Five days in New York City: Beyond the Checklist and Into the Grid

Whatever time you land, this first evening is Midtown, which is where you will probably be sleeping and which is best seen in exactly the order below. It is about a mile and a half in total, all flat, and everything on it stays open late.

Start at Grand Central, walk west, and let the day escalate. The terminal is genuinely beautiful and completely free: come in from 42nd Street, stand at the top of the western stairs and look at the ceiling, which is a green-blue astronomical chart with the constellations painted backwards. Nobody has ever settled whether that was a mistake or a deliberate view from outside the heavens.

Ten minutes further west the character changes entirely. Times Square is loud, aggressively commercial and not really a square, and it is worth twenty minutes after dark and not much more. Go once, at night, when the point of it is obvious.

Then finish high up. The Empire State Building was the tallest in the world when it opened in 1931 and it is still the one the city is shaped around, and the observatories stay open until two in the morning. Go after ten and the queues thin out to almost nothing.

This is the harbour day and the only one with a clock on it. Ferries to Liberty Island leave from Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan, security is airport-grade, and the queue at half past eight is minutes long while the queue at eleven is not. Book the earliest sailing you can and be at the pier before it.

The statue was a gift from France for the centenary of American independence and has been on the UNESCO list since 1984, and the thing you are unprepared for is the copper: it arrived the colour of a new penny and took about thirty years of weather to turn green. Pedestal tickets get you inside and onto the balcony. The crown is a separate ticket that sells out months ahead.

The same ferry then calls at Ellis Island, and this is the half of the trip that stays with people. Twelve million immigrants were processed through the main hall between 1892 and 1954, and something like four in ten Americans can trace a relative through it. The registry room is left almost bare, which is the right decision.

Come back to Battery Park in the middle of the afternoon and walk fifteen minutes north to the memorial. Two square voids sit in the footprints of the towers with water falling into them and the names of nearly three thousand people cut through the bronze parapets. It is free to stand there. The museum below is ticketed, takes two hours and is not something to attempt tired.

Then walk east to the bridge. Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on the raised wooden promenade takes half an hour, the light in the last hour before sunset is the reason to time it this way, and you land in Dumbo with the skyline behind you and dinner in front.

Today is one continuous walk northwest across the older half of Manhattan, from the tenements to the meatpacking district, and it is the day that explains how the city actually got built. Three and a half miles with long stops in it, or two subway rides if the weather is against you.

Start on the Lower East Side, where the immigrants who came through Ellis Island yesterday ended up. The Tenement Museum is a preserved building on Orchard Street, and it works by taking you into individual flats restored to the year a particular family lived in them. It can only be seen on a guided tour, tours are small and they book out, so buy the ticket the night before at the latest.

Walk west into the Village and the grid falls apart. The streets bend, the buildings drop to four or five storeys, and Washington Square appears with its arch, its fountain and its permanent cast of chess players, buskers and NYU students. Sit down for a while. This is the best free hour in Manhattan.

Keep going northwest to Chelsea. The market in the old Nabisco factory, where the Oreo was invented, is now a block-long hall of food counters, and it is where lunch is. The stairs at the far end lead up to the High Line, an elevated freight line whose last train ran in 1980, replanted as a park thirty feet above the street.

Walk the whole length of it north and you finish at Hudson Yards in the late afternoon, which is a good place to give up and get a train.

The eastern edge of Central Park between 82nd and 89th Street holds more art than most countries, and today does two of it with the park in between. Take the subway to 86th Street and walk in.

The Met is the one people underestimate. It opened in 1872, occupies hundreds of rooms across two floors, and covers five thousand years, and nobody sees it in a day. So do not try: choose two or three departments before you go in, walk to them and ignore everything else. The Egyptian wing with the Temple of Dendur, the European paintings on the second floor and the American Wing are the usual answer, and the roof garden is open from spring to autumn.

Come out and go straight into the park. Central Park is 843 acres and entirely artificial, dug and planted from swamp and rock in the 1850s and 60s, and the piece to walk to is Bethesda Terrace, ten minutes south of the museum. The fountain in the middle has an angel on it from 1873 and the arcade underneath it has a tiled ceiling that people play music beneath because of what it does to the sound.

Then go back east and north for the Guggenheim, which is the antidote to the Met: one building, one ramp, an hour and a half. Frank Lloyd Wright finished it in 1959, it is a white spiral you walk down rather than up, and the building is at least half the reason to go.

The last morning is Midtown again, which is convenient for a bag drop and for getting to an airport, and it holds the two things worth saving until now.

MoMA opens at ten thirty and is at its worst by noon, so be there at the door. The trick everybody who lives here uses is to take the lift to the fifth floor and work downward: that is where the paintings people came for hang, and the crowd is still queueing at the ground floor entrance when you get there.

Then walk five minutes west to 30 Rockefeller Plaza and go up. The Top of the Rock deck is on the 70th floor and has the view the Empire State does not, which is the Empire State itself, standing alone in the middle of Midtown with Central Park stretching away behind you the other way. It is the right last thing to see.

Airports from here: allow ninety minutes to JFK or Newark, an hour to LaGuardia, and more of both at rush hour.