IL L U S TRAT I ON B Y PE T ER O U MA N S K I

Shakespeare in the Park, welcomes a production of Julius Caesar this summer. (If waiting all day in the park for free tickets isn’t on your agenda, try the newer Bryant Park Shakespeare, directly behind the New York Public Library, as a fresh alternative.) Meanwhile, the Gothic-revival Met houses a vast store of global treasures, too large to conquer in a day, though after admiring Egyptian artifacts and Old Masters gems, head to the rooftop for a restorative cocktail and beautiful city views. Just a few blocks southeast lies the institution’s latest ambition: the Met Breuer, the museum’s new, contemporary-art outpost housed in the former Madison Avenue home of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Met Breuer’s summer calendar includes a major retrospective of the prolific Brazilian artist Lygia Pape.

Speaking of the Whitney

( whitney.org), it has decamped for airier digs downtown. Its new home in the formerly industrial Meatpacking District is awash in edgy dining and shopping, and the new building, designed by architect Renzo Piano, fits right in. In this second museum/park pairing, the Whitney hugs the southern tip of the High Line ( thehighline.org), the disused elevated railway now reinvented as an urban park, outdoor gallery—and one of NYC’s most unmissable attractions.

Another key downtown neighborhood, SoHo might seem commercial and crowded now, but vestiges of its artsy heyday remain, notably two permanent, site-specific installations by conceptualist artist Walter de Maria that date back to the 1970s. The Earth Room

( earthroom.org) is literally named; it’s a huge
white box filled with moist earth almost two
feet deep, watered and raked weekly to stay
fresh—the warm, springlike smell is strangely
comforting. His nearby Broken Kilometer
n a city as multifaceted as New York,
pinpointing the must-sees of its most
famous borough, Manhattan, is
about as simple as finding the city’s
“best” pizza. Yet if you ask a New
Yorker, you’ll probably find that it’s
the diverse mix of established land-
marks, hidden pleasures and buzzed-about new
destinations that defines the city for locals. Try
a New York itinerary that’s as lively, iconic and
opinionated as the city itself.

Quintessential New York
The perfect Big Apple experience combines its world-famous
attractions with the city’s rising stars—call them modern classics.

BY MARK ELLWOOD

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JOURNEYS

THINGS TO DO

Two of Manhattan’s must-sees are counterparts, pairing a museum with a nearby urban green space; one duo is centuries old, while the other embodies the city’s constant urban renewal. The former, of course, is the combination of the Metropolitan Museum of Art ( metmuseum.org) with the adjacent