Product Description

The Rough Guide to New York City is the most comprehensive and useful full-length guide to the greatest city in the world and a necessity for any traveller. Packed with intriguing accounts of the city's great museums and other sites, the guide also includes full detailed listings of all the best places to eat, drink and be entertained. With this guide you will also be treated to lively writing about the local history, including New York's rich immigrant legacy, and how the catastrophic events of 9/11 have affected the downtown landscape and how it is rebuilding. From the winding beautiful streets of the Village to the majestic avenues of the East side and the other vibrant neighbourhoods of Brooklyn and Queens, there's something in New York and this book for every visitor.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #256011 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

About the Author
Martin Dunford and Jack Holland are two of the co-founders of Rough Guides. They have also co-authored Rough Guides to Amsterdam and Holland and written several other titles independently.

Excerpted from New York: the Rough Guide by Martin Dunford, Jack Holland. Copyright © 2000. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
Introduction

New York City is the most beguiling place there is. You may not think so at first - for the city is admittedly mad, the epitome in many ways of all that is wrong in modern America. But spend even a week here and it happens - the pace, the adrenaline take hold, and the shock gives way to myth. Walking through the city streets is an experience, the buildings like icons to the modern age, and above all to the power of money. Despite all the hype, the movie-image sentimentalism, Manhattan - the central island and the city's real core - has massive romance: whether it's the flickering lights of the midtown skyscrapers as you speed across the Queensboro bridge, the 4am half-life downtown, or just wasting the morning on the Staten Island ferry, you really would have to be made of stone not to be moved by it all.

None of which is to suggest that New York is a conventionally pleasing city. Take a walk in Manhattan beside Central Park, notably its east side, past the city's richest apartments and best museums, and keep walking: within a dozen or so blocks you find yourself in the lower reaches of Spanish Harlem. The shock could hardly be more extreme. The city is constantly like this, with glaring, in-your-face wealth juxtaposed with urban problems - poverty, the drug trade, homelessness - that have a predictably high profile. Things definitely changed during the Nineties, especially in the Mayor Giuliani years. Crime figures are at their lowest in years and are still dropping (statistically, New York is now one of the country's safest big cities), and renewal plans have finally begun to undo years of urban neglect. But for all its new clean-cut image New York remains a unique place - one you'll want to return to again and again.

The city also has more straightforward pleasures. There are the different ethnic neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan, from Chinatown to the Jewish Lower East Side and ever-diminishing Little Italy; and the artsy concentrations in SoHo, TriBeCa, and the East and West Village. There is the architecture of corporate Manhattan and the more residential Upper East and West Side districts (the whole city reads like an illustrated history of modern design); and there is the art, which affords weeks of wandering in the Metropolitan and Modern Art museums and countless smaller collections. You can eat anything, at any time, cooked in any style; drink in any kind of company; sit through any number of obscure movies. The established arts - dance, theater, music - are superbly catered for, and although the contemporary music scene is perhaps not as vital or original as in, say, London or Los Angeles, New York's clubs are varied and exciting, if rarely inexpensive. And for the avid consumer, the choice of shops is vast, almost numbingly exhaustive in this heartland of the great capitalist dream.

Costs

Perhaps your biggest single problem in New York is going to be money, or rather how to hold on to what you have. The exchange rate for foreign visitors is fairly good these days - around $1.60 to the pound sterling at time of writing - and the city (as long as you're not renting an apartment) is generally as cheap as it has been for some time. Still, it's an expensive place to spend time, and far pricier than most of the rest of the US. Accommodation will be your biggest day-to-day expense, with rock-bottom double hotel rooms in Manhattan costing around $100, much more for anywhere in the mid-range, and even a basic YMCA double room going for over $50 - though there are options that work out cheaper (see our recommendations in Chapter 16). The bottom line for staying alive - after this - is around $30 a day, a figure which will of course skyrocket the more you dine out and party, although it is possible to eat out both well and inexpensively. There are bargain restaurants - see Chapter 17 for listings - where you'll be well-fed for $10 or less, while the all-American breakfast will set you up for the day, and ubiquitous delis, pizza places and falafel stands provide the cheapest snacks for just a couple of dollars.

Customer Reviews

Everything you could need to know about visiting New York
This was my bible when visiting New York for the first time! It's small enough to fit in your handbag yet so packed with information that i felt lost without it! It lists resteraunts, tourist attractions, shops, markets, museums, attractions for children, scenic places to visit and lots more. This guide lets you in on secrets that you would not find out from other guides. It tells you the best time to visit places, when certain attractions are on, prices, adresses and a brief background of the place. It also includes a map of Manhatten and a subway map, which are all very vital when you are searching for that well earned Krispy Kreme store!
A must have guide for anyone visiting New York.

fantastic !
Having read the 'Rough Guide' full version, I was half expecting a lot of the information in the mini guide to be left out, but oh contrare, it was still packed with loads of information,and in a more realistic package for those of us who don't have a year to see everything ! It's a great size for reference, fitting snuggly in your pocket, so your head is not constantly in your book missing the sights and sounds going on around you !

I was very impressed, and the maps are very clear and precise.

Once again, as always, the rough guide team have done a fantastic job - Well done.

Just the right amount of detail
Before heading off to New York for a week's sightseeing and shopping, I read this guide from cover to cover (well, nearly) and wrote down all the things I wanted to see. I'm a firm believer in planning holidays so that you don't waste an hour each morning deciding what you're going to do. I found the Mini Rough Guide had just enough information for the first-time visitor with only a week to see the city. Any more detail, and I would have been swamped and not got around to finishing it.

It mentions some great places to see, and not just the major tourist attractions that we've all seen or heard about before, like the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, but also some out of the way places and interesting buildings that you might want to pop into and have a look at on your way down the street.

If you've been to New York before and have seen all the touristy things, or have more than a couple of weeks up your sleeve, it describes various districts within NYC in enough detail to allow you to spend the morning exploring an area in great detail, describing the history of the area and some interesting facts about various streets and buildings.

I found that the restaurant section was a little limited, giving only one or two restaurants in each area and in each food type. But I suppose it is a Mini Rough Guide and if they put all the restaurants in New York City in this guide, it would be as big as the Yellow Pages.

Overall - Informative, interesting, brief and too the point, and doesn't weigh too much