Where To Go in New York
68 places across 10 categories — the landmarks on the postcards, the observation decks, the museums, the parks, and the neighborhoods where the city actually lives.
Landmarks
The Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, Times Square and Grand Central — the handful of places that mean New York to everyone who has never been.
Statue of Liberty
A French gift that arrived in 214 crates and spent a year in pieces on an island nobody wanted. The ferry is the ticket — everything else is an upgrade.
Brooklyn Bridge
Fourteen years, three Roeblings and twenty-odd deaths to build. Free to walk, best at seven in the morning, and the direction you cross matters more than the time.
Times Square
Loud, bright, and genuinely worth twenty minutes once. Go after dark, keep your hands on your bag, and do not eat here.
Grand Central Terminal
A working commuter station that happens to be one of the great interiors in America. Free, open, and the ceiling is backwards on purpose — or by accident, depending who you believe.
Rockefeller Center
Nineteen buildings, a sunken plaza that only became an ice rink because nobody could think of anything else to do with it, and the best of the Midtown observation decks on top.
New York Public Library
Two marble lions, a reading room the length of a city block, and no ticket. One of the few genuinely free great interiors in Midtown.
Skyscrapers & Views
Four competing observation decks, the Art Deco towers that fought for the skyline in 1930, and the building that replaced the ones that fell.
Empire State Building
Built in 410 days during the Depression and empty for years afterwards. The 86th-floor deck is open air, which is what the newer decks in Midtown are not.
Chrysler Building
The best Art Deco tower in the world, and you cannot go up it. The lobby is open, the crown is not, and it is still worth the detour.
Top of the Rock
The deck to pick if you are only doing one, for the simple reason that the Empire State Building is in the photograph rather than under your feet.
One World Observatory
The tallest building in the western hemisphere, at a height of 1,776 feet chosen for the year rather than the engineering. Fully enclosed, with a harbour view no other deck gets.
Summit One Vanderbilt
Less an observation deck than an art installation you happen to be a thousand feet up inside. Mirrored floors, a glass lift over the street, and a lot of people photographing their own shoes.
The Edge
A triangular deck sticking eighty feet out of the side of a Hudson Yards tower, with a glass floor and an angled glass wall you can lean against over a thousand feet of nothing.
Museums
The Met, MoMA, the Natural History Museum and the smaller collections — plus the tenement, the aircraft carrier and the memorial that are museums too.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Two million objects across five thousand years, in a building you cannot see in a day. Pick three departments and accept that you are missing the rest.
Museum of Modern Art
Starry Night, the melting clocks, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Warhol's soup cans, in six floors that can genuinely be done in three hours.
American Museum of Natural History
The blue whale, the dinosaurs and the dioramas, in a rambling complex of twenty-odd interconnected buildings on the west side of Central Park.
9/11 Memorial and Museum
Two voids where the towers stood, with the names of every person killed cut through the bronze parapets. The plaza is free. The museum below is not, and it is very hard.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Frank Lloyd Wright's white spiral, which the artists of the day signed a petition against. Take the lift to the top and walk down the ramp.
Whitney Museum of American Art
American art only, in a Renzo Piano building at the bottom of the High Line with outdoor terraces on four floors. Free on Friday nights and free under 25 always.
Parks & Green Space
Central Park and Prospect Park, the High Line on its old freight viaduct, and the squares that each neighborhood organises itself around.
Central Park
Not a surviving piece of wilderness but a landscape built from nothing over sixteen years, including the streams, the hills and the woods. Free, and larger than you think.
The High Line
A freight viaduct that was going to be demolished, replanted as a mile-and-a-half elevated park thirty feet above the West Side. Free, and busier than you expect.
Bryant Park
Nine acres of lawn behind the Public Library that were a no-go area in the 1980s and are now the most heavily used park per square foot in the city. Free chairs, free events, free wifi.
Washington Square Park
A marble arch, a fountain full of children and buskers, chess hustlers on the south-west corner, and about 20,000 bodies buried underneath it.
Brooklyn Bridge Park
Eighty-five acres of derelict shipping piers turned into the best skyline view in New York, with a restored 1922 carousel in a glass box.
Prospect Park
Olmsted and Vaux's second park, built after Central Park with everything they had learned. Most New Yorkers who have been to both prefer this one.
Theatre & Music
The forty Broadway houses, Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, the Apollo in Harlem, and the basement jazz rooms that never closed.
Broadway Theatre District
Forty-one theatres between 41st and 54th, only four of which are actually on Broadway. Here is how the tickets work and where the cheap ones are.
Carnegie Hall
Opened in 1891 with Tchaikovsky conducting, nearly demolished in 1960, and saved by a violinist. The acoustics are the reason it still matters.
Lincoln Center
Sixteen acres of performing arts built on the cleared remains of the neighbourhood that West Side Story was filmed in. The plaza and the fountain are free.
Radio City Music Hall
The largest indoor theatre in the world when it opened in 1932, with a proscenium designed to look like a sunset and a stage that still works on 1930s hydraulics.
The Apollo Theater
Amateur Night has run since 1934 and launched Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown and Lauryn Hill. The audience still boos people off, and that is the point.
Churches & Cathedrals
St Patrick's on Fifth Avenue, the unfinished cathedral on Amsterdam, and the colonial churchyards that predate the country.
St Patrick's Cathedral
A French Gothic cathedral dropped into the middle of Midtown, built when this was farmland and everyone said the location was absurd. Free to walk into.
Trinity Church
The tallest building in New York until 1890, now dwarfed at the end of Wall Street, with Alexander Hamilton in the churchyard and a parish charter from 1697.
Cathedral of St John the Divine
The largest cathedral in the world by floor area, begun in 1892 and still unfinished. One tower is missing, the transepts are stumps, and it is extraordinary.
Shopping & Markets
Fifth Avenue and the SoHo cast-iron district, Chelsea Market and Smorgasburg, and the department stores that invented the format.
Fifth Avenue
The eleven blocks between Rockefeller Center and Central Park hold the most expensive retail rents in the world. Window shopping is free and the windows are the point.
Chelsea Market
The factory where the Oreo was invented, turned into a food hall on the ground floor and Google's New York offices upstairs.
Macy's Herald Square
A million square feet of department store with wooden escalators from 1902 still running on the upper floors. Free to ride, and almost nobody does.
SoHo Cast-Iron District
The largest collection of cast-iron architecture in the world, saved from a motorway by Jane Jacobs, filled with artists, and now filled with shops.
The Waterfront
The harbour that made the city rich — Ellis Island, the free Staten Island Ferry, Governors Island and the piers that came back as parkland.
Staten Island Ferry
Twenty-five minutes across New York Harbour past the Statue of Liberty, every half hour, around the clock, for nothing. The best free thing in the city.
Ellis Island
Twelve million people came through this hall between 1892 and 1954. Around forty per cent of Americans have an ancestor who was processed in it.
Governors Island
An army base for two centuries, closed to the public until 2005, now 172 acres of car-free park eight minutes by ferry from Lower Manhattan.
The Battery
Twenty-five acres at the bottom of the island, named for the gun battery that stood here, and the departure point for every boat in the harbour.
Other Places
Coney Island, the Bronx Zoo, Yankee Stadium, the United Nations and the rest of the places that do not fit a neat category.
Coney Island
A wooden roller coaster from 1927 that is a designated landmark and still runs, a boardwalk, a free beach and the hot dog contest. Forty minutes on the subway.
The Oculus
A four-billion-dollar train station shaped like a bird leaving a hand, which is either the most beautiful transit hall in America or the most expensive shopping mall. Free.
Green-Wood Cemetery
478 acres of Victorian garden cemetery that was the second most visited attraction in America after Niagara Falls in the 1860s. Free, and a flock of green parakeets lives on the gate.
Bronx Zoo
265 acres, around 6,000 animals, and the zoo that led the shift from cages to habitats. Pay what you wish on Wednesdays.
Yankee Stadium
Baseball on a summer evening is the single easiest way to spend three hours with New Yorkers rather than near them. Tickets are cheaper than you think.
Neighborhoods
Midtown, the Village, Harlem, Williamsburg, Astoria and the rest — what each one is actually like to walk around, and who lives there.
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.
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.