gasps / Hawk claws over metal screech / The round resumes
Multitudes rush routed in its iron lasso
And from time to time we all look up
Awed crook-necked amazed this old fighter won't fall