New York City (NYC — the most iconic city in the Western world: 8.3 million residents in the five boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, Staten Island), 20 million in Greater New York, and the most photographed skyline in the world. New York is simultaneously the world's financial capital (Wall Street, the NYSE, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — the largest gold repository in the world), the world's capital of contemporary art (MoMA, the Met, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the New Museum, Gagosian Gallery), the world's capital of musical theatre (42nd Street, the Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall), and the greatest city for food in the Western hemisphere: from the $1 pizza slice (the most perfect fast food in the world) to the $300 tasting menu at Per Se. The Manhattan grid (the Commissioner's Plan of 1811 — the numbered streets running east-west from 1st Street to 220th Street, the numbered avenues running north-south) is the clearest urban planning decision in history, and the result is a city uniquely legible: everything is north, south, east or west, everything is blocks. The Brooklyn Bridge (1883), Central Park (1858), the Empire State Building (1931) and the Statue of Liberty (1886) are among the most recognized structures in human history.
Central Park (the 843-acre park in the center of Manhattan, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux (1858–1876) — the first major landscaped public park in an American city, and the most visited urban park in the world (42 million visitors per year). At dawn: the Reservoir (the 43-acre Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir on the 86th Street transverse, where runners circle a 1.58-mile track at dawn with the midtown skyline behind them), Strawberry Fields (the tear-drop shaped memorial garden at the Dakota Building entrance on West 72nd Street, where John Lennon was shot on December 8, 1980 — the Imagine mosaic), and the Bethesda Terrace and Fountain (the only formally designed element in the park — the Angel of the Waters, 1873, the only statue commissioned for the park).
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideThe Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met — 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street: the largest art museum in the Americas, one of the three great art museums of the world alongside the Louvre and the Hermitage: 2 million objects spanning 5,000 years of human history. The essential rooms: The Temple of Dendur (the complete 15 BC Egyptian temple transported stone by stone from Egypt in 1968, reassembled in the Sackler Wing), the Arms and Armor gallery (the finest collection of armor in the Americas), the Impressionist wing (the greatest Impressionist collection outside Paris — Monet's series, Renoir, Degas), the American Wing (from the colonial period to Sargent), and the Chinese Garden Court. The Roof Garden (May–October) has the finest views of Central Park and the midtown skyline from any public viewpoint in Manhattan.
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideThe Frick Collection (1 East 70th Street — the Gilded Age mansion of Henry Clay Frick, converted to one of the finest small museums in the world: 10 Rembrandts, Vermeer's Girl Interrupted at Her Music (one of only 36 Vermeers in existence), Holbein's portrait of Thomas Cromwell and Sir Thomas More — the two enemies facing each other across the room. Then Grand Central Terminal (42nd Street — 1913, the finest Beaux-Arts building in New York: the Main Concourse (the celestial ceiling (2,500 stars in the Mediterranean winter sky constellation, painted backwards (as seen from God's perspective looking down)) and the Chrysler Building (1930, William Van Alen — the most beautiful Art Deco building in the world, the eagle gargoyles, the stainless steel crown).
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideThe New York pizza slice (the invention of the Italian immigrants who adapted the Neapolitan pizza to the New York coal oven: a triangular slice of thin-crust pizza (not sourdough — regular dough with a hint of sugar and oil), the cheese partially charred at the edges, the tomato sauce tangy, the oil pooling in the cheese craters, folded in half lengthwise and eaten standing at the counter for $1–2. Joe's Pizza (7 Carmine Street, Greenwich Village — the most famous $1 slice in New York since 1975, voted best in New York repeatedly) or any of the 1,000+ neighborhood "dollar slice" shops.
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideThe Brooklyn Bridge (1883, John Augustus Roebling — the longest suspension bridge in the world for 20 years, the first steel-wire suspension bridge ever built (previously iron wire), the first bridge to cross the East River: 1,834m total length, the two Gothic granite towers (84m) with their characteristic pointed arches, and the wooden pedestrian walkway elevated above the traffic lanes giving the most dramatic city-approach walk in the world. Walk from the Manhattan side (City Hall Park) at dawn (45 minutes) as the sun rises over Brooklyn and the Manhattan skyline fills the sky behind you. The DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) waterfront is at the Brooklyn end: Washington Street at the corner of Water Street gives the most photographed view in Brooklyn (Manhattan Bridge perfectly framed between two red brick buildings).
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideThe Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53rd Street — the greatest collection of modern and contemporary art in the world: Van Gogh's The Starry Night (1889 — Room 505, the painting that is both the most reproduced and most visited artwork in the museum), Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907 — the painting that broke painting), Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie, Pollock's One: Number 31, and the Architecture and Design gallery (with the original iPhone (2007), the Eames Lounge Chair (1956) and the Barcelone Chair (Mies van der Rohe, 1929) — the finest collection of design objects in any museum).
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideThe High Line (the 2.33km elevated park built on the abandoned West Side Line freight railway (1934–1980, converted 2009–2014): the most innovative urban park of the 21st century, running from Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District to West 34th Street, 9m above the street grid. The wildflower planting (inspired by the self-seeded plants that grew on the abandoned tracks), the art commissions (permanent and temporary), the views across the Hudson River to New Jersey, and the sun loungers in the Sundeck section (10th Avenue, 14th Street).
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideThe West Village (the triangle of streets west of 7th Avenue South, between Christopher Street and West 14th Street — the most beautiful residential neighbourhood in Manhattan: Federal rowhouses from 1820s, Bleecker Street (the finest restaurant street in the city: Babbo (Mario Batali's landmark Italian), Minetta Tavern (the best burger in New York, inside a speakeasy-era French bistro), and the Comedy Cellar on MacDougal (where Chris Rock, Louis CK and Dave Chappelle do surprise sets)).
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideThe Statue of Liberty (Liberty Island — Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, 1886: the gift of France to the United States, the 93m copper statue (the green verdigris is the patina of copper oxide formed in the first decades after installation) of Liberty Enlightening the World, the iron internal structure by Gustave Eiffel. The ferry departs from Battery Park (Liberty Ferry, book in advance — Crown tickets for the interior climb to the crown (8 stories of spiral stair inside the copper lady, with a view through the crown's 25 windows) must be booked months in advance in peak season). Ellis Island (the immigration station — 1892–1954: 12 million immigrants processed through this building, the ancestors of approximately 40% of all Americans today).
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideThe National September 11 Memorial and Museum (180 Greenwich Street — the two memorial pools (the Reflecting Absence — Michael Arad and Peter Walker, 2011) built in the exact footprints of the North and South Towers, the largest manmade waterfalls in North America (each pool 30m × 30m, the water falling to a lower pool from which it disappears underground): the names of the 2,977 victims carved in bronze parapets around the pools. The Museum underground (the Foundation Hall with the Last Column (the last structural element removed from Ground Zero on May 30, 2002, covered in memorial notes and photographs), the historical exhibition, and the survivor staircase (the staircase from the North Tower lobby still intact)).
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideWall Street (the financial district of Lower Manhattan: the New York Stock Exchange (1903 — the Corinthian temple facade is the most recognizable financial building in the world), the Federal Hall National Memorial (the site of George Washington's inauguration as the first President (1789)), the Charging Bull (the 3,200kg bronze bull on Bowling Green — the symbol of bull market optimism, installed covertly overnight in 1989 by artist Arturo Di Modica)) and the Brooklyn Bridge Park (the park beneath the Brooklyn Bridge on the Brooklyn side — the finest sunset view of the Lower Manhattan skyline from across the water, with the bridge in the foreground).
🎫 Book tickets via GetYourGuideThe New York bagel (the hand-rolled, boiled-then-baked ring bread of the Ashkenazi Jewish tradition — brought to New York by Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the 1880s: the specific minerals in New York City tap water are credited (perhaps apocryphally) with giving the bagel its particular chewiness and crust. Ess-a-Bagel (831 Third Avenue — the finest plain bagel in New York, sesame or everything-seed, with cream cheese (schmear) and lox (cold-smoked Pacific salmon) — the New York Jewish deli breakfast, for $12–15, an extraordinary and complete meal).