Manhattan below 96th Street is where the sights are. It is not where most New Yorkers live, and it is emphatically not where the best food is. Every one of the neighbourhoods below is reachable on a single subway fare, takes under an hour from Midtown, and will change your idea of what the city is.
Flushing, Queens
7 train to Flushing–Main Street, about 35 minutes from Grand Central.
The largest and most serious Chinese community in New York, considerably bigger than Manhattan’s Chinatown and covering far more of China. Also a substantial Korean population, and a Taiwanese one.
The food is the point. New World Mall food court in the basement on Roosevelt Avenue has thirty-odd stalls doing Sichuan, Xi’an hand-pulled noodles, Dongbei dumplings, Taiwanese beef noodle soup and Malaysian. Golden Shopping Mall is smaller, older and rougher and has been the destination for Chengdu food for twenty years. Main Street has bakeries, hot pot, and a dozen regional restaurants with no English on the sign.
Flushing Meadows Corona Park is a twenty-minute walk south and holds the remains of two World’s Fairs — the Unisphere, the New York State Pavilion, the Queens Museum with its enormous panorama model of the whole city — plus the USTA tennis centre and Citi Field.
Jackson Heights, Queens
7, E, F, M or R to 74th St–Roosevelt Av / Jackson Heights, about 25 minutes.
Reputedly the most linguistically diverse place on earth — something like 160 languages in a few square miles. In practice that means 74th Street is South Asian: sari shops, gold jewellers, Indian, Nepali, Bangladeshi and Tibetan restaurants, and the best momos in New York. Two blocks away, Roosevelt Avenue under the elevated tracks is Colombian, Ecuadorian, Mexican and Peruvian, with taco trucks that operate until three in the morning.
The neighbourhood itself is architecturally interesting — it was one of the first planned garden apartment developments in America, with private interior gardens, and the historic district is worth a walk.
Sunset Park, Brooklyn
N or R to 8th Av (Chinatown) or D to 36th St, about 35 minutes.
Two neighbourhoods stacked on the same grid. Eighth Avenue is Brooklyn’s Chinatown, heavily Fujianese, and the busiest Chinese shopping street in the city outside Flushing. Fifth Avenue, six blocks west, is Mexican, Ecuadorian and Puerto Rican, and the taquerias on it are the best in New York by common consent.
Sunset Park itself, the park, sits on a hill with a view over the harbour to Manhattan that is better than most paid ones, and it is a neighbourhood park with nobody visiting it.
Industry City at the waterfront is a converted warehouse complex with food, shops and studios.
Astoria, Queens
N or W to Broadway or 30th Av, about 20 minutes from Midtown.
Historically Greek, still substantially so, and now also Egyptian, Bangladeshi, Brazilian and Bosnian. Ditmars Boulevard and Broadway have the Greek tavernas and bakeries; Steinway Street in the 20s has the Egyptian cafés and shisha bars, an area locally called Little Egypt.
Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden on 24th Avenue has been run by a Czech benevolent society since 1910 and is the oldest beer garden in New York — a large outdoor yard with long tables, which on a summer evening is one of the best places in the city to be.
The Museum of the Moving Image on 35th Avenue is excellent and almost unvisited. Socrates Sculpture Park on the waterfront is free.
Arthur Avenue, the Bronx
Metro-North to Fordham, or the D to Fordham Rd then a bus. About 40 minutes.
The real Little Italy. Manhattan’s has shrunk to three blocks of restaurants trading on a name; Arthur Avenue is a working Italian food street with butchers, bakeries, cheese shops, a fresh pasta maker and a covered retail market that has been going since the 1940s.
Arthur Avenue Retail Market has a cigar roller, a produce hall and half a dozen counters. Madonia Brothers for bread, Casa Della Mozzarella for cheese made that morning, Borgatti’s for pasta.
The Bronx Zoo and the New York Botanical Garden are a short walk away, which makes for a good combined day.
Brighton Beach, Brooklyn
B or Q to Brighton Beach, about 50 minutes from Midtown.
Russian and Ukrainian New York, on the boardwalk east of Coney Island. Brighton Beach Avenue runs under the elevated tracks with food shops selling smoked fish, pelmeni, pickles and a startling amount of caviar, and the restaurants along the boardwalk do long, loud dinners with live music.
The beach is the same free public beach as Coney Island, fifteen minutes’ walk west, which means you can do the Cyclone and the Wonder Wheel and then walk east into a completely different country for dinner.
How to do these
One neighbourhood per outing, in the afternoon and evening, arriving hungry. They are not attractions and there is nothing to queue for. Bring cash; a lot of the best places do not take cards.
Nobody will treat you as a tourist because nobody will particularly notice you, which after a few days in Midtown is its own kind of relief.