New York City by Neighborhood: Where to Eat, Stay, and Explore

The West Village is the most beautiful neighborhood in Manhattan, and the one that most consistently surprises visitors who expect New York to be all glass towers and grid streets. The streets here are irregular (a legacy of the original Dutch settlement that predates the 1811 grid plan) and lined with Federal-style townhouses from the early nineteenth century. The restaurants on Bleecker Street and Commerce Street are among the best in the city: the West Village has a higher concentration of excellent restaurants per block than any other neighborhood in Manhattan. The bars on Hudson Street and the side streets are the kind of places where you can have a drink without shouting over music. The neighborhood is walkable, beautiful, and the best place in Manhattan to spend an afternoon with no particular agenda. SoHo takes its name from the designation South of Houston Street, and it is the neighborhood that most clearly shows the arc of New York's recent history: the cast-iron manufacturing buildings that were abandoned in the mid-twentieth century, colonized by artists in the 1960s and 1970s, converted to galleries in the 1980s, and transformed into the most expensive retail corridor in the city by the 1990s. The architecture is extraordinary; the cast-iron facades on Broadway, Mercer Street, and Greene Street are the best collection of nineteenth-century commercial architecture in America. The galleries that remain are concentrated on the side streets. The brunch culture is intense on weekends. The shopping on Spring Street and Prince Street is excellent if expensive. The Lower East Side is the neighborhood that more than any other defines the immigrant history of New York. The tenements that housed successive waves of Jewish, Italian, Chinese, and Puerto Rican immigrants still stand on Orchard Street and Delancey Street, and the Tenement Museum on Orchard Street tells their story with extraordinary specificity. Russ & Daughters, the appetizing shop that has been on Houston Street since 1914, is one of the great food institutions of New York, the smoked salmon, the herring, the cream cheese, the bagels. The pickle shops and delis that remain are the last traces of the neighborhood's Jewish history. The Lower East Side has also become one of the best nightlife destinations in the city, with bars and music venues that draw a younger crowd to the same streets where the immigrants once lived. Williamsburg in Brooklyn is the most interesting neighborhood in New York right now, and the one that has changed most dramatically in the past twenty years. The transformation from industrial waterfront to the most desirable neighborhood in Brooklyn has been complete and rapid. The food scene is the best in the outer boroughs: the restaurants are serious, the bars are good, and the range (from excellent Italian to creative Japanese to the kind of American cooking that would be celebrated anywhere) is remarkable. The waterfront has one of the best views of the Manhattan skyline, particularly at sunset from Domino Park. The music venues (Brooklyn Steel, Music Hall of Williamsburg, Baby's All Right) are among the best in the city. The Bedford Avenue strip has the best concentration of shops, cafes, and restaurants in Brooklyn. Harlem is the neighborhood that most visitors to New York miss entirely, and it is one of the most culturally significant places in the city. The history (the Harlem Renaissance, the Apollo Theater, the jazz clubs of 125th Street) is present in the architecture and the institutions that remain. Red Rooster on Lenox Avenue is the most important restaurant in Harlem: Marcus Samuelsson's cooking draws on the African, Swedish, and American South traditions that shaped the neighborhood, and the room is always full of the kind of energy that the best New York restaurants generate. Sylvia's on Lenox Avenue is the classic soul food institution, the fried chicken, the cornbread, the gospel brunch on Sundays. The Apollo Theater still hosts Amateur Night on Wednesdays, and the experience of watching the audience respond to performers is one of the most authentically New York things you can do. Chinatown and Little Italy occupy overlapping territory in Lower Manhattan, and the tension between them tells a story about how New York neighborhoods change. Little Italy has shrunk to a few blocks of Mulberry Street that are largely a tourist performance; the red-checkered tablecloths, the cannoli, the restaurants that are fine but not the reason to come. The real Italian food in the neighborhood is on the side streets, at places that have not updated their signage since the 1970s. Chinatown, by contrast, has expanded and remains one of the most vital neighborhoods in the city: the best dim sum in Manhattan is here, the produce markets and fish markets and herbal medicine shops are the real thing, and the streets on a weekend morning have an energy that is completely different from the rest of Manhattan. The Upper East Side is the quietest luxury in New York, and the neighborhood that most clearly represents the old-money culture of the city. The Museum Mile, the stretch of Fifth Avenue from 82nd Street to 105th Street that contains the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, the Cooper Hewitt, the Jewish Museum, the Neue Galerie, and several others; is the greatest concentration of cultural institutions in the world. The French bistros on Lexington Avenue are the best in the city: Orsay, Café Boulud, and the smaller places that have been feeding the neighborhood for decades. The Carlyle hotel is the social center of the Upper East Side, and Bemelmans Bar is the best bar in the neighborhood. The streets are quieter than the rest of Manhattan, the buildings are well-maintained, and the energy is the opposite of the hustle that defines the rest of the city. Navigating between neighborhoods is easier than it looks on a map. The subway connects all of them: the 1/2/3 runs up the west side of Manhattan, the 4/5/6 runs up the east side, the A/C/E connects the west side to downtown Brooklyn, and the L connects the East Village and Lower East Side to Williamsburg. Many of the best neighborhoods are walkable to each other: the West Village to SoHo is a 10-minute walk; SoHo to Chinatown is another 10 minutes; the Lower East Side to the East Village is five minutes. In Brooklyn, Williamsburg to DUMBO is a 20-minute walk along the waterfront. The best way to understand New York is to walk between neighborhoods rather than taking the subway for every trip.