- nbhd -
midtown
If you had asked me years ago, before I moved to NYC, how often I thought I would be in midtown if I lived here, I’d probably say fairly often. Considering how much midtown Manhattan defines the experiences of tourists to the city, it is remarkable how little time I spend there. Save for the occasional pop out to Bryant Park, or a random errand near Columbus Circle, I rarely even go above 34th St. I do my damn best to avoid braving a 42nd St transfer below ground. And when I do skirt around the edges of Midtown, I keep it short.
Midtown for the most part these days, is pretty mid. Commercial. Convenient. Few reasons to specifically be there without an appointment or event. But catch me in a good mood on a warm summer evening and I start to wonder if I have just been brainwashed to hate midtown. Is it that bad? The tall buildings feel like a city alive. The pedestrians and food carts add to the ambience. The streets don’t feel overly cramped like downtown (looking at you, Soho), intersections move in an orderly chaos, storefronts are large and subway stations feel a bit more modern.
Sometimes itâs nice to feel tiny among the tall buildings. Surrounded by a world that has found itself walking these blocks.
While Midtown sometimes just feels like a massive cluster of activity in the shadows of skyscrapers, it’s more like a bunch of overlapping historic districts that can cut up the same few blocks in a dozen different ways. Some say Midtown extends down to 23rd or even 14th, but I beg to differ. Thereâs a âlowerâ part of Midtown that is actually tolerable to be in (the 20s), and more chaotic part that is a necessary evil (the 30s). And then thereâs what I consider true Midtown: the 40s and 50s. But a few blocks can make all the difference.
Letâs start in the middle. The most Midtown part of Midtown. The thing that most people imagine when they think of New York City. The special slice of hell where Broadway intersects 7th Ave in a visual mess of neon and billboards and flashing signs all fighting for your attention while you fight for your life to get past the M&Ms Store and Hard Rock Cafe. Itâs America at its worst. Disney World if it was dreamed up by a masochist. There is only one reason to be here, and it is not to go to the Olive Garden ironically. It is Broadway. Because unfortunately for us, in order to see any show you have to either navigate the labyrinth of the subway station up and down stairs with people screaming and singing as you try to find the optimal exit to use, or take the fight above ground through blocks of tourists piled up at the intersections, too scared to jaywalk.
Itâs worth it though. Once youâre in the theater youâre in a new world, and you completely forget youâre in the worst place until those doors open and youâre dumped back out onto the streets. Itâs like Hollywood Boulevard, except a lot of people actually have to commute here.
In a way, itâs the most democratizing few blocks of Manhattan. Tourists, commuters, theater kids, hustlers working the crowd, white collar, blue collar, people who’ve never left the five boroughs standing next to people who flew in from the other side of the world â everyone ends up here eventually, willingly or not. But having walked through an empty version of it during the pandemic, I guess it feels better to see it full.
If it were up to me, Hellâs Kitchen would actually be the middle part. But it is actually west of that. And remarkably chill given its proximity to chaos. For most of the 20th century, this was the working-class counterpart to what Midtown would become. Run by Irish mobs and inhabited by theater people for the affordability and proximity to work. These days, itâs a solid LGBTQ community, and a more residential area with a half decent selection of restaurants on 9th Ave.
The only part of 42nd Street that doesnât suck is from Bryant Park on east. Grand Central is a pleasant experience compared to Times Square or Penn Station, even with the tourists. This is appointment territory to me: work events, errands, consulates. That view of the Chrysler building from Tudor City Place. The corporate core stacked along Park and Madison. It feels equal parts historic and modern, local and international, capped with the United Nations Headquarters on the riverfront.
Iâve been told (by friends who live in the neighborhood), that the blocks under 59th Street are called âCentral Park South.â Which sounds to me like real estate branding if Iâve ever seen it, but the fancy hotels and department stores and MoMA and billionaire views from buildings we love to hate do feel a bit distinct from the rest of it. Plus, walking down 5th Ave from Bergdorf down towards the Rockefeller Center is can melt the coldest hearts during the holidays.
On the fringes, Midtown is remarkably normal. At street level once you get past the billboards: 24-hour diners next to bodegas next to franchise restaurants, decades-old theater-crowd bars, business hotels, mom-and-pop holdouts, all crammed together on the grid with Broadway slicing diagonally through it. It’s not curated, not trying to be an aesthetic the way Soho or Williamsburg increasingly are. It’s just serving a lot of different people at once, and there’s something genuinely good about a part of the city that hasn’t been smoothed over yet.
