The Upper West Side is where New York keeps its domestic life — not the towers of money across the park but the apartment houses people actually grew up in, the food shop that's also a meeting place, the side streets of stoops. It's a residential neighbourhood with a museum and a concert hall bolted on, and three and a half kilometres walks the whole character of it.
Start at Lincoln Center's plaza, then up to the Dakota on 72nd, the building that set the tone for everything north of it. Walk Central Park West past the San Remo and the Beresford, the apartment houses that gave the West Side a skyline the East Side never managed. Then west to Zabar's — go in, even if only for the smell of the coffee and the crowd at the lox counter — and cut through the brownstone streets down to the Hudson.
Riverside Park is the surprise: wide, quiet, the river right there. Walk it north, then come back east to the Museum of Natural History, where the blue whale has hung over the hall since 1969 and the new Gilder Center curves around the old. The B/C is right under it.
