Neighborhoods
Midtown, the Village, Harlem, Williamsburg, Astoria and the rest — what each one is actually like to walk around, and who lives there.
15 placesMidtown
Where the skyscrapers, the theatres and most of the hotels are. Nobody who lives in New York would choose to live here, and almost every visitor should stay here once.
Lower Manhattan
The oldest part of the city, where the streets predate the grid and bend around vanished shorelines. Offices by day, increasingly residential by night.
Greenwich Village
Low brick townhouses on streets that ignore the grid, because the Village was a separate settlement before the grid arrived and refused to be redrawn.
SoHo
Cast-iron warehouses, Belgian block streets and a hundred and fifty years of the same cycle: industry, then artists, then shops.
Chinatown
One of the largest Chinese communities in the western hemisphere, and the best cheap eating in Manhattan. Bring cash.
East Village
Punk, tenements, Ukrainian diners and the largest concentration of cheap restaurants in Manhattan. The part of the city that gentrified last and loudest.
Lower East Side
The densest immigrant quarter in the world in 1900, with 500,000 people packed into two square miles. The tenements are still standing and a few of the shops never closed.
Upper East Side
Museum Mile, old money and the most conservative dressing in New York. Also, once you get past Lexington, a perfectly ordinary residential neighbourhood.
Upper West Side
Brownstones, prewar apartment buildings, two of the city's best museums and the highest concentration of people arguing about a film in a queue.
Harlem
The centre of Black American culture for a century, with the best row-house architecture in Manhattan and a Sunday gospel tradition that is not a tourist attraction, whatever the coach tours think.
Williamsburg
The most written-about neighbourhood of the last twenty years, and still worth the L train — for the waterfront, the food, the music venues and the Hasidic south side that has nothing to do with any of it.
DUMBO
Cobbled streets, converted warehouses and the single most photographed view in Brooklyn — the Manhattan Bridge framed between two buildings on Washington Street.
Chelsea
Galleries in converted garages, the High Line running overhead, and a food hall in the factory where the Oreo was invented.
Hell's Kitchen
Where the theatre crowd actually eats, two blocks from Times Square and about a third of the price. Ninth Avenue is one of the best eating streets in Manhattan.
Tribeca
SoHo's architecture with a tenth of the people and twice the money. Cobbled streets, cast-iron warehouses and almost nothing to do, which is the appeal.