City edition
Where to stay in New York
New York, downtown first. Four of these five are below 57th Street, which is where the neighbourhoods are. Every entry ends in the address’s own contact, at the address’s own price.
17John
Financial District, John Street
Serviced apartments
The nightly rate is not published; ask the address.
The Greenwich Hotel
TriBeCa, Greenwich Street
Small independent hotel
The nightly rate is not published; ask the address.
The Whitby Hotel
Midtown, West 56th Street
Small independent hotel
The nightly rate is not published; ask the address.
The Chatwal
Theater District, West 44th Street
Small independent hotel
The nightly rate is not published; ask the address.
Walker Hotel Tribeca
TriBeCa, Walker Street
Small independent hotel
The nightly rate is not published; ask the address.
AKA Central Park
42 West 58th Street, just off Fifth Avenue
Extended-stay hotel residences
Studios to penthouse and Sky Suites; three-bedrooms by combination
The nightly rate is not published; ask the address.
AKA Sutton Place
330 East 56th Street, Sutton Place
Furnished apartments for a month or more
76 apartments; one-bedrooms 51 to 79 m², two-bedrooms 102 to 121 m²
The nightly rate is not published; ask the address.
Staying in New York
Manhattan is a grid with one rule that matters to a visitor: below 14th Street the grid breaks and the streets have names, and that is where the neighbourhoods with a character of their own are. Above it the avenues are efficient and the blocks are long — twenty of them to a mile, which is further on foot than any map suggests.
Space is the thing you are actually buying here. A New York hotel room is small by the standards of every other city in this Collection, and the addresses worth a long stay are the ones that sell a suite, an apartment or a floor of a small house rather than a room. Every entry in this edition says which it is.
Where to sleep, and what it means
- TriBeCa
- Cast-iron warehouses turned into large apartments, cobbles, and the quietest streets in downtown Manhattan at night. Where families and long stays go. Two subway lines and fifteen minutes to Midtown.
- The Financial District
- Wall Street and the water. Emptiest of the central quarters in the evening, which is why it is the best value below 57th, and every line in the city stops there.
- Midtown, the 50s
- The theatres, the offices, the shops, the noise. Right for a short working stay and for a first visit; wrong for a month. Ask for a room facing the side street, not the avenue.
- Greenwich Village and SoHo
- The named streets, the low brick houses, the restaurants people fly in for. Charming and loud, with the fewest large apartments of any downtown quarter.
What a visitor asks first
- Uptown or downtown for a long stay?
- Downtown, below 23rd Street, unless your work is in Midtown. The blocks are shorter, the buildings are older and larger, and you can walk out at eight in the evening into a neighbourhood rather than an office district.
- Which airport?
- Newark for the west and for much of Europe, JFK for long-haul and the Gulf, LaGuardia for anything domestic. From downtown, Newark is often the shorter drive, whatever the map implies. Allow ninety minutes to any of them at five in the afternoon.
- Do the published rates include the taxes?
- Almost never. New York adds city and state taxes and a per-night occupancy charge on top of the room rate, and the total is meaningfully higher than the headline. Ask the address for the all-in nightly figure before you compare it with anything.
The next city, before anyone else
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