Robert moved to New York in 1990 to attend college at Columbia and has called the place home ever since, bouncing around from neighborhood to neighborhood in several Heights (Morningside, Brooklyn, Prospect, and Washington),one Village (East), and a Kitchen (Hell's). 

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He has written about New York in essays and articles, in plays like A Wedding Album and This Blessed Plot, and novels like Suspension and The Sightseers as well as three other upcoming books. For several years, he blogged about New York in conjunction with 74 video tours of the city (Little Bytes of the Big Apple) and has been featured on the Travel Channel as part of their Monumental Mysteries series. He is currently developing the audio tours for New York's newest park and performance venue, Little Island.

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Since 1997, he has given tours to (literally) tens of thousands of people, on buses and boats, on foot and by bike, in limos and on subway trains. He has worked for the leading student travel and destination management companies, and for disparate clients, ranging from book clubs and car dealers to the U.S. State Department as well as one of the Real Housewives of Orange County.