Don’t… Take a twilight carriage ride in Central Park
You may recall the scene in Manhattan where Woody Allen and Mariel Hemingway take a romantic, private, horse-drawn carriage ride through Central Park, quipping their way through the leafy quiet. We regret to inform you that your carriage ride will be nothing like that experience. The horse will seem tired, the driver’s patter will be even less entertaining than Mia Farrow’s memoirs, and you’ll spend the entire ride crawling along the park’s main drives, staring at the back of another carriage, and enduring dirty looks from locals and animal lovers.
Instead… Get up early and walk through Central Park
The park is at its most magical in the morning, when the crowds are thin and the green lawns are fresh, and you’ll want to wander off the main roads and explore its 843 acres at your own pace. You might even want to, you know, stop and smell some flowers—or at least something more aromatic than horse poo. So get up early one morning, grab a cup of joe and a roll from a street cart, and eat your breakfast walking some of the park’s woodsier byways.
Enter the park from either Fifth Avenue or Central Park West in the mid-Seventies, and head toward the center: This latitude offers easy access to some of the park’s best features. You can drift around the marshy shores of the lake, climb Pilgrim Hill near the Conservatory Water, or stand still with a view to the east and watch for Pale Male and Lola, the famous red-tailed hawks who use an apartment building on Fifth Avenue as a launchpad for their own Central Park explorations.
Don’t… Eat at a restaurant in Times Square
We understand the slickster appeal of Times Square, with its gaudy neon, its aura of history, its unbridled commercialism. But we don’t understand why anyone bothers to eat there. The Giuliani-era campaign to make Times Square safe for families and visitors had the side effect of attracting faceless national chains: Red Lobster, Applebee’s, and Chevy’s Fresh Mex hadn’t set foot in New York City until they marched up 42nd Street. And guess what? The chains are exactly the same as the ones in the ‘burbs—just more expensive.
Instead … Eat in Hell’s Kitchen
Two blocks west of Times Square is Hell’s Kitchen, a gentrified neighborhood of former tenements now populated by young actors, writers, and other up-and-comers. These people need reliable, inexpensive places to chow down, and Ninth Avenue is lined with obliging eateries that run the ethnic gamut from Vietnamese to Puerto Rican to Greek to Italian—ideal for a quick, affordable lunch between sightseeing stops, or for a pre- or post-theater bite. Try Pam Real Thai for an authentic taste of Bangkok, Chimichurri Grill for Argentine-style steak, Meskerem for savory Ethiopian food (pictured), or Esca for first-rate Italian seafood—or just walk up and down the avenue till you find something that appeals.
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