New York
CITY
The Cradle of Aviation Museum
photo: keiko niwa / tenement museum
photo: mick hales / new york botanical garden
The big museums—the Met,
MOMA, the Whitney, et
al—are wonderfully
absorbing, but nowadays I
more often head for the
smaller places that I’ve
missed.
The New York Botanical Garden
is a Bronx classic. Calvert Vaux and
the Olmsteds—the designers who
created Central Park—laid out this
verdant, 250-acre landscape 125years ago on behalf of botanist
Nathaniel Lord Britton, who believed
New York should have its own
version of London’s Royal Botanic
Gardens. Indeed, the grandeur and
elegance of the buildings and
esplanades transport you to a more
graceful era. But walk in the oldgrowth forest, a last vestige of virgin
east coast woodland, to experience
what the wilderness was like before
Gotham was born. nybg.org
The Tenement Museum of New
York provides an essential
perspective on America’s immigrant
history. If you dip from the
European gene pool, it’s pretty
likely some relative in your past
spent time in what was New York’s
teeming Lower East Side. For outof-towners, the museum demon
strates how so many millions
suffered tough conditions just to be
American. For New Yorkers, it’s a
way to understand how tenement
structures became such a staple of
city architecture. tenement.org
The Queens Museum in Flushing
58 minute subway ride from Penn Stn.
photo: library of congress
photo: chris devers / creative commons
1.1 miles from Penn Stn.
Meadows is a NYC-must, if for no
other reason than to see the
Panorama of the City of New York, a
gigantic, 3-D mapping of municipal
geograp