5 Days in New York

The Statue of Liberty was a gift from the people of France, designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi around a metal framework by Gustave Eiffel, and it was dedicated on October 28, 1886. She holds a tablet inscribed with July 4, 1776 in Roman numerals, and she steps on a broken chain and shackle, a nod to the end of slavery. For generations of immigrants arriving by ship, she was the first thing they saw of America.

Statue City Cruises is the only authorized seller, from Battery Park in Manhattan or Liberty State Park in New Jersey. General admission covers the grounds, the Statue of Liberty Museum and Ellis Island. Going inside takes a separate pedestal ticket, or a crown ticket for the 162 steps with no elevator. Both are limited and sold online only, and the crown sells out about 90 days ahead. Honest verdict: the pedestal is the better value, and the crown is a long, cramped climb that only some people enjoy.

The same ferry continues to Ellis Island, the busiest immigrant inspection station in the country. From 1892 to 1954 about 12 million people were processed here. The National Museum of Immigration fills the restored main building, and it's a better museum than people expect.

Don't try to read everything. Start in the Registry Room, then follow the exhibits on the journey and the stories of individual families, which is what makes the numbers personal.

From Battery Park, walk up Broadway to Bowling Green, where the Charging Bull stands. Arturo Di Modica made the 7,100-pound bronze after the 1987 stock market crash and, on a December night in 1989, dropped it outside the Stock Exchange without permission. The city had it removed, and it ended up on its current spot at Bowling Green. Expect a long line of people waiting to touch its horns.

Then walk up to Wall Street, which is under 2,000 feet (600 m) long and takes its name from the wall the Dutch built across the settlement from 1653 to 1699. The Stock Exchange is closed to visitors, but Federal Hall, a short walk along the street, is a free national memorial. Finish at Trinity Church at the head of the street, an Episcopal parish that feels far from the traders.

Walk ten minutes north to the site of the World Trade Center. The 9/11 Memorial and Museum remembers the 2,977 people killed in the 2001 attacks and the six killed in the 1993 bombing. The Memorial is two huge square pools set in the footprints of the twin towers, with the victims' names on bronze panels around the edge. It's free and open daily, 8am to 8pm, and it is moving without any explanation.

The Museum underground is open Wednesday to Monday, 9am to 7pm (last entry 6pm), and it is the hardest museum on this list. It holds objects, recordings and photographs from the day and the story of the buildings. Allow at least two hours and don't schedule anything cheerful straight after. The tower beside it, One World Trade Center, is the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere.

The Staten Island Ferry is the best free thing in the city. The 5.2-mile (8.4 km) route to St. George takes about 25 minutes, runs 24 hours a day and has been fare-free since 1997. It's a commuter boat, so there are no tickets and no tours, just a big window onto the harbor.

Take it late in the afternoon, grab a spot on the outer deck, and watch the Statue of Liberty slide past as the skyline falls away behind you. At St. George you walk through the terminal and board the next boat back, with the lights coming on.

Take the subway to the Lower East Side for dinner at Katz's Delicatessen, open since 1888 on the corner of Houston and Ludlow. It serves about 15,000 pounds of pastrami a week, and the pastrami on rye is the order. It isn't kosher, despite what the menu suggests.

The system is the old one: you're handed a paper ticket at the door, you queue at the counter, and the carver usually hands over a taste while he slices, which is the moment to tip him. A sandwich is huge and splits well between two. Hours vary through the week, so check them before you go.

The Empire State Building is the one everyone pictures: 102 stories of Art Deco built between 1930 and 1931. The observation deck is open 9am to 11pm, so you can go in the morning, at sunset or at night.

It's pricier than some alternatives, and the lines at peak times are long. If you'd rather have the Empire State in your photos, Top of the Rock, Summit One Vanderbilt and Edge at Hudson Yards are the other big decks, and Edge starts from around 42 USD (38 EUR). Pick one deck; the skyline is the same.

Walk 15 minutes north to the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the flagship of the New York Public Library, guarded by the two lions. The marble hall is free to enter, and the Rose Main Reading Room upstairs is worth a look even if you never open a book.

Behind it is Bryant Park, a lawn in the middle of Midtown, good for ten minutes on a chair.

Two blocks east is Grand Central Terminal, the best train station in America, whether or not you're catching a train. It stands at 42nd Street and Park Avenue, and the Main Concourse has a painted ceiling of constellations and a famous four-sided clock. It's the third-busiest station in North America, and since 2023 the Long Island Rail Road also runs into a new terminal beneath it, Grand Central Madison.

Look up, then step outside to see the Chrysler Building, a few blocks east, whose stainless-steel crown is the best Art Deco detail on the skyline. Downstairs, the arched corridor outside the Oyster Bar is the so-called whispering gallery, where two people in opposite corners can hear each other speak.

Walk up Fifth Avenue to Rockefeller Center, a complex of 19 buildings on 22 acres that was planned in 1928 as a site for a new Metropolitan Opera house. When the Opera backed out, John D. Rockefeller Jr. built a city of offices instead, and it opened in the middle of the Depression. Look at the Art Deco lobby of 30 Rockefeller Plaza and, in winter, the tree and the skating rink. Top of the Rock, the deck on the same tower, has the best view of the Empire State Building itself.

Across the avenue stands St. Patrick's Cathedral, the Catholic seat of New York, a neo-Gothic church that fills the block between Fifth and Madison Avenues. Step inside for a quiet few minutes.

By now you'll be hungry, and the corner of 53rd Street and Sixth Avenue is where New York's halal cart empire began. In 1990 The Halal Guys opened as a hot dog cart run by three Egyptian immigrants, and soon switched to chicken, gyro meat, rice and pita. The platter with white sauce and hot sauce is the order.

The brand has since spread worldwide, but the corner is still where the lines are. Be warned that the hot sauce is properly hot. If the cart you're after isn't there, any halal cart with a queue of taxi drivers and office workers will do the same job.

A block away, MoMA on 53rd Street was conceived in 1929 and opened days after the stock market crash. Its collection runs from the late 19th century to today and has more of the pictures people know than almost anywhere: Van Gogh's The Starry Night, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Warhol's soup cans.

Do it in two parts. Start with the paintings, from Cézanne to Pollock, then spend whatever time is left on the architecture and design galleries, which are underrated. The sculpture garden is a good place to sit.

Times Square is the junction of Broadway, Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street and the hub of the Theater District, lit by digital billboards. It draws an estimated 50 million visitors a year and is loud and crowded. See it once at night and move on.

The real reason to be here is a Broadway show. Most of the theaters are on the side streets between 41st and 53rd. The TKTS booth and the theaters' own box offices sell same-day seats, so you don't need to plan months ahead for most shows. Hit musicals are the exception. Check which night a theater is dark, because shows rest one day a week.

The American Museum of Natural History fills 21 connected buildings facing Central Park West, with 45 permanent exhibition halls and roughly 32 million specimens, of which only a small fraction is on show.

You can't see it all, so give it two hours. Start in the fossil halls with the dinosaur skeletons, then head down to the Hall of Ocean Life and its giant blue whale. The Rose Center for Earth and Space, the glass cube with a sphere inside, has the planetarium show.

Walk ten minutes north on Amsterdam Avenue to Barney Greengrass at number 541, which calls itself the Sturgeon King. This is an old-fashioned Jewish appetizing shop and restaurant, where the smoked fish is the point: sturgeon, nova, whitefish, with a bagel or a bialy and cream cheese. Scrambled eggs with lox and onions is the classic.

It's loud, a bit gruff, and nothing has been redesigned for tourists. Go for lunch, not dinner: there is no dinner.

Walk south along Central Park West to 72nd Street. Strawberry Fields is the quiet corner of Central Park dedicated to John Lennon, with the Imagine mosaic in the path. Across the avenue is The Dakota, the 1884 apartment building where Lennon lived and where he was shot in 1980. You can't go in, but you can read the plaque and look at the gables.

Fans gather at the mosaic all day. It's a calm place, and a good five minutes before the busiest stretch of the park.

Central Park is 843 acres, the first landscaped park in the United States and the most visited urban park in the country, with an estimated 42 million visits a year. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed it in the 1850s to give a crowded city somewhere to breathe, and almost everything you see, the hills, ponds and meadows, is planned.

From Strawberry Fields, walk to the Lake and Bow Bridge, the cast-iron footbridge, then to Bethesda Terrace, where an arcade of tiles opens onto the fountain and its Angel of the Waters statue. Buskers, rowers and wedding photographers all gather here. You don't need to do much but walk.

Leave the park on the east side at about 4pm and walk up Fifth Avenue to Museum Mile and the Guggenheim, Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral building. The building is the main exhibit. You take the elevator to the top and walk down the ramp, with the art on the walls and the atrium opening below, rather than going room by room.

The collection is smaller than the Met and the shows change, so check what's on. If nothing grabs you, admire the facade and keep the 30 USD for the Met, six blocks south. It's open every day from 10:30am to 5:30pm, closed on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, at 1000 Fifth Avenue, is the largest art museum in the Americas and the most visited in the United States, with 5.7 million visitors in fiscal year 2025. It lists about 1.5 million works across 17 departments, and most of it is not on show at once.

Pick two or three things and let the rest go. The Temple of Dendur, the Egyptian temple in a glass hall by the park, is the signature; the European paintings and the Greek and Roman galleries are the others people rank. On Friday evening the crowds thin out.

Start in Chinatown, which holds the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere. Doyers Street is a short bent lane, and at number 13 is Nom Wah Tea Parlor, which opened in 1920 and is the oldest continuously running restaurant in the neighborhood. It serves Hong Kong style dim sum.

Order from the sheet at the table: the shrimp and pork dumplings, the pork buns and the egg rolls are the classics. It's casual, quick and good value. The real dumpling center of the city is now in Queens; Flushing is in the More Time section.

Walk ten minutes south to the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge, at City Hall. It opened on May 24, 1883, as the first fixed crossing of the East River and, with a main span of 1,595 feet, the longest suspension bridge in the world. The granite towers with their Gothic arches are the thing to look at.

The walkway is a shared deck above the cars. Stay on the pedestrian side, because cyclists don't slow down. It takes about 30 minutes to cross, longer with photos.

Once in Brooklyn, drop down to Dumbo, an acronym for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. It's a neighborhood of old warehouses, Belgian block streets and cast-iron buildings. The famous photo is on Washington Street, where the Manhattan Bridge frames the Empire State Building at the end of the road.

That shot has made the corner a permanent crowd, so take it quickly and move on to the waterfront.

Brooklyn Bridge Park runs along the waterfront below the bridge, and it's where New Yorkers go on weekends. Jane's Carousel, a restored ride inside a glass pavilion at 45 Main Street, sits right at the water, with the Manhattan Bridge behind it. The piers have lawns, playgrounds and open views of the lower skyline.

Walk south along the piers. This is the slow part of the day, and a good place to let tired feet recover.

Climb up into Brooklyn Heights, one of the city's oldest residential neighborhoods, with brownstones and quiet streets. The Brooklyn Heights Promenade is a 1,826-foot (557 m) platform cantilevered over the highway below, with a clear view of Lower Manhattan, the harbor and the Statue of Liberty in the distance.

It's the best free view in the borough, and at sunset locals come with their dogs. Sit on a bench for a while, then walk to the subway at Borough Hall.

Junior's has stood at the corner of Flatbush Avenue Extension and DeKalb Avenue since Harry Rosen founded it in 1950, on the site of a diner his family had run since 1929. It's named after his sons, and its New York style cheesecake is famous: dense, creamy and plain.

Order the plain, which is the one the place was built on. Slices are big enough to split. The room is a classic diner with a long menu and no pretensions.

Red Hook is a waterfront neighborhood without a subway station, so take a bus or a taxi from Downtown Brooklyn to Van Brunt Street, where Hometown Bar-B-Que sits. It does Texas style smoked meat, with brisket, pork ribs and beef ribs.

You queue at the counter, order by weight and carry the trays to communal tables. The brisket and the ribs are the order. Meat can sell out, so go early, then walk to the waterfront for a view of the Statue of Liberty.

Take the subway to 125th Street, the main street of Harlem. The Apollo Theater, at number 253, opened as a burlesque house in 1914 and became the stage where Black American performers broke through, from Ella Fitzgerald to James Brown. It has about 1,500 seats.

The historic theater is closed for a renovation that the Apollo expects to end in late 2026, and its programming runs at the smaller Apollo Stages at the Victoria, at 233 West 125th Street. If the main stage hasn't reopened you'll see the facade and the famous sign, which is still worth the stop. Amateur Night, where the audience can boo you off, is the classic experience, but it falls on a Wednesday, not on this Sunday.

Sylvia's, at 328 Malcolm X Boulevard, opened in 1962 and is the best-known soul food restaurant in Harlem. Sylvia Woods, who founded it, was known as the Queen of Soul Food. Fried chicken with waffles, smothered pork chops, collard greens, mac and cheese and cornbread are the things to order.

On Sundays there's a gospel brunch, with live music and long waits, and the times shift, so check the website. It's loud and a little touristy, but the cooking is real.

Ride the subway or a bus down to Cathedral Parkway (110th Street) on the 1 line, a mile or so from Sylvia's. The Cathedral of St. John the Divine is often called St. John the Unfinished. Construction began in 1892 in a Byzantine and Romanesque design, switched to Gothic after 1909, and has only ever reached about two-thirds of the plan. The nave was finished in 1941, and the building has been unfinished ever since.

Even half-built it's enormous, more landscape than building. Walk the nave and look at the stained glass. Sunday mornings belong to services, which is why the cathedral comes after Harlem in this plan.

The 1 train runs straight down to 14th Street. Walk west to Chelsea Market, a food hall inside the former Nabisco factory, where the Oreo was invented. It's loud, busy and fun for a snack. Then climb up to the High Line at Gansevoort Street.

The High Line is a 1.45-mile (2.3 km) elevated park built on an abandoned rail spur, with plantings by Piet Oudolf, art installations and views over the neighborhood. It runs north to Hudson Yards, where the Edge deck sits at the end. Walk all of it or just a part, and take the stairs down when you've had enough.

New York pizza is thin, wide and foldable, sold by the slice from a counter, and Joe's, at 7 Carmine Street, is the one most guides send you to. Pino Pozzuoli founded it in 1975, and it stays open late. A plain cheese slice, folded in half, eaten standing on the sidewalk, is the whole experience.

Joe's is cash only, so have bills. Keep it simple, because the plain slice is the test. Locals argue forever over which place is best, so treat it as one great answer, not the final one.

Walk a few blocks east to Washington Square Park, 9.75 acres in the middle of Greenwich Village. The marble arch at the north end, the fountain, the chess tables and the buskers make it the city's living room, shared by students from New York University and people who've been coming for decades.

The surrounding streets, with their brownstones, bars and small theaters, were the home of the Beat poets and the folk revival, and the Village still has a street grid that doesn't match the numbered one uptown. Wander down Bleecker Street. For a burger, Corner Bistro on West 4th Street has been serving them since 1961.

End the trip in a basement. The Village Vanguard at 178 Seventh Avenue South opened in 1935 under Max Gordon, began as a room for poets and folk singers, and has been a jazz club since 1957. The room is small, narrow and a bit cramped, and the sound is the best in town.

Buy a ticket ahead and arrive early to be near the front. There are typically two sets a night, around 8pm and 10pm. Tickets aren't cheap and there's a drink minimum, but you're hearing great musicians a few feet away. Monday nights belong to the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra.