Insight Guides City Guide New York (Travel Guide eBook)

Insight Guides

• Publisher: Insight
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781786715494
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

New York City must be the world's top urban destination: whether you're after great theatre, fascinating museums, luxurious hotels, history, nightlife, sumptuous dining or just city energy, you'll find it here.
Stunning, specially-commissioned photography that brings the city and its people to life.
Highlights of the city's top attractions in our Best of New York, including iconic landmarks such as the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, the city's best museums and art galleries and unique areas like Central Park and Greenwich Village.
Descriptive area-by-area accounts cover the whole city: from lively Soho and TriBeCa to the world famous stores on Fifth Avenue and the affluent Upper East Side and beyond to Brooklyn and the Bronx. An Excursions chapter takes in Long Island, Hudson Valley and the Jersey Shore.
Detailed, high-quality maps throughout will help you get around and travel tips give you all the essential information for planning a memorable trip.

About Insight Guides: Insight Guides has over 40 years' experience of publishing high-quality, visual travel guides. We produce around 400 full-colour print guide books and maps as well as picture-packed eBooks to meet different travellers' needs. Insight Guides' unique combination of beautiful travel photography and focus on history and culture together create a unique visual reference and planning tool to inspire your next adventure.

'Insight Guides has spawned many imitators but is still the best of its type.' - Wanderlust Magazine

The Outer Boroughs

Some come for the art and music, some for the lower rent, while others have lived here their entire lives. For 6.5 million New Yorkers, the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island are home.

Main Attractions

Brooklyn Academy of Music

Brooklyn Museum of Art

Prospect Park

Red Hook and Williamsburg

Coney Island

Flushing Meadows Corona Park

Museum of the Moving Image

Historic Richmond Town

Edgar Allan Poe Cottage

Staten Island, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx: these are places some visitors to Manhattan simply don’t go to, except maybe to see the zoo or a ballgame, or to take the ferry.

But they’re really missing out. The Outer Boroughs offer parks, cafés and gourmet restaurants, museums, and history. Cool bars buzz around Williamsburg in Brooklyn; woodlands and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge beckon on Staten Island; New York’s oldest – and thriving – movie studios are in Queens; and the home of Edgar Allen Poe stokes the imagination in the Bronx. There are architectural sites of Old New York. As well as the zoo, botanical gardens, and Yankee Stadium, of course.

So often overlooked, many of these attractions – all less than an hour from Broadway, and accessible by public transportation – have the added plus of being (with few exceptions) uncluttered by other out-of-towners.

Brooklyn Bridge as seen from DUMBO.

Dreamstime

The Queens building called 5 Pointz, a labor of love by local writer Meres.

Britta Jaschinski/Apa Publications

Neighborhoods

The key word in the Outer Boroughs is ‘neighborhood.’ Neighborhoods change, overlap, and can be a bazaar of ethnic delight. Stroll through Middle Eastern stores selling frankincense, order pasta in Italian, and have kasha served in Yiddish.

Some new neighbors are artists and young professionals in search of affordable rents. Since prices in Manhattan have soared, new generations have turned to former industrial zones, like Long Island City in Queens and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, to live. Co-ops flourish where warehouses once thrived. Burned-out buildings become galleries or restaurants. Then real-estate values skyrocket, and the artists turn their sights elsewhere.

Amid the new is the older side of the boroughs: the avenues, parks, and palazzi built as grand civic projects in the late 19th century. Architects like Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux found open space here unavailable in Midtown. With sweeping gestures, they decked the boroughs with buildings inspired by the domes and gables of Parisian boulevards.

Despite this grandeur, however, one thing ‘the boroughs’ lack is Manhattan’s easy grid system. Off the parkways, they are a maze of streets and expressways. With a little attention, though, it’s easy to uncover neighborhoods that can be explored at a comfortable pace on foot – places where the boroughs really breathe.

Brooklyn 1 [map]

More than 70 sq miles (180 sq km) at the southeast tip of Long Island encompasses the most populous borough of New York City, Brooklyn. More than 2.6 million people live here, which would make it the fourth-largest metropolis in the United States if it weren’t a part of New York City. Just a 20-minute ride on the subway from the heart of Manhattan will take you out to Williamsburg or Prospect Park.

Brooklyn street scene.

Britta Jaschinski/Apa Publications

Another scenic way to escape from Manhattan is via the Brooklyn Bridge. A stroll across the walkway leads to Fulton Ferry Landing, where cobblestoned streets have come back to life after lying dormant for decades. It was here that the borough inaugurated its first mass transit, carrying Brooklynites to Wall Street. In 1814 Robert Fulton’s steam ferry, the Nassau, replaced the East River’s earlier rowboats, sailboats, and vessels powered by horses on treadmills. Ferries remained the main way to cross until the Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883.

Tip

Brooklyn’s East River waterfront has been undergoing the same upscale transition as the Hudson River in Manhattan. Oh-so-cool Red Hook (and the city’s only Ikea) is hard to reach by subway or bus, but it’s easy by water taxi. Go to www.nywatertaxi.com.

DUMBO

Brooklyn’s modern-day renaissance began in now-classic New York style – following the trail of artists. When Soho became too expensive, they moved over the water to lofts in DUMBO (for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), now a thriving neighborhood that includes the innovative cultural hubs St Ann’s Warehouse (45 Water Street; tel: [phone]; www.stannswarehouse.org).

Young families followed – so many that recently revitalized Brooklyn Bridge Park incorporated into its design a ‘destination playground,’ a carousel, open grass fields, and a rock beach on the East River where the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy holds ecology classes for curious minds of all ages. The conservancy has been doing all it can to attract people to the glorious new spaces, and it’s working. Outdoor movies are always big draws, as is the pop-up pool that opens in the summer. In autumn, there are fall foliage tours; in the winter, ice-skating. Construction concluded with piers containing...

Table of contents

• How To Use This E-Book
• New York City’s Top 10 Attractions
• Editor’s Choice
• Introduction: New to Everyone
• New York, New Yorkers
• Decisive Dates
• The Making of New York
• Culture and the City
• Insight: Hollywood on the Hudson
• Diners, Delis, and Degustation
• Insight: Food on the Move
• Introduction: Places
• Lower Manhattan
• Insight: The Statue of Liberty
• Insight: Ellis Island
• SoHo and TriBeCa
• Insight: Shopping
• The East Village and the Lower East Side
• Greenwich Village
• Union Square and Chelsea
• Insight: Times Square
• Midtown West
• Insight: Museum of Modern Art
• Fifth Avenue
• Insight: Central Park
• Midtown East
• Upper East Side
• Insight: The Metropolitan Museum
• Insight: Museum Mile
• Upper West Side
• Insight: Lincoln Center
• Insight: The American Museum of Natural History
• Harlem and the Heights
• The Outer Boroughs
• Excursions
• Transportation
• A-Z: A Handy Summary of Practical Information
• Further Reading
• New York Street Atlas