suggestions for a birthday trip to New York
- Thread starter wbnolefan
- Start date
First trip or have you been to the typical tourist stuff (which is typical tourist stuff because most of it is the best anyways)?
First time trip? Well all of the touristy things are pretty evident
Central Park
Top of the Rock
Statue of Liberty
Museums
Broadway
Pizza, Bagels, Deli, Italian ice
Times Square
Yankee game
Check airbnb for apts that you can rent, it might give you more room at prices cheaper than 2 hotel rooms.
Central Park
Top of the Rock
Statue of Liberty
Museums
Broadway
Pizza, Bagels, Deli, Italian ice
Times Square
Yankee game
Check airbnb for apts that you can rent, it might give you more room at prices cheaper than 2 hotel rooms.
Then you should definitely do most of the tacky tourist stuff. Here's a couple of pointers off the top of my head.
1) The view from 30 Rock is much better than the view from the Empire AND it's much quicker and more painless while there. If you want to do both, do 30 Rock during the day and Empire State at night.
2) Don't skip the Met. It's my third favorite museum in the world behind only the Louvre, Vatican and tied with the British Museum. It's miles better than the Smithsonian with really great art exhibits from the ancient to almost near modern including, an entire impressive Egyptian temple stolen brick by brick and reassembled here.
3) Don't miss the Natural History Museum and Central Park. They're right next to each other so you can walk around and find the famous statues and filming spots (plenty of apps for that on your phone just look up Central Park and statues), grab a hot dog and then see the best dinosaur exhibits in the US (again, better than the Smithsonian).
4) Spend at least some of the daylight of one day taking a subway trip out of Manhattan and over to Brooklyn. You can spend a couple of hours at the many little "pocket" theme parks on Coney Island (the famous Cyclone is nearly 100 years old but is one of the best wooden coasters in America imo and I'm a coaster fanatic whose been in parks around the US). You can walk or take a quick cab (depending on how the 9 yo is doing) and grab a pepperoni pizza from my favorite NYC place, Totonnos. It's less than a mile from Coney Island from memory. The. Before heading back to Manhattan jump off the subway for Brooklyn Bridge park to get great photos of the bridge and skyline of NYC.
5) Look at the nonmusicals playing on or off Broadway, some of my best memories were catching Tom Hanks and Nathan Lane in separate nonmusicals plays in small venues a couple of years ago. I'm sure there's some huge stars putting on small plays as we speak, so don't look just at Wicked, Book of Mormon etc...
6) If you can bribe your oldest to babysit the kids for a night, head out to Greenwich Village late night and grab a midnight pastrami from Katz and hang out at one of the great comedy clubs (I HiGHLY rec the Comedy Cellar, it's a small venue but very historic and big headliners will practice new material there before heading on the road).
7) Definitely do a boat ride out to the Statue of Liberty. Near where most of them take off is the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum which has a space shuttle and a lot of military equipment. Try to combine the two to save time. You can always get a taxi from there to relatively nearby but too far to hike Lombardis for the original inventor of modern American style pizza (aka flatbread plus tomato sauce plus mozzarella, pizza did exist in Italy prior to that but it was just flat bread with random things placed on it like lard or tomatoes or cheese but not all assembled together. Lombardis invented the "pizza pie".
Book early and get tickets to go up to the crown of the Statue of Liberty. It's definitely worth all the stairs you ave to climb and the tickets are really limited.
Go to tripadvisor and just work your way down the list of the top attractions - as many as you want or can do in the time that you have. Buy tickets in advance for as many as you can so that you can print them out and bring with you, and save that time.
Go to tripadvisor and just work your way down the list of the top attractions - as many as you want or can do in the time that you have. Buy tickets in advance for as many as you can so that you can print them out and bring with you, and save that time.
Oh, and the "cost" to get into the metropolitan museum of art is really just a suggested donation. You can actually tell them how much you want to pay. And you don't to feel bad for not paying the $25/person.
All good suggestions, one interesting thing we did was the Tenement Museum. They restored some of the original buildings the immigrants lived in when they came over and give tours on how they lived, tours are a around 1.5 hours then you can walk thru Little Italy and China Town. Need to buy tickets in advance. The view from the park in Brooklyn over the Brooklyn bridge at night of the skyline of the city is a must see if it is your first trip to NY.
there is an evening tourist cruise around manhattan, and probably a better value is the shorter one around lower manhattan.
you can take the staten island ferry back and forth for good views too.
walk the brooklyn bridge.
one of the great things about NYC is quality ethnic food. the italian food almost anywhere in the city will feature fresh pasta, even from holes in the wall places. little india around 6th street east is good.
there are a lot of niche things too.
for example, i enjoy chess and there are some great chess shops near washington square park. There is a great photograpy book store on Prince street in soho. there is a one of a kind used bookstore called the Strand on Broadway around 12th/13th in the union square neighborhood.
whatever your niche interest, there is probably something related that is interesting in nyc.
also, check out a book called Gerry Frank's NYC - tells you about the best the city has to offer, with an emphasis on niche things. well worth the price. this is not a tourist guide but rather is written for folks who live in NYC.
http://www.amazon.com/Gerry-Franks-Where-Find-York/dp/1879333244
you can take the staten island ferry back and forth for good views too.
walk the brooklyn bridge.
one of the great things about NYC is quality ethnic food. the italian food almost anywhere in the city will feature fresh pasta, even from holes in the wall places. little india around 6th street east is good.
there are a lot of niche things too.
for example, i enjoy chess and there are some great chess shops near washington square park. There is a great photograpy book store on Prince street in soho. there is a one of a kind used bookstore called the Strand on Broadway around 12th/13th in the union square neighborhood.
whatever your niche interest, there is probably something related that is interesting in nyc.
also, check out a book called Gerry Frank's NYC - tells you about the best the city has to offer, with an emphasis on niche things. well worth the price. this is not a tourist guide but rather is written for folks who live in NYC.
http://www.amazon.com/Gerry-Franks-Where-Find-York/dp/1879333244
we stayed at the hilton garden on 8th IIRC, right between Hells Kitchen and theater district. Walked to dinner/shows most every night.
We also did the hop on/hop off bus tour. It was miserable for us because of weather, but yours should be a lot better I would think.
For those that know, is there still a kiosk in Times Square where you can go get cheap theater tickets?
There is, but it seems now that everyone in the world knows about it, and uses it as the primary way that they buy tickets for shows. The lines begin queuing up over an hour before the TKTS booth opens up and it stays packed for a long time. It's no longer worth it for me to use them to try and get tickets to a show because you end up spending part of a day just standing in a line waiting. You don't come to NYC looking to spend 3 hours waiting in line to get 40% off ticket prices. Better to just find a show you want to see and pay what you have to, rather than wasting part of your trip to save a few bucks.
that's the main reason I don't get why people go try to get on the Today show...
If you're in Times Square at dinner time there's a great little Italian joint that shouldn't be missed...
Actually, last time we stayed at a Holiday Inn literally a block from Broadway and near Empire State Building and it was under a Benji. Great location and decent hotel.
Wow I'm a goob. I was trying to make that into some hip NYC slang and couldn't figure it outBenji Franklin
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