December 2023 Feature Interview,
Collin Knight, Live Like A Local Tours

This interview, conducted by by Nat Thomson, Simmons MSW Candidate, runs abridged in the December 2023 issue of the MPH Monthly.  Collin Knight is the founder of Live Like a Local Tours Boston

For those not in the know, could you lay out Live Like a Local Tours?

Sure thing. Live Like a Local is an independent tour company that’s set up for people to get to know Boston neighborhoods from a different perspective than what they might typically be encouraged to approach them with. Simmons college, for example, is near Roxbury, and the trend is that a lot of these colleges are designed to keep their students in their university bubble. What we want to do with Live Like a Local is to get people out into neighborhoods like Roxbury, in order to learn about the history and culture and also to support the local businesses in the area. What I tend to find is that, let’s look at Simmons college, [students are presented with] all these chain restaurants that are in the hospital corridor and students tend to go there instead of going to local area businesses that could, honestly, really use their support. But that’s just one aspect of it, the businesses, with history and culture making up the other two points of our trifecta. We want to help people understand that it’s possible to make an impact by supporting these neighborhoods of Boston. Right now we are touring Dorchester, Roxbury and Jamaica Plain.

What would you say is the predominant view of Boston that you’re perhaps looking to dispel?

Well, of course there are a million different perspectives on Boston, depending on where you grew up, where you live, where you work. But, it’s easy to see how the city can predominantly be looked at as a white city and/or a college town.  It could also be looked at as a racist city, and I do think there are a lot of racial undertones experienced within the city. We have a lot of people of color that are in office now. So things are turning around, but I still think the culture of these different neighborhoods within the city go largely ignored. So it’s my job to put a lens on how great these neighborhoods are in terms of culture, the arts and history, and all the great local restaurants that are really just a half mile towards Nubian Square from campus. 

What are your thoughts on the advantage to students or tourists of getting outside the campus comfort zone, so to speak?

In my mind, it’s been an issue for decades now with Boston and college campuses, in that students are told that these [on campus establishments] make up all the places they need to go, and that outside of this, there are places they shouldn’t go. However, in light of diversity, equity and inclusion work from around 2020 or so, I think professors are starting to see how something like our tours can be tied into the on campus education provided across different subjects. The city sees 200,000 plus students every year coming into town, but most of their spending happens in Back Bay, Downtown. Can you imagine if these dollars were going into communities of color? Also, in trying to become a different Boston, it starts with really being honest about what the actual history of the city is, so we try to come at things from an honest and unapologetic perspective.

I’m down in the DC/Baltimore area and what you’re saying resonates with me and what I tend to know about where people from out of town generally tend to go, and of course, not go, based on what people on campus or in the media might have you believe about these cities at large.

DC is a great example. Top of the political world but also a black city. Chocolate City. The white house versus Baltimore even. It’s a great point. Something that I talk about on my tours is that Boston is not really unlike any other city, when we talk about these challenges of gentrification. It's happening across the board. And I think that's how I can get students to relate; that even in their home communities the same thing is happening, but also that it’s possible to develop business models that may be able to combat some of the negative aspects associated with gentrification.

In your tours there’s a strong focus on cuisine; is that something that just kind of emerged?

When I started the tours, I wasn’t really exactly sure what I wanted them to be. I used to be a tour guide in New York City, I was pursuing an acting career at the time, and I thought being a tour guide would be a great side job. There was a company in NYC doing nightclub focused touring and their model definitely inspired me with the tours here when I came back. But yeah, I did have to figure out what kind of tour company I wanted it to be. There are a ton of eurocentric tours downtown, where the white perspective on the city is glorified, like we were talking about with how the city is perceived. Walking groups through statues of white people that had ties to slavery in building their wealth. Telling that [eurocentric] side of history, you can do well businesswise, but coming from a black community, and the type of person I am, it just didn’t feel right to me to talk about John Winthrop and perpetuate ideas about his greatness. Once I focused in on local business and the cultures of the different areas, food kind of came forward in the tours.

That makes sense. Like we talked about, while this truth of the city doesn’t make its way into the media through, like, the TV show Cheers or Boston Legal or what have you, with only a little work one can find the multicultural side of Boston.

Exactly. So even though everything can be a little separated, there is Jamaican, Trinidadian, Guatemalan, El Salvadorian; it’s there but not always in the neighborhoods with the most exposure like Chinatown in The North End. The rest of the neighborhoods can tend to get left to the wayside. Especially when there are always new areas popping up, which the tourism boards try to push, like the new Seaport area, which is fabricated but they want to portray as a “neighborhood.” What I do is neighborhood tours, so you will be seeing people running local businesses, who live there and work there. Along with this comes the stories of what these people had to go through in order to create these multi-generational businesses, which helps give people what they really want, which is a more authentic experience. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good Ruth Chris’s steak too, but the majority of my money I would want to go to local businesses versus a chain. With this in mind, I would just like to see more interaction between the colleges, the student bodies and local businesses and even non-profits so that they, or even our tourist visitors, can go forth with a better sense of what a community can look like.

We talked a little bit about college campuses being billed as these kind of all-inclusive offerings, where students never have to venture outside. Clearly, there are some downsides to this view, convenience aside. To me it really seems like ideas about safety are really prominent in culture right now, especially if you turn on the local news.

Right, and we are not taking people to Nubian Square at 11 PM for sure. So much of what people hear about can be avoided with a little common sense but it gets reported in a way that tends to reflect very poorly, but also broadly, on the neighborhood. The whole neighborhood can’t be blamed and also things can happen anywhere. Culturally and in the media though, I don’t think we can use this as an excuse to not support or frequent communities of color. The way we conduct our tours, from personnel to the hours we run, we want to try to challenge some of these assumptions in the first person.

That’s great. These ideas or “brands” that people tend to get exposed to or develop themselves can be very powerful, but not always reality based, unfortunately, so I think it’s important to find ways to see the other side or the truth of the matter. There are plenty of parts of DC and Baltimore that are struggling with similar perceptions.

You can even touch on redlining with this. You make those neighborhoods terrible neighborhoods for a reason; you don't want people to live in those pockets yet. So people can buy up that property for cheap and then turn it into whatever the top neighborhood is. Now, I’m not saying that aspects of the perception are not true or were not true at some point. I grew up in Roxbury in the 1990s and I’m not gonna act like it was a fairy-tale experience. But there was also a lot of community to it, a lot of love and carrying bags for grandmothers and people’s moms. So, I don’t expect someone to just come and wander around as soon as they touch down from Omaha, that’s not realistic.

I think it’s great that you are focusing in on college student bodies from out of town. I have had friends and acquaintances that went to college in Boston but I primarily heard about bars, parties and drinking, if I’m being honest.

Well, like we’re talking about, it’s not always an easy city to completely explore in the way that NYC can be, for example. It’s something I had been talking about before COVID lockdown, but that kind of forced people to be more aware of the support that small businesses can lose very quickly. So before the pandemic, it was more like people looking at me like I had three heads, but now colleges seem to be catching on in light of DEI initiatives, so it’s been a wild ride. But I believe that beyond public health programs, this kind of experience is relevant to history departments and anything with a civic engagement element to it. Being equipped to understand the community can be pretty universal, in my mind, and some of that should take place outside the classroom.

What kind of thoughts do people who have gone through your tours tend to share with you afterwards?

People tend to really appreciate the history brought to the neighborhood through the tour. Being well versed in the neighborhood myself helps me help them understand what they’re looking at, what they’re really standing in the middle of. There is a lot of layered history, from Native Americans to the Irish, The Germans through to African Americans who really started coming into these neighborhoods in more of the 1960s. While there are plenty of people who may know more history of Boston and Roxbury than I do, I feel like my perspectives as someone who grew up here makes for a more engaging way of learning. And I hear this a lot, that the passion brought to the tour, along with the communities of color support mission that we put forth are really appreciated. Downtown Boston tours don’t really have a mission or a POV besides getting someone’s $35. Those tours are about the history of Boston, but they can’t really get you any closer to being a community member in the way that our tour can. Also we are small enough to be flexible and also to keep in contact with people about other restaurant ideas or other important places to visit to get a really well rounded view on what Boston is all about.

That’s a pretty interesting way to think about tourism, in that, in 2023, so much of tourism has been commodified in a way to match expectations at the price-point people think it should come in at. Not to mention the fact that there’s no commercial benefit, per se, to challenging the eurocentric, white dominant historical narratives.

For sure. Those kinds of things, ghost tours, mobster tours, for example, are super popular and money makers. But I find there is a set of people who are looking for something more like what we’re offering, which is exciting. I suppose this approach is more common in foreign countries with language barriers, think about like visiting Costa Rica, but to me it makes a lot of sense here as well. But I do think the tide is turning somewhat, in that there are a lot of people, both young and old, who have been to Boston a bunch of times and are looking for a different perspective on the city.

It raises an interesting point about how black and minority perspectives make their way into an industry, historical tourism, that has been dominated by the white majority, both in control but also in narrative. Even places that have substantial cause to be investing in these perspectives may not necessarily do so, like if you visit Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, they only inject the bare minimum of racial discussion into the tour, in my personal opinion.

There’s always more to the history. People may not want to hear about the nature of the money that was coming through Boston. Some other people may be made uncomfortable, like if they’re on vacation and they don’t want their vision of Boston to be disrupted. There are a lot of parallels between Monticello and Boston, in that there are certainly people who wouldn’t want the narrative to be spun in a different direction, even if it’s reality.