Visiting New York City

“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

New York is the greatest city in the world

Granted: we all live here, and, yes, we are biased.

But, let’s just look at some facts:

  • There are over 800 languages spoken in New York City, making it one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth.

  • New York is home to over 250 museums and galleries, including SPYSCAPE (a museum dedicated to espionage), Poster House (the first museum of posters in the United States) and The Earth Room (an apartment in SoHo that’s filled with 250 cubic yards of dirt).

  • We have so many restaurants representing so many cultures that there is a TikTok channel where two guys are trying to eat every kind of cuisine from around the world without leaving New York. I just watched them eat at a Bhutanese restaurant.

  • The Lion King is still running on Broadway, and it’s not that hard to get tickets. Also running on Broadway: plays cast by Kelly Gillespie.

  • The Federal Reserve Bank of New York houses the world’s largest gold storage, storing over $90 billion in gold bars in a vault 80 feet below street level (take that, Fort Knox!).

  • We have a public park that used to be an elevated train track.

  • Our tap water frequently wins statewide taste tests.

  • The GDP of New York is bigger than the GDP of Canada.

  • While the stereotype is that New Yorkers are not kind, the fact is that New Yorkers are almost always kind. What they might not be is nice. Especially not if you’re taking a very long time to order a bagel, or if you stopped in the middle of the street to look at your phone.

  • We are home to what is, objectively, the greatest sandwich on earth: the Turkey Leg Sandwich at Henry Public in Brooklyn.

  • Is New York crowded? Boy howdy, is it. New York City covers about 300 square miles and has as many people in it as the eight least populated U.S. states combined. But a lot of those people are pretty amazing. They’re world class violinists who are playing on the subway platform or food truck operators serving the best tacos you’ve ever had in your life or 20-year-olds who just found a couch on the street and are trying to get it home on a city bus.

  • Is New York dangerous? Not really. The city’s crime rates are at all-time lows, and very little of that crime is happening in places where visitors go. You might see some weird stuff (a guy playing the guitar in just a cowboy hat and underwear, dancers doing acrobatics on a crowded train car, pigeon men), but it’s highly unlikely that you’ll see any actual crime going down (unless you call charging $12 for a turkey sandwich a crime, which I do).

Facts don’t lie.

New York is the greatest city in the world.

If you’re looking for suggestions of great things to do while you’re here, the world is full of books, websites and blogs to give you ideas.

If you want a bespoke idea of how to spend your time here, we highly recommend this guy’s TikTok videos. He has good insights into visiting the city, delivered in an extremely New York way.

If there’s anything else we can do to make your trip to New York easier/more fun, please drop us a line.

Maybe if enough Yanks find themselves in New York at the same time, we can plan an in-city Yank get-together…

Let us know if you'll be in town!

  • “I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.”

    — Truman Capote

  • “When it's 100 degrees in New York, it's 72 in Los Angeles. When it's 30 degrees in New York, in Los Angeles it's still 72. However, there are 6 million interesting people in New York, and only 72 in Los Angeles.”

    — Neil Simon

  • “There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.”

    — Simone de Beauvoir

  • "London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful. Always it believes that something good is about to come off, and it must hurry to meet it.”

    — Dorothy Parker

  • "One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years."

    — Tom Wolfe

  • "New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian."

    — Russell Baker

  • "The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.”

    — E.B. White