Our 5-day NYC Trip – Day 1: Lower Manhattan

On our first day in the Big Apple, we covered the following districts of Lower Manhattan, starting from our Innside by Melia New York Nomad hotel conveniently located in Chelsea district. We based our walk on the proposed walks and highlights as described in the Capitool Travel Guide.

· First we went to the High Line and walked it down to Greenwich village

· In Greenwich village we covered:

o Meatpacking district

o Historic district

o Sheridan Square, the center of the gay movement in New York

o Washington Square

· Soho District: taking Thompson street in South direction, on to Houston street and to West Broadway. Continuing to Spring street and Greene street and finally left to Canal street. Look out for the cast-iron architecture and facades

· Lower Manhattan and Financial district

o Wall street

o New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Christmas tree

o Trump building (lots of interest)

o Federal Reserve Bank

o Federal Hall

o Trinity church

o 9/11 Memorial and Museum

o One World Observatory

o One World Oculus

o Brookfield place

o Battery Park

o Charging bull

· Lower East Side – just walk through a few streets of China town and Little Italy to get a real Chinese/ Italian vibe and ending in Columbus Park, where tables are filled with locals playing mahjong. This didn’t take us too long

· Back to the hotel in the Chelsea district, through East village (shortest route) and Flatiron district, passing by:

o Flatiron building

o NY Life Insurance Company (golden pyramid roof)

o Union Square

o Empire State Building

 

Tips we want to share

· The above roughly takes 30 km if you do it all by foot, so be aware of the distances. Make sure to wear comfortable shoes. I can assure you they hurt by the end of the day

· For the One World Observatory we advise you to go first thing in the morning. You can enter as from 8am, but go right before to get your tickets. We eventually did this the morning after our first day. Ignorant as we were on our first day, we arrived only around noon, when the line was at least 2 hours to get our ticket and then we still needed to go into another line for another long wait before actually entering. So we decided not to do that and return the morning after, so that we could just enter immediately, without any wait, at 8am

· Same principle applies for the 9/11 Memorial Museum. If you go too late in the day, the wait is unbearable, so we also took the subway on one of the following mornings. We still had to wait about 1 hour to get the ticket and actually enter, but it’s better than almost half a day…

· We don’t eat dinner too late, which is a good thing in New York City, as restaurants tend to get full very quickly. Online reservations are possible, but not everywhere, so be aware of that. We had dinner at The Outback Steakhouse where the wait around 6.30pm was very limited.