Explore New York

Mercer Labs is a museum of art and technology at Church and Dey Streets near the World Trade Center, in part of the former Century 21 store. Created by Roy Nachum and Michael Cayre and opened in 2024, it has fifteen rooms of projections, holograms of suspended LEDs, spatial sound and a robotic arm that draws pictures in sand.

One World Observatory occupies floors 100 to 102 of One World Trade Center, the 541-metre tower designed by David Childs of SOM that opened in 2014 on the site of the destroyed Twin Towers. Since 2015 SkyPod elevators carry visitors up in under a minute to a glass-walled floor with views over Manhattan, the harbor and New Jersey.

Trinity Church is an Episcopal parish church on Broadway facing Wall Street. The present Gothic Revival building by Richard Upjohn, completed in 1846, is the parish's third church on the site and was the tallest building in New York until 1890. Its churchyard holds the graves of Alexander and Eliza Hamilton.

The Museum at Eldridge Street occupies the Eldridge Street Synagogue on the Lower East Side, built in 1887 by Eastern European Jewish immigrants and designed by the Herter brothers in the Moorish Revival style. After decades of decline it was restored by 2007; the sanctuary has a stained-glass rose window by Kiki Smith and Deborah Gans from 2010.

Brooklyn Bridge Park is an 85-acre waterfront park on the Brooklyn side of the East River, laid out by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates on former industrial piers. It runs 1.3 miles from Atlantic Avenue past the Brooklyn Bridge to the Manhattan Bridge, with lawns, playgrounds and sports fields on Piers 1 to 6.

Governors Island is a 70-hectare island in New York Harbor, a short ferry ride from Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. A US Army post from 1783 to 1966 and later a Coast Guard base, it opened to the public in 2005 and now has lawns, man-made hills with harbour views, historic officers' houses and the forts Fort Jay and Castle Williams.

Museum of Illusions New York is an interactive museum at Eighth Avenue and West 14th Street with more than 60 exhibits on optical illusions, perception and the brain. It opened in 2018 as part of a chain founded in Zagreb in 2015, inside the Neoclassical New York County National Bank Building of 1907, a city landmark.

The High Line is a 2.33 km elevated park on a disused freight railway viaduct on Manhattan's West Side, running from Gansevoort Street through Chelsea to 34th Street. It opened in stages from 2009, designed by James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro with plantings by Piet Oudolf, and keeps lengths of the old rails among the plants.

Bryant Park is a 3.9-hectare park in Midtown Manhattan between 40th and 42nd Streets, behind the main building of the New York Public Library. Named in 1884 after the poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant, it was rebuilt in the 1930s and restored in 1988–1992, and has a central lawn, tree-lined terraces, movable chairs and a carousel.

Summit One Vanderbilt is an observation deck on the top floors of One Vanderbilt, a 427-metre skyscraper by Kohn Pedersen Fox beside Grand Central Terminal. Opened in October 2021, it spans floors 91 to 93 and combines mirrored rooms designed by Kenzo Digital, glass balconies that protrude from the facade, an outdoor terrace and glass lifts on the outside of the tower.

United Nations Headquarters is the seat of the UN General Assembly and Security Council, on the East River in Midtown Manhattan. Completed in 1952 to designs by an international board of architects led by Wallace Harrison, with Oscar Niemeyer and Le Corbusier, it can be visited on guided tours of the General Assembly Hall, the Security Council Chamber and the garden.

The Intrepid Museum is a military, aerospace and maritime museum aboard USS Intrepid, a Second World War aircraft carrier moored at Pier 86 on the Hudson River since the museum opened in 1982. Its flight and hangar decks display dozens of aircraft and the Space Shuttle Enterprise, and the pier holds a Concorde and the submarine USS Growler.

Spyscape is an interactive museum about espionage at 928 Eighth Avenue in Midtown, with interiors designed by David Adjaye. Its galleries cover code-breaking, deception, surveillance, hacking and special operations, and visitors take tests of skills such as observation and risk-taking that end with a spy profile. A separate game zone, SPYGAMES, adds physical challenges.

The Roosevelt Island Tramway is an aerial cable car that crosses the East River between East 60th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan and Roosevelt Island. Opened in 1976 as a temporary link and rebuilt in 2010, its two red cabins travel about 960 metres beside the Queensboro Bridge, with views of the river and Midtown.

Central Park is an 843-acre (341 ha) landscaped park in the middle of Manhattan, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux after their Greensward Plan of 1858 and completed in 1876. Its meadows, lakes, woodland paths and bridges, the Ramble, the Reservoir and Bethesda Terrace lie between the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is an art museum on Fifth Avenue at 89th Street, founded in 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting. Its building by Frank Lloyd Wright, completed in 1959, wraps a spiral ramp around a skylit rotunda. The collection spans Impressionist, early modern and contemporary art, including the Thannhauser Collection.

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is the Smithsonian Institution's design museum, housed in the Andrew Carnegie Mansion of 1902 on Fifth Avenue's Museum Mile. Founded in 1897 by the Hewitt sisters, it collects historic and contemporary design, from textiles and wallpaper to furniture, posters and digital work, and has a garden.

The Museum of the City of New York tells the history of the city and its people through exhibitions, photographs, costumes and objects. It was founded in 1923 and moved in 1930 into a neo-Georgian brick building by Joseph H. Freedlander on Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, facing Central Park at the northern end of Museum Mile.