Museums—Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Brooklyn Museum; Studio Museum in Harlem; New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum; Frick Collection; The Morgan Library & Museum; Whitney Museum of American Art.

Memorable Meals—Daniel, L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon or Jean Georges for quintessential upscale New York dining; spectacular views of nighttime Manhattan at the River Cafe in Brooklyn; Chanterelle or Bouley for inspired French cuisine; Lupa for boisterous Italian; Pastis for bistro food among the beautiful and famous.

Late Night—A performance at Joe's Pub; a Broadway show or an evening of music at Carnegie Hall or the Metropolitan Opera House; stand-up comedy at Caroline's Comedy Club; cool new jazz at Smoke.

Walks—Window-shopping along Fifth Avenue in the 50s and Madison avenue from 59th to 86th streets; a daytime stroll through Central Park from 59th Street to the Metropolitan Museum of Art; walking up Broadway in SoHo from Grand Street to Greenwich Village; exploring the narrow streets and great shops of the Lower East Side; the Chelsea art galleries and bars, from 13th to 27th streets between 10th and 11th avenues.

Especially for Kids—The American Museum of Natural History and its Rose Center for Earth & Space; the Bronx Zoo; ice skating at Rockefeller Plaza (fall through spring) and at The Pond at Bryant Park (late October to mid-January); the Central Park Wildlife Center; the Children's Museum of Manhattan; the New York Hall of Science; Toys "R" Us at Times Square; the Central Park Carousel; Sony Wonder Technology Lab.

Manhattan can be roughly divided into three regions: Downtown is the southern end of the island, including Wall Street; Midtown begins around 31st Street and extends north to the southern end of Central Park (59th Street); Uptown is anywhere farther north. The city is further divided into numerous sections within these regions. Chelsea, Gramercy Park, SoHo, the East and West villages, Hell's Kitchen (in today's trendy real-estate market, it's called Clinton) and Harlem are just a few of the famous areas of New York.

Manhattan streets generally follow a simple grid pattern, with a few notoriously confusing exceptions, such as the twisty streets of Greenwich Village and the diagonal swath cut by Broadway. Numbered streets (15th Street, 16th Street, etc.) run east-west with the numbers increasing as you go north. Numbered avenues (Fifth Avenue, Sixth Avenue) run north-south with the numbers increasing as you go west. Fifth Avenue is conventionally the dividing line between the East and West sides of the city. This grid system makes getting around quite easy. If you're ever lost, just look for the cross streets, and you will inevitably find your way.

A few avenues with names can cause additional confusion. In Midtown and on the Upper East Side, the avenues east of Fifth are, in order: Madison, Park, Lexington, Third, Second, First, York and, north of 79th Street, East End. At Columbus Circle (59th Street) on the Upper West Side, Eighth Avenue becomes Central Park West. West of that you'll find Columbus (it's Ninth Avenue south of there), Amsterdam (10th), Broadway, West End (11th) and Riverside Drive. And south of Houston Street (in SoHo and TriBeCa—"South of Houston" and "Triangle Below Canal"), the street numbers end and are replaced by names. This lower part of Manhattan has been known to cause confusion for even the most steadfast New Yorker.

Manhattan played a key role in the American Revolution. It was designated the new country's temporary capital in 1785, and George Washington assumed the presidency there in 1789. The city's excellent natural harbor led to its increasing importance, as it became a commercial shipping center and a major port of entry for immigrants. By 1800, the city's population had swelled to 60,000—more than any other city in the U.S.

The area around Manhattan grew at the same time, of course. With the completion of bridges that spanned the area waterways (the Brooklyn Bridge was the first in 1883), the door was opened for the creation of today's five-borough New York City. The union of Manhattan with Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx and Staten Island in 1898 made it a metropolis—an engine that would lead the continent and the world in diverse realms such as finance, banking, shipping, advertising, art, theater, garment and other manufacturing and, of course, tourism.

As the city has grown, its troubles have multiplied as well—poverty, traffic jams, skyrocketing costs, crime, pollution. New York teetered on the edge of bankruptcy in the 1970s, coming perilously close to losing its status as one of the world's great cities. But, as it had many times before, the city showed its stunning resilience and rebounded. Through a heady era of nearly unparalleled growth, the city was riding high in the '80s, then experienced a dip in the early '90s, when homelessness and crime made palpable increases. But New York again scored big in the late-1990s economic boom. Despite the terrorist attacks in 2001, that surge in public and commercial investment has continued.

Manhattan comes from the Indian name Man-a-hat-ta, meaning island of the hills.

In the 1950s SoHo was mostly known for prostitution and a decade later for artists' and photographers' studios. SoHo was also known as The Valley, Little Africa and Hell's Hundred Acres.

The Statue of Liberty stands 101 ft/31 m tall from base to torch and 305 ft/93 m tall from the pedestal foundation to the torch. She has a broken chain around her feet.

Macy's Department Store is the world's largest store, with 2.1 million sq ft/195,096 sq m of storage and shop space. It is also the world's second-largest consumer of helium (for balloons in the Thanksgiving Day parade), after the U.S. government.

The far East Village is also known as Alphabet City because the avenues east of First Avenue are named avenues A, B, C and D.

Aretha Franklin, Lauryn Hill, James Brown and Ella Fitzgerald are past winners of Apollo Theater's Amateur Night—but Luther Vandross was booed off the stage four times before his career took off.

The site where the United Nations headquarters sits today was a slaughterhouse until the 1940s. The Tudor City complex, across First Avenue, has few windows facing the United Nations because when the buildings were completed in 1928, there were still slaughterhouses to the east.

Nearly 30 men perished in the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, including designer John Roebling, who suffered a fatal accident while sinking the bridge's western support.