Loved his walking tours with David Hartman. His website, BarryLewis.org
“He was the quintessential New Yorker,” Mr. Hartman said, as vibrant as the city he loved. Their series, which began as a one-off, “A Walk Down 42nd Street,” seen on the New York PBS station WNET in 1998, was so popular that they made 10 more, traveling from Brooklyn to Harlem. The shows were seen on PBS stations all over the country.
They never scripted their episodes. “No matter what I said,” Mr. Hartman recalled in an interview, “he just took off like a bumble bee. It was a joy.”
Probably where my idea of walking NYC neighborhoods came from; he was inspiring, and funny.
Barry Stephen Lewis was born on July 4, 1945, in Manhattan, at the old Polyclinic Hospital on 50th Street, across from the old Madison Square Garden. He grew up in Woodhaven, Queens, a neighborhood he described as “the Italian/Irish/German/Polish/Greek/Jewish New York version of any Thornton Wilder town in Ohio.” His father, Larry, was the proprietor of Lewis of Woodhaven, a department store that was a fixture on Jamaica Avenue. A family business, it was started by his grandfather, Louis Lewis, in 1937. His mother, Frances (Distler) Lewis, worked alongside her husband.
The store sold everything from pots and pans to silk flowers and underwear. Neighborhood denizens always asked Barry and his brother, known together as “the Lewis kids,” “if the store carried a certain whatsit,” Barry once wrote.