THE LEVYS' UNIQUE NEW YORK!

 

What do you get when you combine history geeks, performance artists, writers and a family infatuated with New York City? The Levys Unique New York! NY's First Family of Tour Guides. LUNY (as it is fondly called by the inhabitants of the LUNYverse) began its life as Vintage New York Tours in 1999 when Mark Levy decided it was time to grab early retirement from his career in facilties, property and construction management for the City government and start a business. He managed to talk his oldest son Matt Levy into returning to NY from Boston after he graduated from Emerson College with a self designed major in Poetry and Performance Art and very meager job prospects.

Vintage New York Tours was originally intended to be do high concept historical walking tours in costume and character and actually got started when Martin Scorcese's The Gangs of New York was released. Mark's tours as Phil The Butcher (Bill's lesser known and not happy about it younger brother) of the Five Points were a big hit. Mark and Matt set up an office in Mark's house (aka Casa Levy) designed dozens of tours and business systems and built VNYT into a small but scrappy tour company. They discovered the student tour market, joined the Student Youth and Travel Association and business just zoomed upward. Gideon Levy literally crashlanded from his undergraduate career at UMASS Amherst and after recovering from a broken foot sustained in a poorly planned art stunt, joined VNYT in 2004.

They wanted to spotlight the role of the Levy family in the business and to convey some of the saavy, sizzle and sass of our love for New York and decided to rebrand VNYT into the Levys Unique New York! One of the original goals of the business was to provide revenue and income for the Levys to be able to pursue both individual creative careers as a writer (Gideon) filmaker (Jonah) and man about town/journalist (Matt ) and collaborative projects like the Roebling Project celebrating the 125th Anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge (portraying the Roebling Family) and our first film, The Tourfather.