Last year I and my wife decided for the first time to do our Christmas shopping in New York City, also known by its nickname “The Big Apple”, and to visit the city “that never sleeps”.
To know the better places for shopping, the places we should visit, how to get there and the public transportations we should take to drive us to all those places I used my Sygic GPS navigation USA.
New York is located in the Atlantic coast (East coast) of the United States of America, in the state of the same name, on the mouth of Hudson River; the city is constituted by five boroughs, being each one a county of the state that were consolidated into a single city in the later 19th century The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island.
The city was founded by Dutch colons in 1624, under the name of New Amsterdam; in 1664 the city and its surroundings came under British control and the name of city changed to New York; the city was the capital of USA between 1785 and 1790.
The first thing we did in New York was shopping and we mainly went to the departments stores Macys, located at the 34th street, and Saks, in the Fifth Avenue, to the most famous toy shop, FAO Schwartz, at the Fifth Avenue and to Toys ‘R Us, at the Broadway Avenue; we also did some shopping in the streets of the city.
After solving our “shopping problem” we dedicated a few days to know New York City and we focused our attention to Manhattan, where the main touristic attractions of the city are located.
We start our tour in “Lower Manhattan”, going to “Ground Zero”, the former place of the World Trade Center buildings, destroyed by terrorists in September 11 attacks, to see the memorial to honor the victims, the “Reflecting Absence”. We continue until the Wall Street area, to the New York Stock Exchange, where we watch a stock exchange session.
Our next visit was New York Harbor and after we went to Battery Park where we took the ferry to the Statue of Liberty that was offered to the United States by the French people in the later 19th century; the statue is located at Liberty Island and represents “Libertas”, the Roman goddess of freedom, and is designed in a neoclassical style. We took the elevator up to the crown, where we had a wonderful view of the city.
We visited Greenwich Village, at western Lower Manhattan, formerly from the late 19th century to mid 20th century a place of artists, which is nowadays an upper and mid classes’ residential neighborhood and where we saw the Washington Square Park and the Washington Arc, dated from the late 19th century.
We walk around New York City to see some of the examples of the buildings designed in Art Deco style, dated from the 30’s decade of the 20th century, such as the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, which as a very popular outdoor observation deck at the 86th floor, we went to Chinatown to the Rockefeller Center to see the Christmas Tree and to the United Nations Headquarters.
As it was winter we could not enjoy Central Park, the largest green area of the city, but we went to visit to museums that are located at that area etropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History; we also visited the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Guggenheim Museum.
One night we went to Times Square, the intersection of the Seventh Avenue and Broadway Avenue, which is one the major centers of entertainment in the world; in that area we went t watch a musical show at one the numerous theatres that exists in that zone, known as the Broadway Theater District.
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