Cruising the streets of Manhattan in the back of a vintage hearse while seeing the sites where both the famous and infamous met their maker may not be everybody’s idea of a good time. But then, Dead Apple Tours probably isn’t for “everybody.”
The creative brain child of musician and Secaucus resident Mark Rivers and business partner Drew Raphael, Dead Apple Tours offers a unique, if somewhat macabre, perspective on Gotham City. Dressed as undertakers, Rivers and Raphael take passengers on a tour of dozens of sites where famous deaths took place, while adding little-known details and context to the familiar.
Fighting broke out among fans over which man performed a better “Macbeth.”
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Using a 1960 Cadillac Superior Crown Royale combination hearse to carry passengers, Rivers serves as the tour’s chauffer, while Raphael acts as the guide. Original music written and performed by Rivers sets the tone for the tour and is used as a soundtrack for Raphael’s script.
The undertaking
While death can be a sad, depressing subject, Raphael keeps the tour’s mood light with lots of historical tidbits and occasional “Dead Apple Tour Fun Facts.” (Example: Roaches can survive for up to nine days without their heads. And what do headless roaches eventually die of? According to Raphael, starvation. Yuck!)
The tour passes a Walgreens that was once the Astor Place Theater. There, on May 10, 1849, a riot broke out and 31 people were killed. Incredibly, fighting broke out among fans of William Macready, a British actor, and fans of American actor Edwin Forrest over which man performed a better “Macbeth.”
“If it were today, it would be as if Leonardo DiCaprio and Jude Law got into a fistfight on the street,” Raphael said.
Rivers and Raphael stop at what is now Washington Square Park in the West Village, in the heart of the New York University (NYU) campus. The park, Raphael said, was once a potter’s field and was used to bury both the indigent and the criminal. At one corner of the park still stands a 300-year old tree known as the Hangman’s Elm. Until 1919, the elm was used for state-sanctioned executions by hanging.
Another NYU building featured on the tour was once home to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, the scene of one of the worst incidents in New York City history. Factory management routinely kept certain windows and doors locked to prevent thefts, a move that created a fire hazard. Ninety nine years ago, on March 25, 1911, 146 girls and women who worked at the factory died after a fire broke out and there were too few unlocked exits for people to escape.
Raphael also points to the site that was once home to the jazz club Slugs. On Feb. 19, 1972, Helen Moore shot and killed her lover, trumpeter Lee Morgan, after an argument there.
No homage to death in New York would be complete without a stop at the Hotel Chelsea, located at 222 West 23rd St., where Sex Pistol Sid Vicious stabbed his girlfriend, punk rock groupie Nancy Spungen, in Room 100. (Vicious gets equal time, as the tour also passes 63 Bank St., where he intentionally overdosed on heroin less than four months after Spungen’s murder.)
More recent deaths also make the cut. The Hearse passes the apartments of former neighbors Heath Ledger and Adam “DJ AM” Goldstein.
Burial grounds
Rivers and Raphael began offering the tour this month after giving several dress rehearsals for family and friends in April. Already, interest is picking up.
“We’ve been getting a lot of hits on the DeadAppleTours.com Web site,” Rivers said Wednesday. “Actually today we booked three tours. So it seems like it’s catching on.”
The Crown Royale can comfortably accommodate up to seven passengers, Rivers said, and the pair already has a second hearse ready to go should the tours really take off.
The two-hour-plus tour costs $45. For the time being, it focuses on death sites below 36th Street.
However, Rivers said, “Drew has a script ready for upper Manhattan. That one’s more celebrity-oriented…And we’re available for private tours, too, like if somebody wants a tour of” – wait for it – “cemeteries.”
E-mail E. Assata Wright at awright@hudsonreporter.com.