 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
New
York City:
A Top Five For First Timers by Nancy & Eric Anderson Photography by Authors
Some suggestions are valid for any large American city and are almost too obvious: wear comfortable clothes and walking shoes, get a small backpack for rain gear – and a padlock for the backpack – and buy a good guide book and walking map of Manhattan before you come. Do your online research at that time, too, for hotels and restaurants. Know the area you want to explore – there’s more to Manhattan than Times Square – and choose your hotel in your preferred place and book it before you come. Get an idea of what’s available by using a tourist agency website but before booking using an 800 number or agency website, always call the hotel direct as its direct prices may be better. Always ask at the hotel desk when you arrive if there is currently a better price than the one you came with. You should choose a hotel close to a metro station. There are hundreds of hotels in New York city to choose from. Choices vary from, for example, the upscale Hotel Empire on the West Side at 44 W 63 Street about three minutes from the Lincoln Center Metro station and the less elegant, less expensive Pod Hotel over on the East Side at 230 E 51 Street two short blocks from the 51 Street station on Lexington Avenue. Check consumer reviews on the internet. There are 25,000 restaurants in town, from cheap eats like the Flame Diner at 893 9 Avenue up north at 58 Street to, down south, at 75 9 Avenue at 16 Street the upscale Buddakan restaurant. Buddakan, one of those sophisticated restaurants that might make your entire trip, is one of the cool places our kids (who have a Manhattan apartment) enjoy when they are celebrating a particular occasion -- their other special restaurants being Balthazar at 80 Spring Street in SoHo; Il Giglios at 81 Warren Street/W. Broadway-Greenwich Street; Les Halles, 411 Park Avenue S at 28 Street; and Bar Americain at 152 W 52 street. All, say our kids, are big, busy, bustling, noisy restaurants that mirror the excitement of the city and offer visitors a memorable experience. But those same kids suggest other places that are much less expensive but still offer the New York experience: from simple pubs like the Emerald Grill at 308 Spring Street, and the Bleeker Street Pub at 56 Bleeker Street; to popular diners like the Carnegie Deli at 55 Street and 7 Avenue, and Rice N Beans at 744 9 Ave at 50/51 Streets. Bagel eateries like Columbus Gourmet on Columbus at 72/73 Streets, and Hot n Crusty at 85 and Lexington are always in style. But, of course, part of the fun of a New York City visit is finding your own favorite restaurants. OK. If you’ve found your hotel and discovered your restaurant what comes next? You’ll have ideas if you’ve checkout NYCvisit.com and downloaded some of its brochures but a bargain these days is the 50 percent off discount pass it promotes that you can buy online at the City Pass website http://www.citypass.com/city/ny.html?id=ZHinM544. Valid for nine days, its value may be as much in guiding you to Manhattan’s best attractions as it is in saving you money. The pass has given us in the past three of our top five favorites in the city
If you had only time for one attraction in New York this would be it. Its easily found on the Central Park side of 5th Avenue at 82nd Street and easily explored though you might wish you’d brought a compass. It’s huge and we doubt that anyone has really seen it all. But the difficulty isn’t that you can’t find what you’re looking for, the problem is more that you’ll get caught up in a tiny corner and engrossed stay there till closing time. If you love European art you’ll maybe never get to the display of musical instruments. Similarly you may never reach Arms and Armor if you begin with the Greek exhibits. We were fascinated with the Etruscan 6th century BC bronze chariot inlaid with ivory found in a remote part of southeast Umbria in1902 and bought the next year by the Met. Imagine, found one year and bought by General Luigi Palma di Cesnola, the first director of the Met the next! That was a great time in America when museums had clout and could appeal to wealthy benefactors who wouldn’t have the problem of income tax for a decade.
The City Pass offers you other museum choices after the Met including the nearby Guggenheim Museum with its impressive Frank Lloyd White architecture just seven short blocks to the north or the Museum of Modern Art 29 blocks to the south and near to the Rockefeller Center. (In Manhattan 20 blocks north or south is one mile.) But we prefer the American Museum of Natural History which lies on the other side of Central Park. The entrance hall with it dinosaurs may be familiar to those who saw the $600 million 2006 box office success Night at the Museum some of which was filmed on site. Another movie Murph the Surf was filmed in 1975 about this museum that dealt with the largest jewel heist in US history a decade earlier when Jack Murphy climbed in a second story window -- and stole a legendary gem collection. The losses included the Star of India, the de Long Ruby and the Eagle Diamond. The Eagle Diamond was never recovered. At the American Museum of Natural History you can roam around the animals of Africa or the peoples of Asia and painlessly, effortlessly learn about your planet. You can disappear into an elevator and arrive for Cosmic Collisions in the Hayden Planetarium but keep moving because there’s always something new and exciting going on even in a building that goes back to 1874. Like the Met this is a huge sprawling institution and you need again to give yourself enough time.
This has to be the New York City sleeper. You have choices between visiting the Statue of liberty National Monument and the Ellis Island Immigration Museum -- or the harbor cruise. Either would be great but the 2-hour semi-circle of the harbor cruise shows you a side of Mid and lower Manhattan that you seldom see or even have access to. You see the great New York architecture some of which Hollywood has used as backdrop for favorite movies from An Affair To Remember to An Officer And A Gentleman. The captain points out, in a really well-delivered travelogue, buildings featured in the city’s past and how 13 new piers are being built on the West Side just for recreation, one with ice rinks, bowling alleys and golf driving ranges. There’s a solemn moment as the boat passes Ground Zero but we go on as America has had to and finally turn round when we reach the United Nations Building. As we sail close to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island it’s easy to imagine what it must have felt like, a hundred and more years ago, for all those persons who came with hopes and heads held high to join the people of this great country.
There are other choices on the City Pass: the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, for example, and first timers really should make their way to the observatory at the top of the Empire State Building. But as classic as visiting the city’s tallest and most-visited attraction – it’s been featured in more than 90 movies – is heading for Times Square where you can almost feel and hear the heart beat of this spectacular city. If you get there just before when the theater office TKS opens for discount same day shows you may be lucky enough to snare the show you want though not if it’s a hot package still early in its run. If all that walking about has given you an appetite Times Square has its share of restaurants from the Roxy Deli that charges according to its pricey location (in the center of the excitement) to TGIF’s and McDonald’s right there in the same place with the same prices you’d get anywhere in mid-America. Georg Lobel’s statue of the celebrated composer and producer George M. Cohan stands guard as it has done since 1959. The inscription “Give my regards to Broadway” comes from his most famous song. Jim Carrey, behind the statue of this legendary figure, looks down on the crowd in Times Square as if acknowledging the contribution Cohan made to Tin Pan Alley and in turn being inspired by his legends.
You should wander around lower New York to meet the people in places like SoHo and the Village. You can ask Frankie whose son owns Joe’s Dairy what’s so special about his mozzarella cheese and he’ll tell you, “It’s a secret!” You can ask a local why is there a Winston Churchill Square in Greenwich Village and get the reply, “Why not? He’s our Winnie. We made him an honorary citizen in 1963.” And you can pass by a sign on a blackboard outside a thrift shop that says, “The recession is God’s way of telling us to stop buying $300 jeans!” But a walk in Central Park farther north is really God’s way of slowing you down. The park came into being in 1858, the result of cooperation between its first superintendent Frederick Law Olmsted and a British architect Calvert Vaux. Central Park has gone through periods of neglect and decline but has never been as impressive as today under a Conservancy that provides most of the park’s $27 million operating budget. As you stroll though this park rejoice that the city had the insight 150 years ago to protect 843 acres (6 percent of Manhattan) from the developers of New York and were able to create such an oasis of calm for future generations. |
Tell Eric what you think of his article. In the meantime, here are some of the feedback we have already received:
|
Stay tuned.
This site is designed and maintained by WYNK Marketing. Send all technical issues to: support@wynkmarketing.com
|
