Where to Stay in Midtown

Most first-time visitors stay in Midtown, and most of them should. You can walk to a remarkable share of what you came for, every subway line passes through, and the sheer volume of hotel rooms keeps prices below what an equivalent location would cost in almost any other city.

The trade-off is that Midtown is an office district. It empties at seven, the pavements are crowded with other visitors, and the restaurants within two blocks of most hotels are chains at a markup.

Where in Midtown you land makes a real difference to that.

The best blocks

West 40s and 50s, west of Eighth Avenue — Hell’s Kitchen. The best compromise available. Ten minutes’ walk from the theatres, noticeably cheaper than the same standard east of Eighth, and with Ninth Avenue — one of the best eating streets in Manhattan — running through it. The blocks west of Tenth are quiet at night.

Murray Hill and the East 30s. Residential, unglamorous, and cheap for the location. Close to Grand Central and the 6 train. Nothing much happens there, which for a lot of people is the point.

Midtown East and Turtle Bay, the 40s and 50s east of Third. Corporate and quiet after seven, well placed for Grand Central and the UN. Good value because business travel is the market and business travel does not happen at weekends.

Around Herald Square and Koreatown, the low 30s. Close to Penn Station, Macy’s and the Empire State Building, and 32nd Street between Fifth and Sixth is a single dense block of Korean restaurants, bakeries and karaoke open very late. The best food in Midtown by a distance.

What to avoid

The blocks immediately around Times Square — West 42nd to 47th between Sixth and Eighth. It is the loudest part of the city, the pavements are impassable, and every hotel there charges a premium for a location whose only advantage is that you can see the screens from your window. You can walk to Times Square from anywhere in Midtown in ten minutes.

Penn Station’s immediate surroundings. The station is being rebuilt in stages and the streets around it are among the least pleasant in Manhattan.

Practical

Ask for a high floor away from the avenue. Rubbish collection happens at night in Manhattan and it is loud, and Midtown has more of it than anywhere.

Check the facility fee. A great many Midtown hotels charge a mandatory nightly fee on top of the room rate that is not in the advertised price.

Rooms are small — 200 to 250 square feet is a normal standard double here.

Subway access is the one thing that is uniformly excellent. Times Square–42nd Street alone serves eleven lines, and Grand Central, Herald Square, Columbus Circle and Port Authority are all major interchanges.

When to consider staying elsewhere

If this is a second or third trip, or if you want evenings that happen where you are sleeping rather than somewhere you travel to, stay downtown or in Brooklyn instead. The full comparison is in the where-to-stay guide.