Firsthand

What happenedwhere you are standing

A walk you listen to. Go to where it begins, put the phone away, and the street tells you what happened on it when you get there.

Every walk is a real route through a real place.

Hear a walkJoin the beta

San Francisco rooftops in the morning, a long street running down toward the bay

Eight stories

Every street has a first line

Two walks from each of our four biggest cities. Each chapter opens with the walk’s own first lines. Press play and its narrator reads you the trailer.

London · Soho

The Pump, the Stink, and the Corpse Railway

A pump that killed hundreds. A stink that shut Parliament. A train for the dead.

Poster illustration of Broad Street, Soho, in 1854 with its water pump

“Stand still on this pavement for a minute, and take away the offices. Take away the coffee. Eighteen fifty-four. You are in Soho, and Soho is not yet a byword for nightlife. It is cheap, crowded, working London. Families three and four to a room. One privy and one well for a whole court of houses. And at the end of that August, something arrives in these few blocks that has no mercy and no pattern anybody can read. Cholera.”

50 minutes · 2.0 miles on foot

trailer
Broadwick Street, Soho, today
Broadwick Street, Soho photograph by Ewan Munro from London, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Map of the walk's route through Soho

New York · Harlem

The Proof

Harlem made the music America danced to, then built the place that keeps the receipts.

Poster illustration of a Harlem street and library in the 1920s

“In about three quarters of an hour this walk ends at a library on Lenox Avenue, and the man who filled it worked in the mailroom of a bank on Wall Street. His name was Arturo Schomburg. For decades, out of a clerk's wages, he bought books, letters, prints and pamphlets on Black life, at a time when the people who ran the universities said there was nothing of the kind worth keeping.”

45 minutes · 1.9 miles on foot

trailer
The Schomburg Center, Lenox Avenue, today
The Schomburg Center, Lenox Avenue photograph by ajay_suresh, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Map of the walk's route through Harlem

Los Angeles · Miracle Mile

Ross's Folly

A bean field in 1921, drawn to be the first street in the world read from a moving car.

Poster illustration of Wilshire Boulevard through bean fields in 1921

“Six lanes of traffic go past on your left, and the south side of this road is eighteen acres of bean field that a man called A. W. Ross paid fifty-four thousand dollars for in nineteen twenty-one, and the Los Angeles property business thought he had lost his mind.”

39 minutes · 1.3 miles on foot

trailer
Fairfax and Wilshire, today
Fairfax and Wilshire photograph by Downtowngal, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Map of the walk's route through Miracle Mile

San Francisco · Financial District

You Are Walking on Ships

Five hundred ships were abandoned for the gold. The city filled the water in around them.

Poster illustration of abandoned ships crowding Yerba Buena Cove in 1849

“You are in the Financial District of San Francisco, on a flat street between tall buildings, several blocks from the water. Solid ground, obviously. Nobody would think otherwise. In eighteen forty-eight you would have been standing on a beach.”

37 minutes · 1.4 miles on foot

trailer
Market Street, today
Market Street photograph by Bernard Spragg. NZ from Christchurch, New Zealand, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Map of the walk's route through Financial District

London · The City

The Barbican: Built on a Miscount

The Blitz left 48 people north of St Paul’s. Then the City miscounted a vote.

Poster illustration of St Paul's dome above the bombed City in December 1940

“What they had won was the right to draw one site: the ground under those towers. On the night of the twenty-ninth of December, nineteen forty, it had been hit so completely that the neighbourhood on it stopped existing. When the City counted the people still living there, it found forty-eight.”

37 minutes · 1.4 miles on foot

trailer
The Barbican Estate, today
The Barbican Estate photograph by Julian Herzog (Website), CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Map of the walk's route through The City

New York · Roosevelt Island

The Island for People the City Did Not Want

A prison, an asylum, a poorhouse, a smallpox hospital. One reporter got herself committed.

Poster illustration of the lighthouse on Blackwell's Island in the 1870s

“You are standing on two miles of rock in the middle of the East River, and for most of the nineteenth century this was where New York put the people it did not want to see. There were five institutions here: a penitentiary, a hospital, a lunatic asylum, almshouses for the old and the destitute, and a hospital for smallpox.”

41 minutes · 1.7 miles on foot

trailer
The lighthouse, Roosevelt Island, today
The lighthouse, Roosevelt Island photograph by Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Map of the walk's route through Roosevelt Island

Los Angeles · Venice

The Fantasy That Drowned

A man built Venice in California. What grew in the wreckage is what you came for.

Poster illustration of the canals of Venice, California, around 1905

“The name was meant literally. A stretch of the Southern California coast carries the name of a city on the Adriatic because one man decided it should, and then dug it.”

40 minutes · 1.6 miles on foot

trailer
The Venice canals, today
The Venice canals photograph by Américo Toledano, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Map of the walk's route through Venice

San Francisco · Lands End

The People’s Coast

A mining millionaire built the ocean a palace. Only ruins remain.

Poster illustration of Sutro Baths and the Cliff House around 1900

“Everything between here and the point where the land gives out belonged to one man, Adolph Sutro, and he spent a silver fortune turning it into a day out for people who could not afford one. … And a man looked at all that and thought: swimming pools.”

48 minutes · 1.8 miles on foot

trailer
The ruins of Sutro Baths, today
The ruins of Sutro Baths photograph by Frank Schulenburg, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Map of the walk's route through Lands End
39 walks  ·  nine cities  ·  22–65 minutes  ·  works offline

How a walk works

Put it in your pocket and start walking

  1. 1Go to where it begins

    Each walk is a real route through a real neighbourhood, and it starts where the story does.

  2. 2It follows you

    The walk knows which corner you have reached and speaks when you get there.

  3. 3Look up

    Directions come through the audio, so nothing asks you to look at a screen while you walk.

Where the walks are

nine cities, and counting

The standard

We go looking for the real thing

A city is not its landmarks. It is the pump that killed a street and the doctor who proved it, the ships a whole city was built on top of, the island where New York put the people it did not want. We go looking for the story a place is actually about, and we walk you to where it happened.

It is for the traveler who would rather know one street properly than see ten from a bus.

The narrators are synthetic voices, cast and directed for each walk. The judgment behind every word is ours.

The beta

Walk one before the App Store has it

Firsthand is in beta on iPhone. Leave your email and we will send you a TestFlight invitation.

We use your address to send the invitation and nothing else. Privacy

Somewhere near you, something happened.

Join the beta

Support  ·  Privacy