As New York City’s longest-serving tour guide, Joyce Gold has become such a local celebrity that she sometimes gets more attention than the stars she ushers around the Big Apple.
It happened while the 81-year-old guide, who has been giving tours of Manhattan for nearly 50 years, was leading David Schwimmer around on a private tour.
“I think he was feeling bad, because he is incredibly more famous than I am. But they sort of expect to see me on the streets of the Village because I’m there a lot, and nobody expected to see him,” Gold told The Post.
“So finally, he went into Mamoun’s [Falafel] and they recognized him, so I think he felt better. But I did feel a little guilty about how happy that whole incident made me.”
The “Friends” star, who now resides in the East Village, purchased the tour — the Immigrant, Radical, Notorious Women of Washington Square — in 2008 for the birthday of his then-fiancée, artist Zoë Buckman, who is now his ex-wife and mother of his daughter, Cleo.
“And I always thought a lot of him for choosing my women’s tour,” said Gold, who started giving tours in 1976.
Language learning platform Babbel consulted with the nonprofit Guides Association of New York City to determine that Gold is the most tenured guide in all five boroughs.
Her foray into the industry began while she was working as a systems analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank on Gold Street, and stumbled upon a book about old New York.
“It was about the streets I passed every day between the subway and the office. And I had no idea there were Indians on Broadway, there were Dutch, English,” recalled Gold, a graduate of Queens College who earned a master’s in metropolitan studies from New York University.
“When I read that the first battle of the American Revolution, the Battle of Golden Hill, started on the side of my cubicle, it was really amazing.”
The Pennsylvania native, who moved to Bayside, Queens in the ninth grade, conducted her first-ever tour for a group of her friends.
“They paid me $3 because I wanted to start off professionally,” she recalled. “And when I started, there were two other guys that I knew who were giving tours, but neither of them are still doing it.”
Gold, who resides in a loft in Chelsea, has more than 1,000 books on New York and designs tours that focus on the city’s rich history, such as “The Forty Years Manhattan was Dutch,” “Wall Street: From Windmills to World Finance,” “The American Revolution Downtown,” and “Roosevelt Island: From Lunatic Asylum to New Tech Hub.”
She hosts tours in 45 neighborhoods, most in Manhattan and eight in Brooklyn. The most popular ones are in Greenwich Village, where she offers 36 different tours of that neighborhood alone.
The octogenarian estimates 40,000 people have been on one or more of her tours over the nearly five decades she’s been in business.
“Every time I would say to a group, ‘I’ve been doing this almost 50 years,’ the answer almost inevitably was, ‘That was before I was born,’” she said, laughing.
“So I stopped saying that after a while.”
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