New York City Hidden Gems: Off the Beaten Path

New York's iconic attractions — Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, Times Square — are famous for good reason, but the city's most extraordinary discoveries are typically found in the spaces between: the unmarked jazz club in a Harlem basement, the rooftop garden above a Midtown skyscraper open to the public for thirty years without most New Yorkers knowing it exists, the medieval monastery transplanted stone by stone from Europe and rebuilt on a Hudson River bluff above the Bronx. These hidden New York experiences separate the visitor from the connoisseur.

The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park houses the Metropolitan Museum's medieval collection in a monastery complex assembled from five French abbeys, set on a bluff with Hudson River views that are among New York's most romantic. The City Reliquary museum in Williamsburg preserves New York ephemera — a fragment of the old Coney Island roller coaster, a street sign from before the grid system, a collection of every Statue of Liberty souvenir ever manufactured — in a tiny storefront that tells the city's story more intimately than any institutional museum. The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City occupies the sculptor's former studio and is one of the finest single-artist museum experiences in the United States.

Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn is a National Historic Landmark whose Victorian landscape architecture, extraordinary mausolea, and resident monk parakeet colony make it one of New York's most unexpectedly beautiful outdoor spaces. The Whispering Gallery at Grand Central Terminal allows two people standing in opposite corners of the dining concourse to hold a whispered conversation across the room through acoustic reflection — one of the city's best-kept architectural secrets. The Roosevelt Island Tramway provides a five-minute aerial gondola crossing of the East River with Manhattan and Queens skyline views for the price of a subway fare — the best cheap thrill in New York.