New York, United States · North America

8 ideal things to do in New York

The short list, pulled out of the long essay. No opening hours, because they change and I would only get them wrong — just what is worth your morning, roughly when to turn up, and where I have wasted time so you don’t have to.

By Ščenza

Last checked November 28, 2025

1. 01

   The Staten Island Ferry at dusk

   Whitehall Terminal, Lower Manhattan·Late afternoon; ride out and come straight back

   Twenty-five minutes each way, no fare since 1997, and it passes close enough to the Statue of Liberty to make the harbour cruises look like a practical joke played on tourists. Stand at the stern going out for the skyline receding, and at the bow coming back for it arriving. You do have to get off at St George and rejoin the queue for the return, and that inconvenience is the entire price of the thing.

2. 02

   The Met Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park

   Washington Heights, the top of Manhattan·Weekday morning; the A train takes about forty minutes

   Rockefeller money bought the stones of four French monastic cloisters, shipped them across, and assembled them into a museum on a bluff over the Hudson in 1938 — which sounds like vandalism and turned out to be a rescue. Inside: the Unicorn Tapestries, a medieval herb garden, and essentially nobody, because it is an hour from midtown. The quietest hour I have ever had in New York, and I have looked hard for competitors.

3. 03

   The Lower East Side Tenement Museum

   97 and 103 Orchard Street·Book one specific apartment tour rather than a general ticket

   Orchard Street has two surviving tenement buildings, restored apartment by apartment, each room holding one family's story — a German dressmaker, a Sicilian household in the Depression, Holocaust survivors, a Puerto Rican family in the seventies. You go through in small groups. The rooms are the size of my first flat in Munich and housed seven people, and the guide will not let you walk out with a comfortable feeling about it.

4. 04

   Green-Wood Cemetery

   Sunset Park, Brooklyn·A clear morning; go in at the Gothic gate

   Four hundred and seventy-eight acres of hills, ponds and Victorian funerary excess, opened in 1838, back when a cemetery was where a city went on a Sunday afternoon. Basquiat and Leonard Bernstein are here, along with nine unsuccessful presidential candidates, which is a niche. A colony of monk parakeets nests in the spires of the main gate — escaped from a shipment decades ago, never left — and they are astonishingly loud for a graveyard.

5. 05

   A late set at the Village Vanguard

   Seventh Avenue South, Greenwich Village·Weeknight; take the second set, not the first

   Wedge-shaped basement room, open since 1935, the oldest working jazz club in the city, with a low ceiling that is the reason all those live recordings sound the way they do. No talking, no phones, no exceptions. I watched a man removed for the first of those, quickly and without any drama at all, and the band did not stop playing or even appear to notice.

6. 06

   The Coney Island boardwalk and the Wonder Wheel

   Southern Brooklyn, end of the D, F, N and Q·Warm months; the rides close for the winter

   Deno's Wonder Wheel has been turning since 1920 and carries two kinds of car: eight bolted to the rim and sixteen that slide inward along curved rails and swing outward as the wheel comes over the top. Take a sliding one. It is a hundred-year-old machine doing something no modern insurer would sign off, and the boardwalk afterwards — an hour on the subway from Manhattan, and then the Atlantic — is the best cheap day in the city.

7. 07

   The North Woods and the Ravine, upper Central Park

   Between 97th and 110th Streets·Autumn morning, midweek

   Everyone walks the bottom third of Central Park. The northern end has ninety acres of engineered woodland with a stream called the Loch running diagonally through it, two small waterfalls, and Huddlestone Arch, a bridge whose boulders are held in place by nothing but their own weight — no mortar anywhere in it. You can stand under there and hear no traffic, in a park that takes tens of millions of visitors a year. It feels like a filing error.

8. 08

   The whispering gallery at Grand Central Terminal

   Dining concourse, outside the Oyster Bar·Off-peak, or you will be whispering into a rush hour

   Under the tiled arches on the lower level, two people standing in diagonally opposite corners and facing the wall can talk at a murmur while everybody in between hears nothing whatsoever. It has worked like this since 1913, purely because of the way the vaults are shaped. I tried it with a stranger who had also read about it, we each said something idiotic into a corner, and then we shook hands like colleagues and went our separate ways.