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Where to Stay in NYC: An Honest Guide to Picking Your Neighborhood

Photo: Rhododendrites , CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons Every week, someone books a hotel "in New York" that turns out to be a shuttle ride from an airport runway, and their whole trip inherits the mistake. Where you sleep in this city shapes everything: what you see out the window, where you eat breakfast, how much of your vacation you spend underground on the subway. The good news is that there's no single right answer — there's a right answer for you. Let's find it. First trip? Stay central, but not that central Midtown makes sense for first-timers: you can walk to Times Square, Broadway theaters, Rockefeller Center, and Central Park, and every train line in creation passes underneath. The trade-off is soul. Much of Midtown empties after office hours and the blocks immediately around Times Square never stop being Times Square. My compromise pick: stay south of the chaos, in the 20s and 30s — NoMad, Flatiron, Chelsea. You're fifteen minutes from ev...
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Prospect Park: Brooklyn's Backyard Deserves a Day of Your Trip

The Long Meadow in Prospect Park, Brooklyn

Photo: King of Hearts, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed Central Park first. Then they went to Brooklyn and, by most accounts including their own, did it better. Prospect Park is the pair's second act — 526 acres of meadow, forest, and water where the lessons of the first park got applied without the compromises. Central Park gets the postcards. Brooklyn kept the masterpiece, and Brooklynites will tell you so, repeatedly, without being asked.

If your itinerary has room for one long green afternoon outside Manhattan, spend it here.

Start with the Long Meadow

Enter at Grand Army Plaza (the triumphal arch alone is worth the trip) and the park opens onto the Long Meadow, a mile of unbroken lawn that rolls away from you like something out of an English landscape painting. No skyline looming over the trees, no crosstown traffic humming underneath. On weekends it fills with picnics, pickup soccer, and barbecue smoke; early on a weekday morning, when the off-leash dogs get their golden hour before 9 a.m., it might be the most peaceful place in the borough.

Yes, Brooklyn has a forest

The Ravine at the park's center is exactly what it sounds like: a genuine wooded gorge, with a stream tumbling through it and trails where the city noise fully disappears. This is Brooklyn's only remaining forest, and Olmsted engineered its Adirondack fantasy on purpose. Follow the water downhill and you'll eventually reach the Boathouse and the Lullwater, where the park goes full Monet.

Food, skates, and carousel horses

Sundays April through October, Smorgasburg sets up its food-vendor city at Breeze Hill on the park's east side, running 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Expect several dozen vendors and every cuisine Brooklyn contains, which is to say most of them. The LeFrak Center at Lakeside offers roller skating in summer and ice skating in winter on its twin rinks. There's also a working 1912 carousel near the Children's Corner, and the small Prospect Park Zoo for the stroller set. None of it feels engineered for tourists, because it isn't; you're a guest at Brooklyn's standing weekend party.

The neighbors are excellent

Part of the case for Prospect Park is everything ringing it. The Brooklyn Museum and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden sit along its eastern edge (both merit hours on their own). Grand Army Plaza hosts one of the city's best greenmarkets on Saturdays. And the surrounding neighborhoods — Park Slope's brownstone rows, Prospect Heights' restaurant streets — are the kind of places that make visitors start browsing real estate listings they can't afford. Our local's guide to Brooklyn covers the full orbit.

Summer nights at the bandshell

From June into August, the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! festival fills the Prospect Park Bandshell with one of the city's longest-running free concert series: blankets, wine in plastic cups, headliners you'd pay real money for elsewhere. If you're visiting in season, check the lineup before you plan your evenings.

Logistics, quickly

The 2 and 3 trains stop directly at Grand Army Plaza; the B and Q stop at the Prospect Park station on the east side, closest to the Boathouse and Smorgasburg; the F and G serve the 15th Street entrance near the bandshell. The park rewards aimlessness, but if you want a route: Grand Army Plaza, down the Long Meadow, into the Ravine, out at the Boathouse, then the Botanic Garden or the museum, roughly three unhurried hours.

How does it compare to the park everyone knows? Different animal. Central Park is a stage with the city always in view (see our complete Central Park guide), while Prospect Park is an escape hatch. You go to Central Park to feel like you're in New York. You go to Prospect Park to forget, for an hour, that you are.

By Jon Weber, Editor. Jon edits New York News Today and checks the prices, schedules and opening times in our guides against official sources before they are published. Spotted something out of date? Tell us and we will fix it. More about how we work.

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