Quirky NYC walking tour covers history of death, executions and body-snatching in the Big Apple

This ghoulish walking tour may send chills running down your spine.New York locals and tourists alike can instead get a glimpse into the city’s macabre history of death, disease and burials — at sites like Chinatown’s funeral row – through an off-beat lower Manhattan walking tour.“It’s 400-plus years of municipal management and mismanagement of death in New York,” said Purefinder tour guide and journalist K.Krombie, who founded the Death in New York walking tour in 2022.

“It’s what the city doesn’t want you to see.”The uniquely morbid tour – which takes the curious through Battery Park, the Financial District, Tribeca, the Civic Center and Chinatown – was conceived by Krombie during the pandemic lockdown due to the city’s emergency burial and sanitation process.“The pandemic happened, and to get fresh air I would walk around Randall’s Island — where they had about 50 or 60 refrigerated trucks to store the dead,” the Astoria, Queens, resident said.“So that got me thinking about the history of sanitation and epidemics because I had nothing else to do during the pandemic, so I just started writing about it.”The result was first a book published in 2021, dubbed “Death in New York: History and Culture of Burials, Undertakers and Executions,” which evolved into a real-life lower Manhattan tour the following spring.Since then, the historian has expanded her offerings to include a tour of the Psychiatric History of the Upper East Side, Oppenheimer in New York and The Outlaws Who Built Manhattan.A “Central Park: Scandal & Vice” tour focusing on lesser-known crimes in and around the park will debut next week.“There’s a lot of Central Park tours, but nothing like this one,” Krombie said.The weekend walking tours are mostly frequented by New Yorkers looking to see a new side of their city — but visitors have come from as far as Russia, Switzerland and Thailand, Krombie said.Attendees can expect a nearly 3-mile trek a...