A world-traveled friend says the best places to visit are the most popular places. That's why they are popular. My wife and I found him right about taking the Circle Line cruise around Manhattan Island on a recent visit to New York. Its hourly cruises can be jammed with over 500 people, and great. New York is a great
place for sight-seeingBut another tour, this one relatively lightly patronized, was also great - the Gray Line Trolley Tour through the city's gigantic Central Park. Its trolleys carry only 30 or so people and make only a few trips a day.
Our advice: Don't miss either one.
I first saw New York nearly 60 years ago when I was in high school. I have been in love with it and excited by it ever since. Its 1996 face is upbeat. Now it calls itself the Big Apple. It delivers a tourist experience as exciting as ever before and quite safe to those who take practical precautions like staying out of Central Park at night.
The 35-mile Circle Line tour starts on the Hudson at 42nd Street, goes down to the harbor to circle the Statue of Liberty, then up the East River, into the Harlem River and Harlem Canal and back to the Hudson and 42nd Street.
In nearly three hours you see the world's greatest collection of skyscrapers in lower and mid-town Manhattan, then downright rustic areas in the North. You even see some surprises - a golf driving range and tented tennis courts by the Hudson, an East River sewage plant topped with a 28-acre park, the new planned residential community on Roosevelt Island that is complete with its own schools.
You see residential New York, its harbors, and look straight down Wall Street. You see the United Nations, vast East Side medical centers, the mayor's riverside residence, Yankee Stadium and cathedrals.You get wonderful harbor views of Lower Manhattan with its 110-story World Trade towers, the 102-story Empire State Building in the background, and dozens of towers, some the symbols of insurance and other companies.
You pass under numerous bridges, most notably the historic Brooklyn Bridge, then a world pace-setter, completed in 1883. You see the other boroughs as well as Manhattan - Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island. Ditto highly developed New Jersey communities across the Hudson.
Don't miss it, but also don't miss the 90-minute trolley ride through Central Park, starting opposite the Plaza Hotel where the much more limited but romantic horse-drawn hansom cab rides also start.
At 844 acres, extending from 59th Street to 110th Street, the park is bigger than all of Waikiki. It is on land wisely set aside more than a century ago when it was still remote from town as was Waikiki's Kapiolani Park, thanks to our forefathers. May we do as well.
A commercial and wonderful indoor/outdoor Tivoli-lighted Tavern on the Green intrudes on the long rectangular park on the West Side. The Metropolitan Museum of Art intrudes on the east.
But most of the rest is either activity-oriented or rustic, including a century-old waterfall and glen that now look natural despite being fed by underground piping.
A West Side tract of 2.5 acres is near the late John Lennon's high-rise apartment residence, endowed by his widow, who still lives there. It is called the Strawberry Fields for the London orphanage where he grew up. "Imagine" is written in tile in the center of a walkway circle.
Lakes, formal gardens, limited statuary, a free outdoor theatre, a children's zoo in fairy tale settings, a wildlife conservation center, a pool and skating rinks also are part of this wonderful park. Auto traffic is excluded except for two cross-park pass-throughs separated from pedestrian walks by either bridges or underpasses and not very intrusive.
New York also has the best formal theatres in America, museums galore, fascinating ethnic neighborhoods, and gigantic business/commercial centers. It throbs with vitality. It's wonderful.