At the request of an outraged neighborhood, a company promising tours through "a real NYC ghetto," has stopped offering tours, reported Fox News.
Real Bronx Tours took mostly European tourists from Manhattan to the South Bronx. Earlier this week, the company issued a statement saying they would immediately cease all tours.
According to Fox News, the tours passed by food pantry lines, housing projects and a park described by a tour guide as a pickpocket hangout. The tour website said tourists would see the Bronx that reflects one the city's darkest periods: the 70's and 80's.
"This borough was notorious for drugs, gangs, crime and murders," the website read.
Residents were livid, saying the tours were a complete misrepresentation of what the borough represents now, ABC news reported.
"Those days are over, the Bronx is being rebuilt, it's rising again," Bronx resident and Grammy-nominated musician Bobby Sanabria told Fox News.
Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. and City Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito sent an open letter to the company owner, Michael Myers, on Monday saying they were "sickened by the despicable way" the borough was being shown to tourists.
"We strongly urge you to stop profiting off of a tour that misrepresents the Bronx as a haven for poverty and crime, while mocking everything from our landmarks to the less fortunate members of our community who are availing themselves of food assistance programs," the letter read.
The tour company did not respond to media questioning, but instead posted on their website on Thursday that they would be discontinuing the tour.
Anthropologist and Bronx resident, Elena Martinez, is offering visitors walks though of the same neighborhoods on the Real Bronx Tours' itinerary.
"Many young Europeans come here as a pilgrimage," Martinez told Fox News. "This was the incubator for hip-hop, salsa, jazz, Afro-Cuban music, R&B."
Al Quinones is a caretaker at a Bronx park that features a fruit garden and an outdoor amphitheater. He posted a sign on his shack on the park grounds saying "Don't dump on the Bronx."
"We've had enough of the gawkers who come to ghettoize us," he told Fox News. "Their timing was bad. The Bronx is not burning, not now! Now, it's resurgence."
According to Fox News, Sanabria, Martinez and more Bronx residents will meet this Friday to plan a counter-campaign against what they called the Bronx's "negative image."
Their initiative is called "Bronx Rising."