New York City, USA

New York City highlights

Top of the Rock
Museum of Maths
Madison Square Park
Union Square
Flatiron
Grand Central Station
NY Public Library
Museum of Modern Art
Broadway and Hamilton
Chelsea
The High Line
Central Park
Staten Island Ferry
Brooklyn

Why visit New York City?

For a world class city with top museums, art galleries, parks, restaurants and shopping.

Getting there and around

After our stay in the Berkshires, Massachusetts we drove for 3.5 hours into New York where we spent a week at the end of August 2022.

On arriving in New York we immediately returned our hire car and walked to our hotel, 15 minutes away.

We mainly walked but sometimes used the buses and subway to get around. We much preferred the cleaner buses to the subway.

For public transport we initially got a pay-per-ride (£2.30 per one-way journey per person) metro card but we soon realised it was easier to tap and pay using our contactless debit cards.

Only younger children under 44 inches - so about 5 years old - travel for free. Therefore as a family each return trip cost us about £20. We had allowed £25 per day for transport in NYC. With careful planning of our itinerary to group activities by location each day we did manage to stay on budget.

Accommodation

Broadway plaza hotel

Food

A quick note about some of the places we ate at and would recommend:

Milu (Park Avenue South) - healthy and affordable Chinese food; their crispy chilli chicken and homemade Hong Kong style milk tea were delicious.
Obicá Flatiron (Broadway) - smart and pricey Italian featuring mozzarella-based sharing boards. And, a kids menu! A real treat.
Emperor Dumpling (6th Avenue) - traditional, affordable, yummy and fast.
Anita Gelato (broadway) - popular and with very long queues. Amazing ice cream, huge servings (and high prices). Well worth the wait!

Top of the Rock

On our first afternoon in New York we decided to go to a skyscraper observatory. There were a number to choose from in the city including the Empire State building, One World, the Edge, Summit, and Top of the Rock. We decided to visit Top of the Rock because reviews said it had less crowds and some of the best views including from an open outdoor deck (so photos wouldn’t have to be through glass).

The Rockefeller centre is historic and we enjoyed spotting locations from the recent Marvel Hawkeye TV series when we visited! The staff at the Top of the Rock were all welcoming, friendly and helpful. There was no queue and the lifts to the top were fast. Tickets cost us £45 per adult and £21 per child.

We really enjoyed this observation tower. The Top of the Rock wasn’t the tallest skyscraper around, but the views on the sunny afternoon we visited were fantastic and far reaching. We saw the Hudson River with its bridges, the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings, the Statue of Liberty, and Central Park.

Museum of Maths

This was hands down one of the best museums we have ever visited. We like learning new things, and our kids particularly enjoy science, maths and engineering. So this was the perfect place for us. The museum was small, just two floors, but with a range of interactive exhibits and maths-based puzzles.

We spent a morning playing with the exhibits including riding square wheeled bicycles around a giant sunflower shaped track that had been designed using the Fibbonaci sequence, upside down catenary curves and the golden ratio; a coaster roller which glided over unusual shapes but still had a smooth ride; digital pattern painting; a hyper hyperboloid; tracks of Galileo; tan grams and shape puzzles; plus much more!

All of the staff were really knowledgable and explained everything patiently. They asked us insightful and challenging questions and encouraged us to work out the problems and solutions themselves. We found the museum to be fun, hands-on and interesting. Masks and proof of covid vaccinations were required for 5 years old+. Adult tickets cost £20, child tickets £17.

Madison Square Park, Union Square and Flatiron

Madison square park was a sweet little park with a playground just five minutes from our hotel that provided respite from the humid New York heat.

Grand Central Station and NY Public Library

We stopped by this famous station terminal to have a look inside. It opened in 1918; has 44 platforms, the most of any station in the world and all below ground; and is the second busiest station in the USA (after Penn Station). For us, the attraction was the architecture and Parisian-style Beaux Arts design and detailed facade and gilded interior. It was an absolutely stunning and impressive building.

New York Public Library is another famous Beaux Arts building close to Grand Central Station and bordering Bryant Park.
We wandered around and found Christopher Robin’s original soft toys (dating to 1921) that inspired AA Milne’s books. The kids were excited by this as we had the Winnie-the-Pooh stories with us and they are firm family favourites.

Museum of Modern Art

The collection here is outstanding. If you made a list of modern art works you wanted to see, you’d probably find them here. We had timed tickets booked for 11am and it was busy, but there was no queue. Tickets cost £20 per adult, children were free.

We headed straight to the 5th floor for the 1880s to 1940s galleries which include works by Picasso, Gaudí, Dali, Miro, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mondrian, the Bauhaus School, Corbusier and Perriand, Pollock, Rothko, Matisse, Magritte, Chagall, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and Monet’s water lilies.

Warning, a rant follows…

We actually skipped the Van Gogh because we we’re getting fed up jostling for a view with selfie takers in front of every famous painting. We even saw one person prop their phone up on a sculpture so they could record a tik-tok of themselves in front of a painting.

It was here at MOMA that we first encountered a particular approach to taking selfies where the person takes up the entire frame, blocking the famous sight or item behind. This baffles us, as surely people back home want to see the famous sight that you thought was so worthy of posing with.

We named this selfie style ‘Look at me in front of…’ and throughout our travels we have spotted many such selfie takers. Look at me in front… of Monet’s Water Lilies, Machu Picchu, Iguazu Falls, Mickey Mouse, the Golden Gate Bridge, Half Dome… none of which you can see because my face is in the way!

We much prefer taking photos of the sights and sharing those. When we do inevitably buckle to peer pressure from the surrounding crowds and take a selfie, we at least try to show some of the sight in the frame…

…rant over!

Anyway, we absolutely loved the Matisse room (502), the ‘circle and square’ room (512) with works by Joaquín Torres-García and Piet Mondrian; and the mid-century furniture and architectural models carefully curated and arranged amongst the paintings.

Then we made our way to the 4th floor for the 1940s to 1970s galleries for Max Earnst, more Pollock, more Rothko, Andy Warhol’s soup cans, Litchenstein, Joan Mitchell, Bridget Riley, Yves Klein, and Jasper Johns.

It was tough for the kids to stay interested because whenever we tried to engage them in a piece someone would jump in front with a camera. Unlike other galleries, MoMA didn’t seem to have any activity packs or creative materials to engage children (shout out to the Hepworth gallery in Wakefield, UK which does this brilliantly).

Ideally we would have spent longer because there was so much to see, but after about 2 hours the kids got bored and hungry. Overall, visiting MoMA and seeing some of its collection was a highlight and we didn’t let other people detract from our enjoyment of the galleries. It’s just that, like everyone else, we wished we had the place to ourselves!

Times Square
After seeing Hamilton, Mal and William checked-out Times Square. It was super busy with a dazzling array of advertisements and flashing lights. Much like Las Ramblas in Barcelona or Piccadilly Circus in London it was tacky and touristy, but nonetheless an impressive sight to see.

Chelsea and the High Line

We spent Sunday exploring the Chelsea area of Manhattan which bordered our hotel to the west. The Hudson Yards area is a new shopping mall and outside there are lots of modern buildings including the Shed and the Vessel.

The highlight of this area for us was the High Line, an elevated linear park along an old railway line. It provided a different and beautiful perspective on the city and strolling along on a chilled Sunday was very enjoyable.

One thing we liked was how the developers and architects of buildings alongside the High Line had upped their game, the quality of the green infrastructure challenging them to do better (and presumably increasing land values and yields too).

At the end of the High Line we visited Chelsea Market for lunch. There was a good selection of different cuisines at the Market and lots of interesting shops and stalls too.

Central Park

We walked up to strawberry fields (a part of the park named in memory of John Lennon) and sat for a while on the benches next to the Imagine memorial designed by Yoko Ono, listening to a busker sing some Beatles songs.
We enjoyed Central Park but we didn’t love the horses and carts offering rides to tourists. The horses didn’t look like they were having fun in the heat, and throughout the park there was a strong smell of horse poo and urine which was rather unpleasant.
We had planned to continue through the park to the Met museum but after spending most of the day in the park we were all drained by the heat and decided to save the Met for a future visit to the city.

Staten Island Ferry

We took the subway to Whitehall St. station and the south ferry terminal where we caught the ferry to Staten Island. It runs every 30 minutes.

There were three reasons the Staten Island Ferry was a great activity for kids and our family:

1 - Our kids love novel forms of transport. Cable cars, trams, and tube trains, for example. When we asked our kids if they liked the NYC subway they said “yes, because it rocks from side to side.” It’s the simple things in life! Anyway, a boat ride is always an entertaining prospect for them.

2 - It’s a ***free*** 25 minute each-way ferry that sails right past the Statue of Liberty so it’s an inexpensive and quick way to see this famous landmark. No need to shell out for an expensive sightseeing tour.

3 - It features in Working Girl, one of Harriet’s favourite films, and in recreating the film’s iconic opening credits we could embarrass the kids by singing loudly Carly Simon’s *Let the River Run* while looking at the NYC skyline!

Brooklyn

After the Staten Island Ferry we caught the subway to Court Street in Brooklyn and walked through Brooklyn Heights to the Cobble Hill district.

We loved this part of the city. It felt like a residential neighbourhood with independent shops and cafes, and was more human in scale than Manhatten’s skyscrapers.

The brownstone buildings and street trees were beautiful and photogenic.

Final Thoughts

New York in August was hot, smelly, dirty, crowded and noisy. The subway was not pram or wheelchair friendly. Drivers ignored red lights and ‘cross walks’. Restaurants tended not to have kids’ menus. We only found one public toilet. So it’s not a particularly ‘kid friendly’ city. In fact, as we listened to music blaring from a nearby rave at 3am one night, and watched a load of drug dealers get into a fight on the corner outside our hotel the next, we’d say it’s decidedly un-kid friendly. Or perhaps the Broadway Plaza Hotel just needs to invest in double glazing…

…and yet, New York was an amazing place to bring children! We were blown away by the friendly people, iconic architecture, great food, shops, museums and galleries. Because the streets are so often shown on screen, even the little details like the yellow taxis, fire hydrants and ‘don’t walk’ signs were exciting for us. We figured it must be how tourists in London feel!

This was our first time visiting New York and we felt so incredibly privileged to be there. There was so much quality stuff to see and do. We were busy all week and barely scratched the surface. We spent the majority of our time in Manhattan, with just one day in Brooklyn and we didn’t even visit the other three boroughs. We would love to make a return trip, perhaps when our kids are teenagers with new interests, so that we that can discover the city all over again.