New York City comprises the central
island of
Manhattan along
with four outer boroughs -
Brooklyn,
Queens, the Bronx , and
Staten
Island . Manhattan, to many,
is
New York - whatever your interests,
it's here that you'll spend the most
time and are likely to stay. New
York is very much a city of
neighborhoods
and is best explored on foot.
Offshore, the Statue of
Liberty and Ellis Island
comprise the first section of New
York (and America) that most
nineteenth-century immigrants would
have seen. The Financial District
takes in the skyscrapers and
historic buildings of Manhattan's
southern reaches and was hardest hit
by the destruction of perhaps its
most famous landmarks, the Twin
Towers of the World Trade Center.
Just northeast is the area around City
Hall , New York's well-appointed
municipal center, which adjoins TriBeCa
, known for its swanky restaurants,
galleries, and nightlife. Moving
east, Chinatown is
Manhattan's most populous ethnic
neighborhood, a vibrant locale
that's great for food and shopping.
Nearby, Little Italy bears
few traces of the once-strong
immigrant presence, while the Lower
East Side , the city's
traditional gateway neighborhood for
new immigrants, is nowadays
scattered with trendy bars and
clubs. To the west, SoHo is
one of the premier districts for
galleries and the commercial art
scene, not to mention designer
shopping. Continuing north, the West
and East Villages form a
focus of bars, restaurants, and
shops catering to students and
would-be bohemians - and of course
tourists. Chelsea is a
largely residential neighborhood
that is now mostly known for its gay
scene and art galleries that borders
on Manhattan's old Garment
District . Murray Hill
contains the city's largest
skyscraper and most enduring symbol,
the Empire State Building .
Beyond 42nd Street , the
main east-west artery of midtown,
the character of the city changes
quite radically, and the skyline
becomes more high-rise and home to
some of New York's most
awe-inspiring, neck-cricking
architecture. There are also some
superb museums and the city's best
shopping as you work your way north
up Fifth Avenue as far as
59th Street. Here, the classic
Manhattan vistas are broken by the
broad expanse of Central Park
, a supreme piece of
nineteenth-century landscaping,
without which life in Manhattan
would be unthinkable. Flanking the
park, the mostly residential and
fairly affluent Upper West Side
boasts Lincoln Center, Manhattan's
temple to the performing arts, the
American Museum of Natural History,
and Riverside Park along the Hudson
River. On the other side of the
park, the Upper East Side is
wealthier and more grandiose, with
its nineteenth-century millionaires'
mansions now transformed into a
string of magnificent museums known
as the "Museum Mile," the
most prominent being the vast Metropolitan
Museum of Art . Alongside is a
patrician residential neighborhood
that boasts some of the swankiest
addresses in Manhattan, and a nest
of designer shopping along Madison
Avenue in the seventies. Immediately
above Central Park, Harlem ,
the historic black
city-within-a-city, has a healthy
sense of an improving go-ahead
community; a jaunt further north is
most likely required only to see the
unusual Cloisters, a
nineteenth-century mock-up of a
medieval monastery, packed with
great European Romanesque and Gothic
art and (transplanted) architecture.
