Heritage tour travels city's dark past

This is a different kind of walking tour.

It doesn't visit pretty parks or stately homes. Rather, it takes lower Manhattan visitors to the city's first slave market and gallows at Foley Square where slaves were publicly executed. Visitors walk back in time and directly into a couple of stops on the fabled Underground Railroad, where black slaves were hidden and saved.

These historic sites are part of a new heritage tour given by Brooklyn native Stacey Toussaint, 36, a corporate lawyer who has a passion for history.

Amid the city's competitive tourism market, where walking tours dot almost every pedestrian sidewalk, Toussaint touts hers as "a cultural exploration."

"I have a passion to reveal the hidden history of our city," said Toussaint, a licensed tour guide whose "Inside Out Tours" now include a walking tour through lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The city's first slave market was at Water and Wall streets, near what is now the South Street Seaport. In Brooklyn, visitors can see the basement of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights -- one of dozens of stations where slaves were hidden as they followed an Underground Railroad route to freedom in Canada.

Toussaint's tours offer a narrative of the New York City slave trade and its abolitionist movement starting at the National Museum of the American Indian -- the former Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House built in 1907.

Across the street in Battery Park the tour stops at a cement flagpole that commemorates the West India Co. -- a Dutch trading company that brought New York its first black slaves.

The marker also has a bronze relief map showing where the city's slave population lived.

Along the tour, Toussaint points out the properties of prominent blacks such as Samuel Fraunces, a businessman and owner of Fraunces Tavern, the city's oldest building and restaurant, visited by George Washington after the Revolution.

And on Wall Street, across from Federal Hall where the famous George Washington statue once stood, she points out the former Downing Oyster House, a restaurant owned by free black man Thomas Downing that catered to the rich and elite by day and was part of the Underground Railroad by night.

"I've worked here for years and it's astonishing -- all these historic details that I have missed when walking over these sidewalks," said Monique Claxton, 37, of Bay Shore, who was on one recent tour. "Our history is a hidden treasure."