Upper East Side

The Upper East Side is where New York keeps its art. Museum Mile runs up Fifth Avenue along the park: the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim in Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral, the Neue Galerie with its Klimts and its Viennese cafe, and the Frick, a steel baron’s mansion with the collection still hanging in the rooms he lived in.

Away from Fifth, the neighborhood is quieter than almost anywhere else in Manhattan: limestone townhouses, doormen, dogs being walked in the morning, and streets where the loudest thing is a bus. Lexington and Second Avenue carry most of the actual life, including the restaurants and bars people in the neighborhood use.

The park is the other half of any day here. The Conservatory Garden at 105th Street is a formal garden with almost nobody in it, and the reservoir path gives you the best skyline view in Central Park.

For a drink, Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle is the one to see: Ludwig Bemelmans painted the Central Park murals on those walls in 1947 in exchange for a stay at the hotel, and the room has barely changed. Go at 5pm to beat the cover charge for the music.