25 Landmarks in New York City
9/11 Memorial
180 Greenwich St, New York, NY 10007
The two reflecting pools sit in the exact footprints of the Twin Towers. Each one is nearly an acre in size. Water cascades thirty feet down the sides, then drops another twenty feet into a central void. The architect, Michael Arad, described them as "absence made visible." Although water flows continuously into the voids, they can never be filled. Bronze panels around the edges of each pool are inscribed with the names of every person killed in the September eleventh two thousand and one attacks and in the nineteen ninety-three World Trade Center bombing. The names are not arranged alphabetically — they are placed according to where people were and who they were with, so that colleagues and friends appear together. Near the south pool stands the Survivor Tree — a callery pear that was pulled from the rubble in October two thousand and one. It was eight feet tall, badly burned, with one living branch. The Parks Department moved it to a nursery in the Bronx where it was nursed back to health. In December two thousand and ten, the tree — now thirty feet tall — was returned to the site. Each year, the memorial gives seedlings from this tree to communities that have experienced terrorism, violence, or natural disasters. The four hundred swamp white oaks surrounding the pools were chosen because the species is native to all three crash sites: New York, Arlington, and Somerset County, Pennsylvania. The memorial plaza is free and open daily.
African Burial Ground
290 Broadway, New York, NY 10007
Beneath Broadway, near City Hall, lie the remains of an estimated fifteen thousand free and enslaved Africans. Nobody knew they were there for almost three hundred years. In sixteen ninety-seven, Black New Yorkers were banned from burying their dead in the city's churchyards. They were forced to use a plot outside the city limits — a six-point-six-acre site that eventually disappeared under twenty-five feet of landfill as Manhattan expanded northward. The burial ground was forgotten. Streets were paved over it. Buildings were constructed on top of it. In nineteen ninety-one, construction workers excavating for a new federal office building at 290 Broadway broke through to the original grade level and found human remains. Archaeologists eventually uncovered four hundred and nineteen individuals and over five hundred artifacts. The remains were sent to Howard University for study, which confirmed the brutal physical toll of enslaved labour — evidence of malnutrition, heavy muscular stress, and violent injury. In two thousand and three, a series of ceremonies called the Rites of Ancestral Return brought the remains back from Washington. Hundreds of schoolchildren marched in the final burial procession down Broadway. The site was designated a National Monument in two thousand and six. The outdoor memorial and indoor visitor centre are free. Almost nobody visits.
Brooklyn Bridge
New York, United States
The Brooklyn Bridge killed its creator before the first cable was strung. In June eighteen sixty-nine, John Augustus Roebling was surveying the site when a docking boat crushed his foot. His toes were amputated. He developed tetanus. He was dead within three weeks. His son Washington took over at thirty-two. He spent months working in the underwater caissons — massive airtight wooden boxes sunk to the riverbed so workers could dig foundations beneath the water. The deeper they dug, the more men started collapsing. They called it "caisson disease." We call it the bends. Twenty men died during the fourteen-year construction. Washington himself was crippled by it and spent the rest of the build watching through a telescope from his Brooklyn apartment. His wife Emily effectively ran the project. She studied mathematics, cable construction, and bridge engineering, becoming the first person to cross the completed bridge on May twenty-fourth, eighteen eighty-three. President Chester Arthur walked behind her. The bridge was the longest suspension bridge in the world and the first to use steel wire for its cables. Walk it from the Brooklyn side for the best view. The wooden pedestrian boardwalk is elevated above the car lanes, and the Gothic stone towers frame Manhattan as you approach. It is one of the most beautiful walks in any city.
Central Park
New York, United States
Central Park is eight hundred and forty-three acres of engineered wilderness in the middle of Manhattan. Every rock placement, every sightline, every curve in the path was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who won the design competition in eighteen fifty-eight. Nothing here is natural. Everything is meant to look like it is. The Bethesda Fountain, at the heart of the park, is topped by the Angel of the Waters — designed by Emma Stebbins in eighteen seventy-three. Stebbins was the first woman to receive a commission for a major public work in New York City. The fountain celebrates the eighteen forty-two opening of the Croton Aqueduct, which brought clean water to the city for the first time. The angel represents the healing power of that water. On the west side, near the Seventy-Second Street entrance, is Strawberry Fields — a five-acre memorial to John Lennon, who was shot outside the Dakota apartment building directly across the street on December eighth, nineteen eighty. The black-and-white Imagine mosaic was a gift from the city of Naples. Yoko Ono worked with landscape architect Bruce Kelly on the design, which was officially dedicated on October ninth, nineteen eighty-five — Lennon's forty-fifth birthday. Between these two landmarks, the Ramble is a thirty-six-acre woodland so dense you can lose sight of every building. It is one of the best birdwatching spots on the East Coast.
Chelsea Market
75 9th Ave, Manhattan, New York, 10011, United States
This building used to make Oreos. The National Biscuit Company — Nabisco — operated a factory complex here from the eighteen nineties until the nineteen fifties. The Oreo cookie was invented in this building in nineteen twelve. The factory was converted into Chelsea Market in nineteen ninety-seven, and the industrial bones were deliberately left exposed — raw brick, iron beams, factory piping. The ground-floor concourse runs the full block between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, lined with food vendors, bakeries, and small shops. It sits directly beneath the High Line, and you can access the elevated park from the building's western side. The market is one of the few food halls in New York that manages to serve both tourists and locals without completely alienating either. Los Tacos No. 1 has had a permanent queue since it opened. The lobster rolls at The Lobster Place are unreasonably good. And the building itself — with its exposed industrial infrastructure and a waterfall built into the concrete — is worth walking through even if you are not hungry.
City Hall Subway Station
Manhattan, New York, United States
Beneath City Hall is the most beautiful subway station in New York, and it has been closed since nineteen forty-five. City Hall station opened on October twenty-seventh, nineteen oh four, as one of the original twenty-eight stations of the New York City Subway. It was designed to be the showpiece of the system — Guastavino vaulted ceilings in muted red, green, and cream tiles, stained-glass skylights, large brass chandeliers, and herringbone tilework. Rafael Guastavino, the same Catalan architect whose tilework appears in Grand Central's Whispering Gallery and the catacombs of Old St. Patrick's, designed the ceilings here using timbrel vaulting — thin terracotta tiles bonded with mortar into a self-supporting arch. The station was closed on December thirty-first, nineteen forty-five, because the platform was too short. It sits on a tight curve, just over two hundred feet long, and could not be extended to accommodate modern ten-car trains. The nearby Brooklyn Bridge station absorbed its passengers. Unlike most abandoned subway stations, City Hall has remained in remarkably good condition — little graffiti, little dust, though only one of the original skylights survives. You cannot walk through it, but you can glimpse it: stay on the downtown 6 train past its last stop at Brooklyn Bridge and the train loops through the old City Hall station before heading back uptown. Look out the windows.
DUMBO
Washington St & Water St, Brooklyn, NY 11201
DUMBO stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, a name the residents invented in the nineteen seventies specifically because it sounded stupid. They were artists who had moved into abandoned warehouses and they wanted to discourage developers from taking the neighbourhood seriously. It did not work. Stand at the corner of Washington and Water Streets and look north. The Manhattan Bridge frames the Empire State Building perfectly between its stone pillars. It is one of the most photographed views in New York, and it works because of an accident of urban geometry that nobody planned. The cobblestone streets are original — nineteenth-century Belgian block laid for horse-drawn carts serving the waterfront warehouses. Jane's Carousel, visible beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, is a nineteen twenty-two Philadelphia Toboggan Company carousel that was bought at auction in nineteen eighty-four by Jane Walentas, who spent over twenty years restoring it by hand — scraping away sixty-two years of paint with an X-acto knife to reveal the original colour palette and carvings. It opened to the public in two thousand and eleven, housed in a glass pavilion designed by Jean Nouvel. Walk here after crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. The transition from the bridge's Gothic stone towers to the neighbourhood's industrial brick is one of the best sequences in any city.
Ellis Island
New York, United States
Between eighteen ninety-two and nineteen fifty-four, approximately twelve million immigrants entered the United States through this building. They arrived by ship, were processed in the Great Hall on the second floor, and either walked into New York or were turned back. About two percent were denied entry — roughly two hundred and fifty thousand people told to go home after crossing an ocean. The processing was brutal in its efficiency. Doctors would watch immigrants climb the stairs to the Great Hall. If someone was breathing heavily or limping, they were pulled aside and marked with chalk — H for heart, L for limp, X for suspected mental illness. The average inspection lasted three to five hours. The longest could last days or weeks. The main building was restored in nineteen ninety and reopened as the Immigration Museum, which is free with the ferry ticket. But the south side of the island — a complex of hospital buildings where sick immigrants were quarantined — sat abandoned and decaying for decades. These ruins, now accessible on guided tours, are among the most powerful spaces in New York: peeling paint, collapsed ceilings, rusting medical equipment, and trees growing through the floors of what were once hospital wards.
Empire State Building
20 W 34th St, New York, NY 10001
On July twenty-eighth, nineteen forty-five, a B-25 Mitchell bomber flew into the seventy-eighth floor of this building. Lieutenant Colonel William F. Smith Jr. was flying from Massachusetts to Newark in dense fog. He was warned of zero visibility but kept going. He passed the Chrysler Building and turned right instead of left. The plane hit the north side at roughly two hundred miles per hour, punching an eighteen-by-twenty-foot hole into the offices of the National Catholic Welfare Council. Fourteen people died — three crew and eleven in the building. An engine shot through the building and landed on a penthouse roof a block away. The other engine severed the cables of an elevator shaft. Inside that shaft, elevator operator Betty Lou Oliver fell seventy-five stories to the basement. She survived. It remains the longest survived elevator fall in history. The building itself barely flinched. It had been built to withstand hurricane-force winds, and the structural damage was minimal. It reopened two days later. The crash did, however, lead directly to the passage of the Federal Tort Claims Act in nineteen forty-six, which for the first time allowed civilians to sue the federal government. Before all that, the building was erected in four hundred and ten days — an average of four and a half floors per week. At the time, it was the tallest building in the world.
Federal Hall
26 Wall St, New York, NY 10005
Everyone walks past this building to photograph the Stock Exchange across the street. Almost nobody stops to read the plaque. This is where the United States began. On April thirtieth, seventeen eighty-nine, George Washington stood on the balcony of Federal Hall and took the oath of office as the first President of the United States. Chancellor Robert Livingston administered the oath. The Bible was opened at random to Genesis forty-nine thirteen. Livingston then shouted to the crowd: "Long live George Washington, President of the United States." A thirteen-gun salute followed. Washington's inaugural address, delivered in the Senate Chamber inside, was one thousand four hundred and nineteen words long. This was also where the Bill of Rights was proposed on September twenty-fifth, seventeen eighty-nine, and where the Judiciary Act of seventeen eighty-nine established the federal court system. For a brief period, this building was the centre of American democracy. The original Federal Hall was demolished in eighteen twelve. The current building — a Greek Revival structure completed in eighteen forty-two — was built as the New York Custom House and is now operated by the National Park Service as a free national memorial. The bronze statue of Washington on the front steps marks the approximate spot where he stood.
Flatiron Building
175 5th Ave, New York, NY 10010
When construction started, New Yorkers placed bets on how far the debris would spread when the wind knocked it down. They called it Burnham's Folly. The Flatiron Building was designed by Chicago architect Daniel Burnham and completed in nineteen oh two. It fills a triangular plot at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Broadway — a wedge-shaped site that produces a building just six and a half feet wide at its narrowest point. At twenty-two stories and two hundred and eighty-five feet, it was one of the tallest buildings in New York when it opened on October first, nineteen oh two. The building was developed as the headquarters of the Fuller Construction Company, and its official name is the Fuller Building. Nobody has ever called it that. The shape reminded people of a cast-iron clothes iron, and the name Flatiron stuck despite every effort to make "Fuller" happen. The triangular geometry creates powerful downdrafts at street level — the "Flatiron breeze" — that was famous enough to attract men who would loiter on Twenty-Third Street hoping to catch a glimpse of women's skirts being blown upward. Police officers were stationed at the corner to shoo them away. The phrase "twenty-three skidoo" — meaning to scram — may have originated from officers telling these men to move along from Twenty-Third Street.
Grand Central Terminal
89 E 42nd St, New York, NY 10017
The stars on the ceiling are backwards, and the official explanation is magnificent nonsense. The zodiac mural that spans the main concourse ceiling features twelve gold-leaf constellations and two thousand five hundred stars — fifty-nine of which are illuminated — and all of them are painted in reverse. Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose family built the terminal, claimed this was intentional: to show the sky from God's perspective, looking down. Astronomers have pointed out this is not how anything works. There is also a dark rectangle on the ceiling near the northwest corner. During a nineteen ninety-eight restoration, cleaners left one small patch untouched to show how decades of tobacco smoke had stained the entire surface. The rest of the ceiling had been nearly black. Downstairs, outside the Oyster Bar, is the Whispering Gallery. Stand in one corner of the arched Guastavino tile ceiling, have someone stand in the diagonally opposite corner, and whisper. The sound follows the curve of the tiles and arrives perfectly clear across the crowded hall. Nobody knows whether this acoustic effect was designed or accidental. And somewhere above the main concourse, accessible by elevator from the Oyster Bar ramp, there is a full-size tennis court. The space was previously a CBS television studio, and before that, in the nineteen sixties, a sixty-five-foot indoor ski slope.
Green-Wood Cemetery
500 25th St, Brooklyn, New York, 11232, United States
By the eighteen sixties, more people visited Green-Wood Cemetery each year than any attraction in America except Niagara Falls. It was not morbid. It was the closest thing New York had to a public park — Central Park would not open for another decade. Green-Wood was established in eighteen thirty-eight on four hundred and seventy-eight acres of rolling Brooklyn hillside. It holds six hundred thousand graves and seven thousand trees. The entrance alone — a Gothic Revival gatehouse completed in eighteen sixty-one — is one of the finest pieces of architecture in the borough. The resident list is extraordinary. Boss Tweed is here — the Tammany Hall political boss who stole an estimated two hundred million dollars from New York City. Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Brooklyn-born graffiti artist who went from tagging subway cars as SAMO to selling paintings for millions and dying of a heroin overdose at twenty-seven, has a small, simple headstone. Lola Montez — an Irish-born dancer who became the mistress of King Ludwig of Bavaria, was made a countess, served as his chief political advisor, and caused an armed revolt that forced his abdication — is buried under an equally modest marker. The cemetery is also a designated National Historic Landmark and one of the best birdwatching spots in Brooklyn. Free to enter.
Smallpox Hospital Ruins
New York, United States
On the southern tip of Roosevelt Island — a narrow strip of land in the East River between Manhattan and Queens — stand the Gothic Revival ruins of a hospital built to quarantine smallpox patients from the rest of New York City. The Smallpox Hospital was designed by James Renwick Jr. and built between eighteen fifty-four and eighteen fifty-six. Renwick is the same architect who designed St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue and Grace Church on Broadway. The hospital could accommodate one hundred patients — charity cases on the lower floors, paying patients in private rooms above. The building was abandoned around nineteen fifty-six. The roof collapsed. The floors rotted away. Only the outer walls and foundation remain, standing open to the sky behind a chain-link fence. In nineteen seventy-six, it was declared a New York City landmark — described as "a romantic and picturesque ruin, evoking memories of the past." Since nineteen ninety-five, the ruins have been illuminated at night. You can see it from the Roosevelt Island Tramway — a cable car that crosses the East River from Second Avenue and Sixtieth Street in Manhattan. The tram ride itself, which costs the same as a subway fare, gives you one of the most unusual perspectives on the city.
St. Patrick's Old Cathedral
263 Mulberry St, New York, NY 10012
This is not the famous St. Patrick's. The famous one is on Fifth Avenue. This is the original — built between eighteen oh nine and eighteen fifteen in the Gothic Revival style on Mulberry Street in what is now Nolita, at the edge of Little Italy. It was the first cathedral in New York, and when the bishop's chair moved uptown in eighteen seventy-nine, this building was quietly forgotten. Beneath it are catacombs. Thirty-five family crypts and five clerical vaults, constructed between eighteen oh nine and eighteen fifteen because Manhattan was running out of burial space. The catacombs contain original Thomas Edison light fixtures and tilework by Rafael Guastavino — the same tiler responsible for the arches in Grand Central's Whispering Gallery. For over two hundred years, almost nobody saw the catacombs. They were restricted to clergy and the families of the entombed. In twenty seventeen, the basilica opened them to the public for candlelight tours. Among those buried here: the first resident Bishop of New York John Connolly, members of the Delmonico restaurant family, and Congressman John Kelly. The churchyard above, surrounded by a high brick wall, feels like a different century — one of the quietest spots in Lower Manhattan.
Staten Island Ferry
Whitehall Terminal, 4 Whitehall St, New York, NY 10004
The best view of the Statue of Liberty costs nothing. The Staten Island Ferry runs twenty-five minutes each way between Whitehall Terminal in Lower Manhattan and St. George on Staten Island, and it has been free since July fourth, nineteen ninety-seven. The service started in eighteen seventeen under the Richmond Turnpike Company. In the eighteen thirties, a young Cornelius Vanderbilt — who would later build Grand Central Terminal and become one of the richest Americans in history — expanded the ferry operation. Today, it carries almost seventy thousand passengers daily, roughly twenty-two million a year. Board at Whitehall, head to the right side of the vessel, go upstairs to the outdoor deck, and position yourself toward the back. As the ferry pulls away from Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty appears to your right, Ellis Island behind it, and Governors Island to your left. The entire Lower Manhattan skyline recedes behind you. Then you get off at Staten Island, walk through the terminal, and get back on the next ferry heading the other way. It is the single best free experience in New York and almost nobody who lives here uses it for anything other than commuting.
Stone Street
Stone St, Manhattan, New York, 10004, United States
In sixteen fifty-eight, the residents of Breuers Straet in New Amsterdam were so annoyed by the dust and mud on their street that they petitioned the Dutch colonial government for permission to pave it — at their own expense. The petition was approved. Breuers Straet became the first cobbled street in New Amsterdam, and eventually, in New York. The name tells you the story. The Dutch called it Breuers Straet — Brewers Street — because one of the first commercial breweries in America was built here in sixteen thirty-two by the Dutch East India Company. When the British took over in sixteen sixty-four, they renamed it Duke Street. In seventeen ninety-four, it was finally called Stone Street, for its cobblestones. Today it is a narrow, pedestrianised lane in the Financial District, lined with restaurants whose tables spill out across the cobbles in summer. It looks nothing like the rest of Lower Manhattan. The buildings are mostly nineteenth-century brick, and the atmosphere is closer to a European alley than a street next to Wall Street. The street sits within the Stone Street Historic District. It is free to walk through, and it is one of the best lunch spots in the city if the weather is good.
Tenement Museum
103 Orchard St, New York, NY 10002
An estimated fifteen thousand people from over twenty nations lived in this building between eighteen sixty-three and two thousand. It is a five-storey tenement at ninety-seven Orchard Street on the Lower East Side, and the apartments inside have been preserved exactly as they were found. The building was contracted by Prussian-born immigrant Lukas Glockner in eighteen sixty-three. It originally contained twenty-two apartments and a basement saloon. A family of ten would share three hundred and twenty-five square feet. There was no indoor plumbing until eighteen ninety-five. The toilets were in the backyard. The Tenement Museum was founded in nineteen eighty-eight by historian Ruth Abram and social activist Anita Jacobson. Instead of recreating history, they preserved the actual layers of wallpaper, the kitchen layouts, the sewing machines left behind. Each apartment tells the story of a real family — German, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Puerto Rican — who lived in the building at different periods. The Lower East Side itself has been called "Little Germany," "the world's largest Jewish city," and home to the largest Puerto Rican community in the mainland United States, depending on the decade. Every wave of immigrants to New York came through this neighbourhood, and most of them worked in the garment industry that surrounded this building.
The Cloisters
99 Margaret Corbin Dr, New York, NY 10040
Somebody dismantled five medieval European monasteries, shipped them across the Atlantic stone by stone, and rebuilt them on a hilltop in northern Manhattan overlooking the Hudson River. That somebody was John D. Rockefeller Jr. The Cloisters opened on May tenth, nineteen thirty-eight, as a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art dedicated entirely to medieval European art. The building incorporates actual architectural elements from abbeys in Catalonia and southern France — cloisters from Sant Miquel de Cuixà, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, Bonnefont-en-Comminges, and Trie-sur-Baïse were taken apart, crated, and reassembled here. It is not a reproduction. These are real twelfth- to fifteenth-century stones. The collection holds around five thousand objects, including the Unicorn Tapestries — seven panels woven around fourteen ninety-five to fifteen oh five that are among the most famous artworks of the Middle Ages. The Mérode Altarpiece, painted around fourteen twenty-two, depicts the Annunciation in a Flemish domestic interior so detailed you can see the smoke rising from a recently extinguished candle. Rockefeller also bought the land across the river — the Palisades — to ensure the view from the museum would never be spoiled by development. The surrounding Fort Tryon Park, also a Rockefeller gift, has gardens maintained by the same team that tends the Cloisters' medieval herb gardens. Most tourists never make it above Midtown. This is what they miss.
The Hess Triangle
New York, United States
Look down at the sidewalk on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Christopher Street. There is a small mosaic triangle embedded in the concrete. It reads: "Property of the Hess Estate which has never been dedicated for public purposes." It is five hundred square inches of pure spite. In the early nineteen tens, New York City used eminent domain to demolish two hundred and fifty-three buildings to widen Seventh Avenue and expand the IRT subway. Among the properties seized was a five-storey apartment building owned by David Hess, a landlord from Philadelphia. His estate later discovered that the city had missed a tiny triangular sliver of the original plot — roughly twenty-seven and a half inches on each side. The city asked the Hess family to donate the remnant to the public. They refused. On July twenty-seventh, nineteen twenty-two, they installed the mosaic as a permanent declaration that this fragment of sidewalk belonged to them and always would. In nineteen thirty-eight, the estate sold the triangle to the adjacent Village Cigars store for a reported one thousand dollars. It was, at the time, the smallest piece of private property in New York City. You can still see it — most people step right over it.
The High Line
New York, United States
Before this was a park, it was a freight railway. And before that, it was a street so dangerous they called it Death Avenue. In the mid-nineteenth century, the New York Central Railroad ran freight trains at street level along Tenth Avenue on Manhattan's West Side. By nineteen ten, more than five hundred pedestrians had been killed by these trains. The railroad hired men on horseback — the "West Side Cowboys" — to ride ahead of the trains waving red flags. The cowboys made their final ride in nineteen forty-one, after the elevated rail line was built above the streets in nineteen thirty-four. The last train ran on the High Line in nineteen eighty. It carried three carloads of frozen turkeys. After that, the tracks sat empty. Wildflowers and grasses colonised the rails. The structure was scheduled for demolition in nineteen ninety-two. Two residents — Joshua David and Robert Hammond — founded Friends of the High Line in nineteen ninety-nine to save it. They had no planning experience and no money. CSX Transportation donated the structure to the city in two thousand and five, and the first section opened as a public park in two thousand and nine. It is now one of the most visited attractions in New York. Walk it from Gansevoort Street north for the best views of the Hudson River and the Chelsea art gallery district below.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 5th Ave, New York, NY 10028
The Met holds over one and a half million objects spanning five thousand years of human history. It is the largest art museum in the Americas and one of the most visited museums in the world. You could spend a week here and still miss entire wings. The building has been expanding since it opened in eighteen seventy on the edge of Central Park. The original Gothic Revival structure is now buried behind a Beaux-Arts facade that stretches the length of four city blocks along Fifth Avenue. The Egyptian Temple of Dendur — a complete two-thousand-year-old sandstone temple gifted by Egypt to the United States in nineteen sixty-five — sits in a glass-walled gallery overlooking Central Park. It was given in gratitude for American help in relocating Nubian monuments threatened by the construction of the Aswan High Dam. The rooftop garden, open seasonally, offers one of the best views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline. It typically features a commissioned sculpture installation. The admission price is technically a "suggested amount" — you can pay what you wish if you are a New York State resident, though out-of-state visitors pay a fixed price.
Times Square
Manhattan, New York, United States
Times Square is named after the New York Times, which moved its headquarters to the newly built One Times Square tower in nineteen oh four. Before that, the area was called Longacre Square, and it was the centre of the city's horse-and-carriage industry. The newspaper moved out long ago. One Times Square — the building where the ball drops on New Year's Eve — is now almost entirely empty inside. The building makes more money from the advertising on its exterior than it ever could from renting office space. It is essentially a billboard disguised as a skyscraper. In the nineteen seventies and eighties, Times Square was one of the most dangerous places in New York — a concentrated grid of strip clubs, pornography theatres, and drug dealing. The cleanup began in the early nineteen nineties under Mayor Giuliani, and by two thousand it had been transformed into the family-friendly commercial zone it is today. Fifty million people pass through Times Square every year. The electronic billboards consume enough energy to power a small town. It is loud, bright, overwhelming, and genuinely unlike anywhere else on earth. Go once, form an opinion, and then never go back — or go every time.
Vessel (Hudson Yards)
20 Hudson Yards, New York, NY 10001
Hudson Yards is the most expensive private real estate development in American history — twenty-five billion dollars spent building a neighbourhood from scratch on a platform over an active rail yard on Manhattan's far West Side. The centrepiece, Vessel, is a sixteen-storey structure consisting of one hundred and fifty-four interconnected flights of stairs — two thousand five hundred individual steps and eighty landings — designed by Thomas Heatherwick. It looks like a giant honeycomb, or a bronze beehive, or an Escher drawing made real. It opened in March twenty nineteen and was free to climb. The structure was closed in twenty twenty-one after three suicides. It reopened in twenty twenty-four with mandatory partners and a twenty-dollar entry fee. The debate about whether it is a masterpiece or an expensive vanity project has never been resolved. Love it or hate it, the engineering is extraordinary — the entire development sits on a platform built over thirty active train tracks serving Penn Station. The platform alone weighs more than the Eiffel Tower.
Washington Square Park
New York, United States
You are standing on top of twenty thousand bodies. Before this was a park, before it was a military parade ground, before NYU surrounded it with lecture halls — this was a potter's field. From seventeen ninety-seven, New York City buried its indigent and unclaimed dead here. An estimated twenty thousand people were interred beneath what is now nine and three quarter acres of paths, chess tables, and street performers. In the northwest corner stands the Hangman's Elm, one of the oldest trees in Manhattan. Legend says it was used for public executions, though only one hanging here is documented: Rose Butler, a young Black woman convicted of arson, was executed at a gallows nearby in eighteen nineteen and buried yards from where she died. The marble arch at the north end was designed by Stanford White in eighteen ninety-one to celebrate the centennial of George Washington's inauguration. It was formally dedicated in eighteen ninety-five and marks the southern terminus of Fifth Avenue. Bob Dylan played his first New York gigs in the folk clubs surrounding this park in the early nineteen sixties. Before that, Henry James set his novel Washington Square here. The fountain at the centre has been a gathering point for musicians, protesters, students, and chess hustlers for over a century.