Brownstones, prewar apartment buildings, two of the city's best museums and the highest concentration of people arguing about a film in a queue.
What it is like
More relaxed than the east side and more residential than anywhere else this central. It is families, academics, and a large population of people who have lived in rent-stabilised apartments since the 1970s and have opinions about everything.
The architecture is the appeal: brownstone side streets between Columbus and Amsterdam, and a run of enormous prewar apartment buildings along Central Park West — the Dakota at 72nd, where John Lennon lived and was killed; the San Remo, the Beresford and the El Dorado, all with twin towers, all built in a burst around 1930.
The big things
American Museum of Natural History at 79th and Central Park West, with the Rose Center planetarium and the Gilder Center.
Lincoln Center at 65th, for the opera, the ballet and the Philharmonic.
The New-York Historical Society at 77th, next to the Natural History Museum and comprehensively overshadowed by it, which is unfair — it holds the original Audubon watercolours and a very good Tiffany lamp collection.
Riverside Park, four miles along the Hudson, designed by Olmsted, built over the railway tracks. Quieter than Central Park and better for a run.
Cathedral of St John the Divine and Columbia University are at the northern end in Morningside Heights.
Food shops
The Upper West Side takes food shopping seriously in a way that is slightly out of step with the rest of the city.
Zabar’s, Broadway at 80th, since 1934 — smoked fish, cheese, coffee, and a famously chaotic upstairs.
Barney Greengrass, Amsterdam at 86th, the Sturgeon King, since 1908, for sturgeon and eggs at a formica table.
Levain Bakery on 74th for the cookies, with a permanent queue.
H&H for bagels, Fairway at 74th for produce.
Around it
Columbus Avenue has the restaurants and the shopping. Amsterdam is more local. Broadway is the commercial spine with a planted median and benches.
The 72nd Street station, an original 1904 IRT control house in the middle of Broadway, is worth a look.
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.