Tag: New York Travel Guide

New York is arguably the most famous destination in the United States and one of the most visited places on Earth. It is a state of extraordinary contrasts — a place where the most densely populated and culturally intense urban environment in the Western Hemisphere exists alongside vast wilderness, working farms, historic small towns, world-class wine regions, and mountain landscapes of genuine grandeur. Most visitors, when they think of New York, think of New York City — and the city deserves every superlative applied to it. But the state that surrounds it is equally rich, equally surprising, and far less explored by the millions who pass through each year. From the tip of Manhattan to the shores of Lake Erie, from the Adirondack High Peaks to the vineyards of the Finger Lakes, New York State is one of the great travel destinations in North America.

Why Visit New York
New York State receives over 250 million visitors a year, the vast majority of them drawn to New York City. The city alone justifies the journey for most travelers — it is a place of unmatched cultural density, where more museums, restaurants, theaters, musical venues, neighborhoods, and human stories are packed into a relatively small geographic area than anywhere else in the United States. It is a city that has defined modernity, shaped global culture, and served as the entry point and proving ground for wave after wave of immigrants whose influence has made it the most cosmopolitan place in the world.
But beyond the city, New York State offers experiences that surprise even seasoned travelers. The Hudson Valley is one of the most historically and scenically rich river corridors in North America. The Catskill Mountains have been reinvented as a destination for thoughtful travelers seeking good food, art, and nature within a few hours of the city. The Finger Lakes produce wines of genuine international distinction. Niagara Falls is one of the great natural wonders of the world. And the Adirondack Mountains contain the largest protected wilderness area in the contiguous United States — larger than Yellowstone, Glacier, and Grand Canyon National Parks combined.

New York City
New York City is not merely a city but a civilization — a place so large, so dense, so relentlessly various that a lifetime of visits would not exhaust its possibilities. It is home to approximately 8.3 million people within the five boroughs, and the greater metropolitan area encompasses over 20 million, making it the largest urban area in the United States by a significant margin. The city is composed of five boroughs — Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island — each of which is itself a complex world of neighborhoods, cultures, and experiences.

Manhattan
Manhattan is a narrow island, 13 miles long and 2 miles wide at its broadest, packed with an intensity of human activity and cultural production that has no parallel anywhere in the world. It is organized around a grid of numbered streets running east-west and avenues running north-south, with Broadway cutting diagonally across the grid from tip to tip — a layout that makes orientation relatively straightforward once grasped.
Lower Manhattan is where the city began and where its most historic layers are most visible. The Financial District, centered on Wall Street, is built on the bones of the original Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, and several streets — including Stone Street and the winding lanes around the Fraunces Tavern — preserve something of the pre-grid street pattern of the colonial city. The 9/11 Memorial and Museum at the site of the World Trade Center is one of the most powerful and moving memorial sites in the United States. The twin reflecting pools, occupying the footprints of the original towers and surrounded by the names of the nearly 3,000 people who died in the attacks, are objects of extraordinary emotional force. The museum below ground tells the story of the attacks and their aftermath with intelligence, sensitivity, and unflinching honesty. One World Trade Center, the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, offers an observation deck with panoramic views of the city and surrounding region from its 102nd floor.

The Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883 and for many years the longest suspension bridge in the world, remains one of the most beautiful and historically significant pieces of infrastructure in American history. Walking across it from Manhattan to Brooklyn — a journey of about 30 minutes — is one of the essential New York experiences, offering views of the Manhattan skyline, the harbor, and the river that are among the finest in the city.
The neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan and the areas immediately north reward slow exploration. Tribeca — the Triangle Below Canal Street — is one of Manhattan’s most handsome neighborhoods, its 19th-century cast-iron warehouses now housing restaurants, galleries, and expensive loft apartments. SoHo, just north, was the center of New York’s art scene in the 1970s and 1980s and retains the most extraordinary concentration of cast-iron architecture in the world — block after block of elaborately ornamented 19th-century commercial buildings now largely given over to retail. The streets of SoHo on a weekend afternoon are crowded and commercialized, but looking above the ground-floor storefronts at the upper floors of the buildings reveals one of the great architectural ensembles in New York.

Greenwich Village has been the bohemian heart of New York since the early 20th century. Its irregular, pre-grid streets — a legacy of the colonial-era lanes that predated the Manhattan grid — make it the most European-feeling neighborhood in the city. Washington Square Park, with its grand triumphal arch at the foot of Fifth Avenue, is the neighborhood’s living room — a gathering place of chess players, students, musicians, and dog walkers that has served as the center of Village life for over a century. The surrounding blocks contain some of the finest 19th-century townhouses in New York. The West Village, the neighborhood’s western extension toward the Hudson River, is one of the most beautiful and intimate streetscapes in the city — narrow lanes lined with Federal and Greek Revival rowhouses, excellent restaurants, and a charm that is almost impossible to articulate but immediately felt.
The High Line is one of the most celebrated urban design achievements of the 21st century — a 1.45-mile elevated linear park built on a disused freight rail line on Manhattan’s West Side. The park winds from the Meatpacking District in the south to Hudson Yards in the north, offering planted gardens, art installations, and extraordinary views of the Hudson River and the city’s western architecture. The Meatpacking District below the High Line’s southern end has been transformed from a working industrial neighborhood into one of Manhattan’s most fashionable districts. Hudson Yards, at the High Line’s northern terminus, is a massive new development on the former West Side Rail Yards that contains The Shed — an extraordinary flexible arts venue — and the Vessel, a climbable honeycomb structure of interlocking staircases by Thomas Heatherwick that has become one of the most controversial and discussed public sculptures in recent New York history.

Midtown Manhattan is the city’s commercial core and the location of many of its most iconic landmarks. The Empire State Building, completed in 1931 and for 40 years the tallest building in the world, remains the most beloved skyscraper in New York and offers observation decks on the 86th and 102nd floors with views that justify every superlative. The Chrysler Building, just to the east, is widely considered the most beautiful skyscraper ever built — its Art Deco steel crown, eagle gargoyles, and Nirosta steel cladding make it one of the great works of architecture of the 20th century. Grand Central Terminal, the Beaux-Arts masterpiece completed in 1913 at the intersection of 42nd Street and Park Avenue, is one of the finest public spaces in the United States — its Main Concourse, with its turquoise celestial ceiling map and floods of natural light from the arched windows, is breathtaking. The terminal sees approximately 750,000 people pass through it daily, and its lower levels contain one of the best food markets in Midtown.

Fifth Avenue is one of the most famous streets in the world — lined with flagship retail stores, luxury hotels, and iconic institutions. The New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue is one of the finest Beaux-Arts buildings in the United States, its two marble lions flanking the entrance serving as unofficial mascots of the institution. The Rose Main Reading Room, restored to its original gilded splendor, is one of the great interior spaces in New York. St. Patrick’s Cathedral, directly across Fifth Avenue from Rockefeller Center, is the largest decorated Neo-Gothic Catholic cathedral in North America and a powerful presence in the heart of Midtown.
Rockefeller Center is a complex of 19 commercial buildings from the 1930s that represents one of the finest examples of large-scale urban planning in American history. Its Art Deco architecture, public art program, and public spaces — including the famous ice skating rink in winter — make it one of the most visited destinations in the city. Top of the Rock, the observation deck on the 70th floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, offers what many consider the finest view of Manhattan available anywhere — including a view of the Empire State Building that the Empire State Building’s own observation deck cannot provide.

Times Square is the most visited tourist destination in the United States, drawing approximately 50 million visitors a year to its intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue. It is simultaneously one of New York’s most overwhelming and most exhilarating experiences — a canyon of electronic billboards, theater marquees, pedestrian plazas, and unceasing human activity that is spectacular in its way, though New Yorkers themselves generally avoid it. The theater district surrounding Times Square contains 41 Broadway houses presenting the finest commercial theater in the English-speaking world. A Broadway show — whether a classic revival, a new musical, or a dramatic play — remains one of the essential New York experiences, and the diversity of productions available on any given night is remarkable.

Central Park is one of the great achievements of American landscape architecture and one of the most beloved public spaces in the world. The park covers 843 acres in the middle of Manhattan — an enormous green rectangle stretching from 59th Street to 110th Street — and was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux beginning in 1858. Its landscapes, which include meadows, woodland, rocky outcroppings, lakes, a formal garden, and dozens of other distinct environments, were entirely man-made — the site was largely swampland and rocky terrain before Olmsted and Vaux transformed it. Today the park receives approximately 42 million visitors a year and serves as the backyard, playground, and escape valve for millions of New Yorkers. The Bethesda Fountain and Terrace at the center of the park is its great formal centerpiece. The Ramble, a 36-acre woodland of winding paths in the middle of the park, is one of the finest urban birdwatching locations in the country. The park is at its most magical in early spring, when the cherry trees and crabapples bloom, and in autumn, when the surrounding buildings glow in the late afternoon light above the turning foliage.

Museum Mile is a stretch of Fifth Avenue along the eastern edge of Central Park containing the greatest concentration of world-class museums of any street in the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art — the Met — is the largest art museum in the Western Hemisphere and one of the finest in the world, with a collection of over 1.5 million objects spanning 5,000 years of human civilization. A single day is barely sufficient to scratch the surface of its permanent collection, which includes everything from ancient Egyptian temples to medieval European armor to Impressionist masterpieces to contemporary American design. The museum also operates the Met Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park at the northern tip of Manhattan — a remarkable reconstruction of several medieval European monastic cloisters, housing an extraordinary collection of medieval art in a setting of serene beauty above the Hudson River. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, housed in Frank Lloyd Wright’s extraordinary spiral building of 1959, is one of the most architecturally significant museum buildings in the world. The Whitney Museum of American Art, which relocated from the Upper East Side to a dramatic new building by Renzo Piano at the southern end of the High Line in 2015, is the premier institution for American art of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Museum of Modern Art — MoMA — in Midtown contains one of the finest collections of modern and contemporary art in the world, including Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans.

The Upper West Side, running along the western edge of Central Park toward the Hudson River, is one of the most pleasant residential neighborhoods in Manhattan for walking — lined with beautiful brownstones, excellent independent bookshops, neighborhood restaurants, and the outstanding food market of Zabar’s, a New York institution since 1934. The American Museum of Natural History, facing Central Park on Central Park West, is one of the largest and most comprehensive natural history museums in the world, with 45 permanent halls covering everything from the cosmos to ocean life to human origins, anchored by the spectacular dinosaur fossil halls.
Harlem, north of Central Park, is one of the most historically significant African-American communities in the United States — the center of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, when an extraordinary flowering of African-American literature, music, art, and intellectual life transformed American culture. The neighborhood today is a complex, rapidly gentrifying community that retains its cultural identity and institutional richness. The Apollo Theater on 125th Street has been the most important venue in African-American music history since the 1930s — its Amateur Night has launched the careers of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, James Brown, and countless others. The Studio Museum in Harlem is one of the finest small art museums in New York. The food scene along 125th Street and in the surrounding blocks reflects Harlem’s African-American, Caribbean, and increasingly international population.

Brooklyn
Brooklyn is New York City’s most populous borough — home to 2.7 million people — and has emerged over the past two decades as one of the most creative and culturally vibrant urban environments in the world. It is a borough of enormous geographic and cultural diversity, encompassing everything from the brownstone-lined streets of Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope to the Caribbean communities of Crown Heights and Flatbush to the industrial waterfront of Red Hook to the beaches and amusement parks of Coney Island.
Brooklyn Heights is the borough’s most historic neighborhood — a 19th-century enclave of Federal and Greek Revival townhouses overlooking the East River and the Manhattan skyline. The Brooklyn Heights Promenade, a cantilevered walkway above the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, offers what many consider the finest view of the Manhattan skyline available anywhere — a panorama of towers above the river, best appreciated at dusk when the buildings begin to light up.

Dumbo — Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass — is the neighborhood directly below the bridge approaches on the Brooklyn waterfront, a former industrial district of cobblestone streets and massive brick warehouses that has become one of Brooklyn’s most fashionable and photographed neighborhoods. The view of the Manhattan Bridge framed by the buildings of Washington Street, with the Empire State Building visible in the distance, is one of the most reproduced images of New York. Brooklyn Bridge Park, stretching along the waterfront below Dumbo and Brooklyn Heights, is one of the finest urban parks created in New York in recent decades.

Williamsburg, just north of the bridge along the East River waterfront, was the center of Brooklyn’s creative renaissance in the early 2000s and remains one of the most energetic neighborhoods in the borough, with an exceptional restaurant scene, excellent bars and music venues, and the outstanding Smorgasburg open-air food market on weekends from spring through fall. Bushwick, further east, has become the center of Brooklyn’s street art scene — its streets and warehouse walls covered in murals by international artists that make walking through the neighborhood a continuously surprising visual experience.

Prospect Park, designed by Olmsted and Vaux after their success with Central Park, is Brooklyn’s great green heart — 585 acres of meadows, woodland, and a beautiful lake that serves the same role for Brooklyn that Central Park serves for Manhattan. The Brooklyn Museum, facing the park’s northern entrance, is one of the largest art museums in the United States, with a collection of Egyptian art that is among the finest outside Cairo, outstanding American period rooms, and a strong collection of contemporary art. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden, adjacent to the museum, is 52 acres of cultivated gardens famous above all for its Japanese Garden and Cherry Esplanade, where the cherry blossom bloom in April draws enormous crowds and creates one of the most beautiful scenes in New York.

Coney Island, at the southern tip of Brooklyn on the Atlantic Ocean, is one of New York’s most storied and most melancholy places — a former resort of extraordinary popular vitality that declined sharply in the mid-20th century and has never fully recovered its former glory, yet retains a battered, irresistible character. The boardwalk, the Nathan’s Famous hot dogs (an institution since 1916), the Wonder Wheel, the Cyclone roller coaster (a National Historic Landmark), and the New York Aquarium make it a genuinely enjoyable destination for families and for anyone interested in American popular culture history.

Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island
Queens is the most ethnically diverse urban area in the world — a borough where over 160 languages are spoken and where neighborhoods like Flushing (with its extraordinary Chinese and Korean food scene), Jackson Heights (South Asian and Latin American communities), and Astoria (Greek, Middle Eastern, and increasingly diverse) offer some of the finest and most authentic international dining experiences available anywhere in the United States. The Queens Museum, Noguchi Museum, and MoMA PS1 make it an important destination for art lovers as well.
The Bronx is home to the New York Yankees and Yankee Stadium, the Bronx Zoo — one of the largest and finest metropolitan zoos in the world — and the New York Botanical Garden, whose 250 acres contain one of the great plant collections in the world and a Victorian-era greenhouse of extraordinary beauty. The Arthur Avenue neighborhood in the Belmont section of the Bronx is the city’s most authentic Italian-American community, with an indoor market and surrounding streets of butchers, cheese shops, pasta makers, and old-school red-sauce restaurants that preserve a New York food tradition increasingly rare elsewhere in the city.
Staten Island is the least visited of the five boroughs and offers, somewhat surprisingly, some of the finest views of Manhattan available anywhere — from the free Staten Island Ferry, which crosses New York Harbor and offers a close approach to the Statue of Liberty. Snug Harbor Cultural Center, a complex of 19th-century Greek Revival buildings on a 83-acre park, houses several museums including the Staten Island Museum and the Chinese Scholar’s Garden — a remarkable recreation of a traditional Ming dynasty garden.

The Hudson Valley
The Hudson River Valley stretches from the northern suburbs of New York City to the capital Albany, a distance of roughly 150 miles. It is one of the most historically and scenically rich river corridors in North America — the landscape that inspired the Hudson River School, America’s first great artistic movement, and that shaped the American sense of landscape and national identity in the 19th century.
The Catskill Mountains to the west of the river have been reinvented as a destination for creative, food-conscious travelers from New York City seeking an alternative to the Hamptons or the Berkshires. The towns of Woodstock, Rhinebeck, Hudson, Tivoli, and Phoenicia each have their own character and their own appeal. Hudson, in particular, has transformed itself from a struggling post-industrial town into one of the most surprising small cities in New York — its long main street, Warren Street, lined with exceptional antique dealers, art galleries, restaurants, and hotels that would not look out of place in any major city. Woodstock, forever associated with the countercultural movement of the 1960s (though the actual 1969 festival took place 60 miles away in Bethel), remains an arts community of genuine vitality.

The Hudson River School landscapes that inspired Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, and their contemporaries can still be seen essentially unchanged from many points along the valley. Olana, the Persian-inspired mansion of Frederic Church perched on a hilltop above the river near Hudson, is one of the finest house museums in the United States — the views from its grounds over the river toward the Catskills are precisely the landscape Church painted, and standing in them is a genuinely moving experience.
The valley is rich in historic estates and sites. Hyde Park is home to both Springwood — the Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site, including the Roosevelt home, library, and museum — and Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site, a Gilded Age Beaux-Arts palace on the river’s eastern bank. The Culinary Institute of America, also in Hyde Park, operates several outstanding student-run restaurants open to the public and is one of the finest culinary schools in the world. Kykuit, the Rockefeller estate in Sleepy Hollow, offers exceptional tours of the house and its sculpture garden, which contains a remarkable collection of 20th-century sculpture including works by Picasso, Calder, and Giacometti displayed against the river landscape.
West Point, on a dramatic bend of the Hudson just north of the Hudson Highlands, is home to the United States Military Academy — one of the most beautiful campus settings in the United States. Visitors can tour the campus, visit the excellent West Point Museum, and attend concerts at Eisenhower Hall. The view of the river from Trophy Point is among the finest in the valley.

The Finger Lakes
The Finger Lakes region of central New York is one of the most beautiful and least known wine regions in the world — a landscape of long, narrow lakes gouged by glaciers into the rolling hills south of Lake Ontario, surrounded by gorges, waterfalls, and vineyards. The lakes themselves — eleven of them, of varying sizes, the largest being Seneca and Cayuga — moderate the climate in a way that allows the cultivation of cool-climate wine grapes, particularly Riesling, which reaches its finest American expression here.
The Rieslings of the Finger Lakes have attracted international attention and critical acclaim — dry, mineral, and site-specific, they rival the great Rieslings of Germany and Alsace and represent America’s most compelling contribution to the world of white wine. Dry Rosé and Cabernet Franc also excel here. The wine trail along each lake — particularly the Seneca Lake Wine Trail, the largest in the region — connects dozens of wineries, many of them small, family-owned operations producing wines of genuine distinction.

Ithaca, at the southern tip of Cayuga Lake, is home to Cornell University and Ithaca College and has a character disproportionate to its size — a food scene of remarkable quality, excellent independent bookshops, a strong arts community, and the extraordinary natural feature of Ithaca Gorge, where Cascadilla Creek has carved a dramatic canyon through the city itself. The Ithaca Commons is one of the most pleasant downtown pedestrian areas in upstate New York. Taughannock Falls State Park, a short drive north of the city along the lake, contains a waterfall with a sheer drop of 215 feet — higher than Niagara Falls.
Watkins Glen State Park, at the southern tip of Seneca Lake, is the most visited state park in New York — a two-mile gorge trail following Glen Creek through a succession of waterfalls, narrow canyon passages, and natural stone bridges of breathtaking beauty. The gorge has been carved into the shale and sandstone bedrock by the creek over thousands of years, creating a landscape of otherworldly intimacy. The town of Watkins Glen itself is also famous as a historic auto racing venue.

Niagara Falls and Western New York
Niagara Falls is one of the great natural wonders of the world and the most powerful waterfall in North America by volume of water. The falls actually consist of three waterfalls — the American Falls, the Bridal Veil Falls, and the Canadian Horseshoe Falls — straddling the border between the United States and Canada on the Niagara River between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. The Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side is the most spectacular, with a crest of approximately 2,600 feet and a drop of 167 feet, sending a thundering volume of water over its edge at a rate that is almost incomprehensible in person. The mist rises hundreds of feet into the air and creates a perpetual rainbow on sunny days.
Niagara Falls State Park on the American side is the oldest state park in the United States, established in 1885. The Maid of the Mist boat tour, which has been operating since 1846, takes visitors directly into the basin of the Horseshoe Falls — passengers wear blue ponchos that provide minimal protection from the drenching spray, and the experience of standing at the rail as the boat moves into the wall of water is one of the most viscerally thrilling things available at any natural attraction in the United States.

Buffalo, just south of Niagara Falls at the eastern end of Lake Erie, is one of America’s great underrated cities — a post-industrial city of extraordinary architectural heritage, a passionate sports culture, and a food scene with several genuine claims to national fame. The city was one of the wealthiest in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, and the architectural legacy of that prosperity is extraordinary. Richardson Olmsted Campus, the former Buffalo State Hospital designed by H.H. Richardson in 1870, is one of the great Victorian institutional buildings in America, now being sensitively restored into a hotel and cultural complex. The Guaranty Building, designed by Louis Sullivan in 1896, is one of the earliest and finest skyscrapers ever built. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin Martin House, completed in 1905, is the most complete and finest Prairie Style house in existence.
Buffalo’s food culture includes several genuine American originals. The Buffalo wing — chicken wings fried and tossed in a cayenne pepper hot sauce — was invented here at the Anchor Bar in 1964, and eating them in Buffalo, where the tradition is deep and the execution is finest, is a genuine culinary pilgrimage. Beef on weck — thin-shaved roast beef piled on a kummelweck roll crusted with caraway seeds and coarse salt — is another Buffalo original of considerable deliciousness.

The Adirondacks
The Adirondack Park is the largest publicly protected area in the contiguous United States — six million acres of wilderness, forests, lakes, rivers, and mountains in the northeastern corner of New York State, larger than the entire state of Vermont. The park is unusual in that it contains both public forest preserve — where development is constitutionally prohibited — and private lands including farms, villages, and resorts, creating a mosaic of wilderness and human settlement unlike any other protected area in the country.
The Adirondack High Peaks, a cluster of 46 peaks above 4,000 feet in the northeastern corner of the park, draw hikers, climbers, and backcountry skiers from across the Northeast. Mount Marcy, at 5,344 feet, is the highest point in New York State. The High Peaks Wilderness is one of the most challenging and rewarding hiking destinations in the eastern United States. Lake Placid, the village at the center of the High Peaks region, hosted the Winter Olympics in both 1932 and 1980 — the latter famous for the “Miracle on Ice,” when the United States hockey team defeated the Soviet Union in one of the most celebrated moments in American sports history. The Olympic venues are still in use and accessible to visitors, including the bobsled and luge run where visitors can ride with professional drivers.

The interior of the Adirondacks is a paradise for canoeists and kayakers. The Adirondack Canoe Route, a 740-mile network of lakes, rivers, and carries connecting the interior waterways, is one of the great paddling destinations in North America. The quiet, tea-colored waters of the wilderness lakes, the absence of roads and development, and the extraordinary quality of the night sky — some of the darkest in the Northeast — make the Adirondack interior an experience of genuine wildness increasingly rare in the eastern United States.

The Catskills
The Catskill Mountains, southwest of the Hudson Valley, are lower and softer than the Adirondacks but have a character entirely their own — a landscape of rounded summits, hemlock ravines, tumbling streams, and small towns that have drawn visitors from New York City since the 19th century, when the grand Catskill Mountain House perched above the Hudson Valley attracted the wealthy elite of the Gilded Age. The region fell into decline in the mid-20th century and became associated with the Borscht Belt — the resort hotels of Sullivan County that served the Jewish-American community — many of which are now abandoned ruins of considerable melancholy beauty.
Today the Catskills are experiencing a renaissance driven by Brooklyn and Manhattan residents who have bought farmhouses, opened restaurants, and created a new creative community in towns like Woodstock, Phoenicia, Livingston Manor, and Narrowsburg. The Catskill Center and various land trusts protect the region’s natural areas, and the fishing on the streams of the western Catskills — particularly the Delaware River and its tributaries — is among the finest trout fishing in the eastern United States.

Long Island and the Hamptons
Long Island extends 118 miles east of New York City into the Atlantic Ocean, and its two forks at its eastern end contain some of the most beautiful and most expensive real estate in the United States. The South Shore is lined with barrier beach — Jones Beach State Park is one of the finest public beaches on the East Coast, and Fire Island National Seashore, a barrier island accessible only by ferry, preserves 26 miles of undeveloped Atlantic beach with two communities of extraordinary character — the charming, car-free village of Ocean Beach and the Fire Island Pines and Cherry Grove, LGBTQ+ communities with a history stretching back decades.

The Hamptons — the string of villages on the South Fork including Southampton, East Hampton, Bridgehampton, Sag Harbor, and Montauk — are the summer playground of New York’s wealthy and famous, and the real estate values and the restaurant prices reflect that reality. But the landscape that attracted wealthy New Yorkers in the first place is genuine and beautiful — wide, clean Atlantic beaches, bucolic farm fields, historic whaling-era architecture, and the extraordinary light that has drawn artists to the area since the 19th century. The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill is an outstanding institution for American art. Sag Harbor, a former whaling port of considerable architectural beauty, is the most historically satisfying of the Hamptons villages. Montauk, at the very tip of the South Fork, is less polished and more genuinely blue-collar than the villages to its west and has a raw, windswept beauty of its own.
The North Fork, quieter and less fashionable than the Hamptons, has emerged as Long Island’s wine country — a maritime climate well-suited to Merlot, Cabernet Franc, and Sauvignon Blanc, with dozens of wineries producing wines of steadily improving quality.

Practical Travel Information

Getting Around
New York City is served by one of the most extensive public transit systems in the world. The subway system operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year on 472 stations and 245 miles of routes — an experience in itself, and the most efficient way to move around Manhattan and into Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority also operates an extensive bus network. Within Manhattan, walking is often the fastest and most pleasurable way to travel for distances of up to a mile or two. Taxis and rideshare services are ubiquitous. For trips to the outer boroughs and beyond, the Long Island Rail Road, Metro-North Railroad, and New Jersey Transit connect the city to the surrounding region.
Upstate New York is car country. Distances are significant, and public transit outside the city is limited. The New York State Thruway connects New York City to Buffalo via Albany. Amtrak operates the Empire Service between New York City and Buffalo via Albany, and the Adirondack train between New York City and Montreal through the Hudson Valley.

Best Time to Visit
New York City is a year-round destination, but spring — April through June — and fall — September through November — are generally the finest seasons. Spring brings the cherry blossoms of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and Central Park, the return of outdoor dining, and a sense of renewal after winter. Fall brings spectacular foliage in the parks and outer boroughs, comfortable temperatures, and the concentrated cultural energy of the new season’s theater, museum exhibitions, and restaurant openings. Summer is hot and humid but offers outdoor concerts, free events in Central Park, and the beaches of Long Island. Winter, while cold, has its own rewards — the holiday season in New York is genuinely magical, with ice skating at Rockefeller Center, the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree, and a festive energy throughout the city.
Upstate, fall foliage — typically at its peak in the Adirondacks and Catskills in late September and early October, and in the Hudson Valley slightly later — is one of the great natural events of the year, drawing visitors from across the Northeast and beyond.

Food
New York City’s restaurant scene is the most diverse and arguably the finest in the United States. Every cuisine on Earth is represented somewhere in the five boroughs, and the city contains more Michelin-starred restaurants than any other American city. But New York’s food identity goes beyond fine dining — it is built equally on the perfect slice of New York pizza (thin-crusted, folded, eaten standing at the counter or walking down the street), the bagel with cream cheese and lox, the Jewish deli sandwich of pastrami or corned beef piled on rye, the soup dumpling of Flushing’s Chinatown, the jerk chicken of Crown Heights, and the extraordinary street food of every nationality available from carts across the city.

A Few Final Thoughts
New York rewards the visitor who comes without a fixed itinerary and allows the city — and the state — to surprise them. The famous destinations are famous for good reason, and no first-time visitor should skip the Empire State Building or Central Park or the Metropolitan Museum. But the deepest pleasures of New York are often found elsewhere: in a neighborhood discovered by accident, a restaurant with no English on the menu and the best food of the trip, a conversation with a stranger on a subway platform, an unexpected view down a canyon of towers as the light catches the upper floors gold at sunset. New York is endlessly patient with the traveler who arrives with open eyes and a willingness to walk, to wander, and to be astonished. It has been astonishing visitors for four centuries, and it shows no signs of stopping.