It is popular, particularly in certain circles – it has always been popular in these circles – to lambast New York City. The crime, the filth, the soaring costs, the homelessness, the sheer urban carnage of it all that lurks just beneath the snow-globe image – part “French Connection,” part “Home Alone 2.” And yet…
And yet, we might say of this almost 400-year-old city of reinvention – it was founded by the Dutch in 1624 — what Shakespeare says of Cleopatra: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.”
Indeed, it is the place atop the bucket list of many Americans, according to a survey by
Viator, ranking ahead of Paris and London. Part of why New York City speaks to a new generation is that it is Instagrammable. Taking into account Instagram hastags and TikTok views, JOOR found that the Big Apple is second only to Paris – so, not too shabby – when it comes to street style. (London and Milan were an unsurprising third and fourth, the quartet of cities hosting the semiannual fashion weeks.)
New York’s fashion street smarts have 61.3M TikTok views and 130,000 Instagram hashtags. Explore KITH in SoHo, Fivestory, The Webster and more for unusual street style and cutting-edge fashion finds; Orchard Street on the Lower East Side for vintage, independent and emerging designer stores; and Ludlow Street for the indie fashion scene.
Also Instagrammable — New York’s many museums, with three finishing in the top 10 of a survey by photograph wall tiles company Storyboards. Midtown’s The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) – home of Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory” – has the most hashtagged Instagram posts with 2,917,787 million. The hashtag #moma generates the lion’s share of its Instagram hashtags, with a total of 2,575,679 posts, while the hashtag #museumofmodernart has been used on 342,108 Instagram posts.
Uptown’s spiraling Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, is third on the list, with 967,717 Instagram posts. The hashtag #guggenheim is the musuem’s most popular, with 959,631 posts. The second most popular hashtag is solomonrguggenheimmuseum, with a total of 8,086 posts.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is sixth on the list, with 449,310 Instagram posts. The hashtag #metropolitanmuseumofart has the highest number of posts, totaling 437,745, while the hashtag #themetmuseum generates 11,565 Instagram posts.
The museums are just part of what makes New York irresistible to so many. At holiday time, residents and visitors alike throng to the great, glorious Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center and Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Real estate firm Houlihan Lawrence’s excellent newsletter has some other great suggestions for your visit here.
Viator is back with some off-the-beaten-path attractions, including Brooklyn’s eco-friendly Green-Wood Cemetery, and Plymouth Church, rich in abolitionist history; Queens’ King Manor, home of Sen. Rufus King, a signer of the U.S. Constitution and an abolitionist; the 100-year-old Morgan Library & Museum, once the Manhattan home of financial titan and bibliophile J. Pierpont Morgan; St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue; Lower Manhattan’s Merchant’s House Museum, the city’s first landmark, which sees itself threatened by an adjacent development; The Frick Collection, temporarily relocated to the former Madison Avenue home of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Met Breuer while its own Fifth Avenue home (at 70th Street), once the domicile of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, is under renovation; the Church of the Ascension in Greenwich Village; Tiffany & Co.’s reinvented flagship; now called “The Landmark”; and the Chester A. Arthur House, the lower Manhattan home of the 21st president of the United States. – edited by Georgette Gouveia
