Museum Mile, old money and the most conservative dressing in New York. Also, once you get past Lexington, a perfectly ordinary residential neighbourhood.
Museum Mile
Fifth Avenue from 82nd to 105th holds an extraordinary run of institutions along the park:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art at 82nd. The Neue Galerie at 86th, in a Carrère and Hastings mansion, for German and Austrian art including Klimt’s Woman in Gold, with a Viennese café downstairs that is worth a visit on its own. The Guggenheim at 89th. The Cooper Hewitt design museum at 91st in Andrew Carnegie’s house. The Jewish Museum at 92nd. El Museo del Barrio at 105th.
The Frick is at 70th, slightly south of the official mile.
One evening in June the whole stretch closes to cars and every museum opens free.
The avenues, in order
Fifth is the park frontage: mansions turned into museums and consulates, and the most expensive apartment buildings in the country.
Madison is the luxury shopping street — the quieter, older-money version of Fifth Avenue shopping, running roughly 60th to 80th.
Park is residential and formal, with a planted median.
Lexington is where it becomes ordinary: delis, dry cleaners, nail bars.
Third, Second and First are the everyday neighbourhood, with the bulk of the bars and restaurants.
York and East End are quiet and residential.
Beyond the museums
Carl Schurz Park on the East River at 86th has a promenade over the FDR Drive and contains Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence, which runs tours by booking.
Yorkville, the East 80s, was German and Hungarian into the 1960s. Schaller & Weber still sells sausage on Second Avenue and Heidelberg next door is the last of the German restaurants.
Roosevelt Island Tramway leaves from 59th and Second and crosses the East River in four and a half minutes for a standard subway fare — the cheapest aerial view in New York.
More Neighborhoods
Midtown
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.