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This Saturday, Philadelphia's Top Tour Guides Show Their Stuff

By John McDevitt

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Some of Philly's best tour guides will be celebrating the city on Saturday by leading all-day walking tours.

The tours are free, but you'll need to register so organizers can get a headcount for the fourth annual "Great River to River, Vine to Pine, Rain or Shine Walking Tour of Philadelphia."

The free tours are up to 12 hours long and cover 200 sites. The public can join in when they want or do the whole thing (see below).

Ed Mauger, founding president of the Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides (APT), runs the training and certification program for the association.

"We start near the Delaware River and work our way through various points in the city," he tells KYW Newsradio. "We start at 8 o'clock in the morning and we end up around 8 o'clock at night at the Schuylkill River, near the Waterworks."

The tours are broken into four stages:

  • Stage 1 (8am) covers Old City Philadelphia.  It kicks off from the lobby of the National Constitution Center, 525 Arch Street.
  • Stage 2 (11am) winds through Society Hill.  It sets out from the Bourse Building, 111 S. Independence Mall East, on 5th Street near Ludlow Street.
  • Stage 3 (2pm) covers the 19th century neighborhood around East Market Street.  It begins at the Independence Visitor Center, 6th and Market Streets.
  • Stage 4 (5pm) heads along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and nearby sites on its way to the Fairmount Waterworks.  It  launches from the courtyard of Philadelphia City Hall, at the intersection of Broad and Market Streets.

For more information and to sign up, go to www.phillyguides.org.

"We all ready have quite a few people who have already signed up -- many hundreds," Mauger notes.

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