The City That Never Sleeps, New York

The remarkable thing is that New York looks even better up-close, in person. 'It's just like the movies!' is a constantly delighted phrase. No matter how grandiose or beautiful New York's sights are, their combined scale may seem overwhelming.

Whether you want to call it spontaneity or chaos, there are a million different New York moments that can catch you off-guard and sweep you off your feet. You could turn a corner and run into a full-blown Russian winter festival or a production assistant barking orders to clear the way for a film shoot. New York is the city that never sleeps. The Broadway shows are larger than life, the art exhibitions open your eyes to beauty and possibility, the orchestral concerts and ballets can move you to tears, and the shopping opportunities are amazing. Not to mention that the pizzas and bagels, available 24 hours throughout Manhattan, are the best in the nation.They don't come any bigger than the Big Apple - king of the hill, top of the heap, New York, New York. You could spend weeks in New York and still barely scratch the surface, but there are some key attractions – and some pleasures – that you won't want to miss. There are the different ethnic neighbourhoods, like lower Manhattan's Chinatown and the traditionally Jewish Lower East Side (not so much anymore); and the more artsy concentrations of SoHo, TriBeCa, and the East and West Villages. Of course, there is the celebrated architecture of corporate Manhattan, with the skyscrapers in downtown and midtown forming the most indelible images. There are the museums, not just the Metropolitan and MoMA, but countless other smaller collections that afford weeks of happy wandering. In between sights, you can eat just about anything, at any time, cooked in any style; you can drink in any kind of company; and sit through any number of obscure movies. The more established arts – dance, theatre, music – are superbly catered for; and New York's clubs are as varied and exciting as you might expect. And for the avid consumer, the choice of shops is vast, almost numbingly exhaustive in this heartland of the great capitalist dream.

American Museum of Natural History With 42 exhibition halls and more than 32 million artifacts and specimens, this is the world's largest and most important museum of natural history. Founded in 1869, this museum began with a mastodon's tooth and a few thousand beetles; today, its collection includes more than 30 million artefacts, interactive exhibits and loads of taxidermy. Dinosaur mania begins in the massive, barrel-vaulted Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda, where a 50-ft-tall skeleton of a barosaurus rears on its hind legs, protecting its fossilized baby from an enormous marauding allosaurus. Three spectacular dinosaur halls on the fourth floor -- the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs, the Hall of Ornithischian Dinosaurs, and the Hall of Vertebrate Origins -- use real fossils and interactive computer stations to present interpretations of how dinosaurs and pterodactyls might have behaved. In the Hall of Fossil Mammals interactive video monitors featuring museum curators explain what caused the woolly mammoth to vanish from the Earth and why mammals don't have to lay eggs to have babies. Enthusiastic guides roam the dinosaur halls ready to answer questions, and the ‘please touch’ displays allow kids to handle many items, including the skullcap of a pachycephulasaurus, a plant-eating dinosaur that roamed the earth 65 million years ago. The popular 94-ft blue whale model recently resurfaced when the revamped Hall of Ocean Life reopened as a 'fully immersive marine environment,' complete with shimmering blue lighting and whale song.There is also the Star of India sapphire in the Hall of Minerals and Gems. The Hall of Human Biology and Evolution's wondrously detailed dioramas trace human origins back to Lucy and feature a computerized archaeological dig and an electronic newspaper. The spectacular Hayden Planetarium is in a 90-ft aluminum-clad sphere that appears to float inside an enormous glass cube, which in turn is home to the Rose Center for Earth and Space. Models of planets, stars, and galaxies dangle overhead, and an elevator whisks you to the top of the sphere and the planetarium's Sky Theater, which -- using 'all-dome video' -- transports you from galaxy to galaxy as if you were traveling through space. The sky show, 'The Search for Life: Are We Alone?,' narrated by Harrison Ford, is the most technologically advanced planetarium show in the world, incorporating up-to-the-minute scientific knowledge about the universe in computerized projections generated from a database of more than 2 billion stars. Newer exhibitions, such as the Hall of Biodiversity, feature a strong ecological slant, with a video display about the earth's habitats. The Hall of Biodiversity focuses on Earth's wealth of plants and animals; its main attraction is the walk-through 'Dzanga-Sangha Rainforest,' a life-size diorama complete with the sounds of the African tropics -- from bird calls to chain saws. The Butterfly Conservancy is a popular recurring exhibition, open from November to May and featuring 600 butterflies from all over the world (admission is extra). The building itself is amazing: turn the corner to admire the 77th St facade.

Central Park In 1856, landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux transformed 843 acres of land into New York's most treasured public space. The park contains grassy meadows, wooded groves, and formal gardens; paths for running, strolling, horseback riding, and biking; playing fields; a small zoo; an ice-skating rink; a carousel; an outdoor theater; and numerous fountains and sculptures. One of the many treasures to be found within Central Park, this beautiful restored carousel is made up of huge, hand-carved and hand-painted jumping horses. It is simple, old-fashioned and children of all ages adore it. A carousel was originally placed in the park in 1871. The current carousel has been on this site since 1951 (although it is much older than that). Admission is 90 cents. Other highlights include the the Shakespeare Garden; Strawberry Fields, the memorial to John Lennon; the magnificent formal Conservatory Garden; and the Bethesda Fountain.

Empire State Building New York's original skyline symbol, the Empire State Building, is a limestone classic built in just 410 days during the depths of the Depression. It stands 102 storeys and almost 449m (1472ft) tall. The skyscraper craze of the 1920s generated a slew of buildings in Manhattan, each outstretching the next in the quest to claim the title of world's tallest building. Developer John Jacob Raskob was no different, asking architect William Lamb, 'Bill, how high can you make it so it won't fall down?' The famous antenna was originally to be a mooring mast for zeppelins, but the Hindenberg disaster put a stop to that plan. One airship accidentally met up with the building: a B25 crashed into the 79th floor on a foggy day in July 1945, killing 14 people. Today about 20,000 people work in the Empire State Building, and more than 3.3 million people visit its observation deck annually. Tickets are sold on the concourse level and on the building's Web site (a good way to avoid the considerable line); on your way up admire the illuminated panels depicting the Seven Wonders of the World -- with the Empire State Building brazenly appended as number eight -- in the three-story-high marble lobby. The 86th-floor observatory (1,050 ft high) is open to the air (expect heavy winds) and spans the building's circumference; on clear days you can see up to 80 mi. It's worth timing your visit for early or late in the day (morning is the least crowded time), when the sun is low on the horizon and the shadows are deep across the city. But at night the city's lights are dazzling. The French architect Le Corbusier said, 'It is a Milky Way come down to earth.' A major tourist attraction within the Empire State Building is the second-floor New York Skyride. A Comedy Central video presentation on the virtues of New York precedes a rough-and-tumble motion-simulator ride above and around some of the city's top attractions, which are projected on a two-story-tall screen.

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Upper East Side is home to New York's greatest concentration of cultural centres: 5th Ave above 57th St is known as Museum Mile. The big daddy of these is the Metropolitan Museum of Art ('the Met'), New York's most popular tourist site. Its permanent collection of nearly 3 million works of art from all over the world includes objects from the Paleolithic era to modern times -- an assemblage whose quality and range make this one of the world's greatest museums. The Met first opened its doors on March 30, 1880, but the original Victorian Gothic redbrick building by Calvert Vaux has since been encased in other architecture, which in turn has been encased. The 5th Avenue entrance leads into the Great Hall, a soaring neoclassical chamber that has been designated a landmark. Past the admission booths, a wide marble staircase leads up to the European paintings galleries, whose 2,500 works include Botticelli's The Last Communion of St. Jerome (circa 1490), Pieter Brueghel's The Harvesters (1565), El Greco's View of Toledo (circa 1590), Johannes Vermeer's Young Woman with a Water Jug (circa 1660), Velázquez's Juan de Pareja (1648), and Rembrandt's Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (1653). The arcaded European Sculpture Court includes Auguste Rodin's massive bronze The Burghers of Calais (1884-95). The American Wing, in the northwest corner, is best approached from the first floor, where you enter through a refreshingly light and airy garden court graced with Tiffany stained-glass windows, cast-iron staircases by Louis Sullivan, and a marble federal-style facade taken from the Wall Street branch of the United States Bank. Take the elevator to the third floor and begin working your way down through the rooms decorated in period furniture -- everything from a Shaker retiring room to a federal-era ballroom to the living room of a Frank Lloyd Wright house -- and American paintings. In the realm of 20th-century art, the three-story Lila Acheson Wallace Wing was opened in 1987. Pablo Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906) is the centerpiece of this collection. Those with a taste for classical art should proceed to the left of the Great Hall on the first floor to see the Greek galleries. Grecian urns and mythological marble statuary are displayed beneath a skylighted, barrel-vaulted stone ceiling that forms one of the grandest museum spaces in the city. Although renovations are still in progress, Roman galleries are slated to open behind the Greek galleries, with a court for Roman sculpture, and space for the museum's collection of rare Roman wall paintings excavated from the lava of Mt. Vesuvius. The Met's awesome Egyptian collection, spanning some 4,000 years, is on the first floor, directly to the right of the Great Hall. Here you'll find papyrus pages from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, stone coffins engraved in hieroglyphics, and mummies. The collection's centerpiece is the Temple of Dendur, an entire Roman-period temple (circa 15 BC) donated by the Egyptian government in thanks for U.S. help in saving ancient monuments. Placed in a specially built gallery with views of Central Park, the temple faces east, as it did in its original location, and a pool of water has been installed at the same distance from it as the Nile once stood. Also on the first floor are the Medieval galleries. The Gothic sculptures, Byzantine enamels, and full-size baroque choir screen built in 1763 are impressive and may whet your appetite for the thousands of medieval objects displayed at the Cloisters, the Met's annex in Washington Heights. From the Medieval galleries continue straight on until you enter the cool, skylighted white space of the Lehman Wing, where the exquisite, mind-bogglingly large personal collection of the late donor, investment banker Robert Lehman, is displayed in rooms resembling those of his West 54th Street town house. The collection's strengths include old-master drawings; Renaissance paintings by Rembrandt, El Greco, Petrus Christus, and Hans Memling; French 18th-century furniture; and 19th-century canvases by Goya, Ingres, and Renoir. Even at peak periods, crowds tend to be sparse here. To the north of the Medieval Galleries is the Arms & Armor exhibit.

Museum of Modern Art When the MoMA re-opens to the public in November 2004 after its two-year stint in Long Island City, Queens, it will undoubtedly be one of New York's greatest museums. In its new location on W53rd st, between Fifth and Sixth Aves, the MoMA is a perfect excuse to explore its 100,000-plus paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, architectural models and design objects. For those who can't wait for MoMA to re-open, here's a small taste of a fraction of what will be on offer. It boasts a permanent collection of masterpieces, including works by Picasso, Van Gogh, Monet and Mondrian, plus an outstanding photography collection and a very cool gift shop. Its collection of masterpieces includes Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Van Gogh's Starry Night and Piet Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie. Claude Monet's Water Lilies rates a whole gallery to itself.

SoHo This downtown neighborhood is virtually synonymous with black-clad artist-types, expansive loft apartments, chic boutiques, and packed-to-the-gills restaurants. Three decades ago, though, the area was a virtual wasteland. SoHo (the district South of Houston Street) was regularly referred to as 'Hell's Hundred Acres' because of the many fires that raged through the untended warehouses crowding the area. It was saved by two factors: first, preservationists here discovered the world's greatest concentration of cast-iron architecture and fought to prevent demolition; and second, artists discovered the large, cheap, well-lighted spaces that cast-iron buildings provide. By the 1980s SoHo was such a desirable area that only the most successful artists could afford it.

Statue of Liberty The Statue of Liberty stands at the crossroads of Old World and New. The Lady with the Lamp represents not only the shining ideals of democracy but, over the years, has become a shorthand visual for the emigrants' lament inscribed on her base: 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...' Back in 1865, however, it was only even meant to be a rather grand gesture on the part of political activists Edouard René Lefebvre de Laboulaye and sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi. The two of them came up with the idea at a dinner party and went away to build a monument, their paean to the American conception of political freedom, which they would then donate to the Land of Opportunity. Twenty-one years later, on 28 October 1886, the 45m (151ft) Liberty Enlightening the World, modelled on the Colossus of Rhodes, was finally unveiled in New York Harbour before President Grover Cleveland and a harbour full of tooting ships. Heightened security at the ferry departure point (Castle Clinton) will add time to your trip. Until July 2004 the museum and observation deck will be closed, but do visit for an inspiring ranger-led tour around the statue. Even after access is allowed to the museum and deck, the statue itself will remain off-limits. Exhibits inside the museum illustrate the statue's history, including videos of the view from the crown. There are also life-size models of Lady Liberty's face and foot for people who are blind to feel and a pleasant outdoor café.

Ellis Island Between 1892 and 1924, approximately 12 million men, women, and children first set foot on U.S. soil at this 27½-acre island's federal immigration facility. By the time Ellis Island closed in 1954, it had processed the ancestors of more than 40% of Americans living today. The island's main building, now a national monument, reopened in 1990 as the Ellis Island Immigration Museum. More than 30 galleries of artifacts, photographs, and taped oral histories chronicle the immigrant experience, from what someone's native village was like to where a particular national group took root in America and what industries employed them. Check at the visitors desk for free film tickets, ranger tour times, or special programs. You can rent an audio guide or follow a ranger tour up to the white-tiled Registry Room (Great Hall), where immigrants awaited processing and inspectors screened out 'undesirables' -- unmarried women, the utterly destitute, and people suffering from contagious diseases. The ground-level Railroad Ticket Office has several interactive exhibits and three-dimensional representations on the Peopling of America. At a computer terminal in the American Family Immigration Center, you can search Ellis Island's records for your own ancestors (a $5 fee). Outdoors is the American Immigrant Wall of Honor, where the names of more than 500,000 immigrant Americans are inscribed along a promenade facing the Manhattan skyline. The names include Miles Standish, Priscilla Alden, George Washington's grandfather, Irving Berlin -- it's possible to add a family member's name to the wall, too.

Times Square Dubbed the 'Great White Way' after its bright lights, Times Square has long been celebrated as New York's glittery crossroads. The Square went into deep decline during the 1960s when the movie palaces turned XXX-rated and the area became known as a hangout for every colourful, crazy or dangerous character in Midtown. A major 'clean-up' operation removed most of the sleaze and now the combination of colour, zipping message boards and massive TV screens makes for quite a sight. Up to a million people gather here every New Year's Eve to see a brightly lit ball descend from the roof of One Times Square at midnight, an event that lasts just 90 seconds and leaves most of the revellers wondering what to do with themselves for the rest of the night. Whirling in a chaos of competing lights and advertisements, Times Square is New York's white-hot energy center. Hordes of people, a mix of tourists and midtown workers, jostle for space on the sidewalks to walk and gawk. It would take hours of fixed concentration to really see what's going on here, in the confusion of lights, billboards, people, stores, and traffic. Like many New York City 'squares,' it's actually two triangles formed by the angle of Broadway slashing across 7th Avenue between West 42nd and 47th streets. Times Square (the name also applies to the general area, beyond the intersection of these streets) has been the city's main theater district since the turn of the 20th century: from West 44th to 51st streets, the cross streets west of Broadway are lined with some 30 major theaters; film houses joined the fray beginning in the 1920s. Before the 1900s, this was New York's horse-trading center, known as Long Acre Square. Substantial change came with the arrival of the subway and the New York Times, then a less prestigious paper, which moved here in exchange for having its name grace the square. On December 31, 1904, the Times celebrated the opening of its new headquarters, at Times Tower, with a fireworks show at midnight, thereby starting a New Year's Eve tradition. Now resheathed in marble and called One Times Square Plaza (W. 42nd St. between Broadway and 7th Ave.), the building is topped with the world's most famous rooftop pole, down which an illuminated 200-pound ball is lowered each December 31 to the wild enthusiasm of revelers below. (In the 1920s the Times moved to its present building, a green-copper-roof neo-Gothic behemoth, at 229 West 43rd Street.) Times Square is hardly more sedate on the other 364 nights of the year. You'll be mesmerized by its usual high-wattage thunder: two-story-high cups of coffee that actually steam; a 42-ft-tall bottle of Coca-Cola; huge billboards of underwear models; mammoth, superfast digital displays of world news and stock quotes; on-location network studios; and countless other technologically sophisticated allurements. Zoning actually requires that buildings be decked out with ads, as they have been for nearly a century. The newest contributions to the electronic kinetics are visible in the sky-high Reuters headquarters (at the northwest corner of 7th Avenue and 42nd Street), and across 42nd Street from Reuters, at a new skyscraper known as 5 Times Square.

World Trade Centre Site On September 11, 2001, terrorist hijackers steered two commercial jets into the World Trade Center's 110-story towers, demolishing them and five outlying buildings, and killing nearly 3,000 people. Dubbed Ground Zero, the fenced-in 16-acre work site that emerged from the rubble has come to symbolize the personal and historical impact of the attack. In an attempt to grasp the reality of the destruction, to pray, or simply to witness history, visitors come to the site for a glimpse of what is left, clustering at the fence surrounding the site. Temporary panels listing the names of those who died in the attacks and recounting the history of the twin towers have been mounted along the fence on the west side of Church Street. The World Trade Center (WTC) was a seven-building, 12-million-square-ft complex resembling a miniature city, with more than 430 companies from 28 countries engaged in a wide variety of commercial activities, including banking and finance, insurance, transportation, import and export, customs brokerage, trade associations, and representation of foreign governments. The daytime population of the WTC included 50,000 employees and 100,000 business and leisure visitors. Underground was a mall with nearly 100 stores and restaurants and a network of subway and other train stations. The twin towers were New York's two tallest buildings, the fourth tallest in the world after Kuala Lumpur's Petronas Towers, Shanghai's Jin Mao Building, and the Sears Tower in Chicago. The two 1,350-ft towers, designed by Minoru Yamasaki and built in 1972-73, were more engineering marvel than architectural masterpiece. To some they were an unmitigated design fiasco; to others their brutalist design and sheer magnitude gave them the beauty of modern sculpture, and at night when they were lighted from within, they were indeed beautiful strokes on the Manhattan skyline. Whether they were admired or reviled, the towers endured as a powerful symbol of American ingenuity, success, and dominance in the world marketplace.

Tribeca This neighbourhood of old warehouses and loft apartments has a fair share of sceney restaurants and bars, along with Robert De Niro's Tribeca Films production company. It's not unusual to spot a star hanging out at a local restaurant or bar, and Tribeca's desolation chic makes the area a favourite for fashion photographers. Though not as touristy or architecturally significant as SoHo, Tribeca has an even cooler etymology: it's the 'TRIangle BElow CAnal' St. The neighbourhood went through an amazing transformation prior to September 11, with huge lofts, top restaurants, historic bars and a strong shopping and arts scene. The tragedy of 9/11 rocked the area as it bordered the WTC site and is only just recovering.

West (Greenwich) Village The Village is one of the city's most popular neighbourhoods, and a universal symbol for all things outlandish and bohemian. It's still a vibrant area, packed with cafes, shops and bars, all of them huddled around Washington Square Park, purportedly the most crowded recreational space in the world. The Village (as New Yorkers call it) is kept humming by the endless supply of New York University (NYU) students and nostalgic tourists. Once known throughout the world for its swinging, smoky arts scene, the neighbourhood can seem downright somnolent these days. The area's reputation as a creative enclave can be traced back to at least the early 1900s, when artists and writers moved in, followed by jazz musicians who played at famous (still functioning) clubs like the Blue Note and Village Vanguard. By the 40s the neighbourhood was known as a gathering place for gay people. The coffeehouses on Bleecker St hark back to New York's beatnik 50s and hippie 60s. Bob Dylan reputedly smoked his first joint in the Village, Jimi Hendrix lived here and the Rolling Stones recorded here. Of course nobody can afford to actually live in the Village today, perched high in the Manhattan real estate stratosphere. Yet somehow it still packs some kind of energy.

PICTURES