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.
What it is
Midtown is roughly 34th Street to 59th, river to river, and it contains a startling proportion of what people picture when they picture New York: the Empire State Building, Grand Central, Rockefeller Center, Times Square, the Broadway theatres, Fifth Avenue, MoMA, the Chrysler Building and the UN.
It is also the densest office district in the world, which means it empties out. On a Sunday morning in the East 40s you can stand in the middle of a street and hear nothing.
Staying here
The argument for: you can walk to most of what you came to see, every subway line goes through it, and the hotel supply is enormous, which keeps prices below what a comparable location in most cities would cost.
The argument against: it is loud, the pavements are crowded, there is nowhere good to eat within two blocks of most hotels, and it has no residential texture at all. You will not accidentally discover anything.
For a first trip of three or four days, Midtown is the sensible choice and everyone who tells you otherwise is answering a different question. For a second or third trip, stay downtown or in Brooklyn.
The pieces of it
Midtown East and Turtle Bay are corporate and quiet after seven. Good for the UN and Grand Central.
Midtown West and the Theatre District are hotels, tourists and Broadway.
Hell’s Kitchen, west of Eighth Avenue, is where the theatre crowd actually eats and drinks and is the closest thing Midtown has to a neighbourhood.
Murray Hill, in the low 30s east, is residential, young and unglamorous.
Koreatown on 32nd Street between Fifth and Sixth is a single dense block of Korean restaurants, karaoke and bakeries, most open very late. It is the best food in Midtown by a distance.
Columbus Circle at 59th is where Midtown meets Central Park, with the Time Warner Center’s shops and the best supermarket in the area in its basement.
More Neighborhoods
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.