by Caroline Hendrie
I love autumn in the Big Apple. For me there is no better season to visit, with clear skies and the sun sparkling on skyscrapers.
July and August can feel like sightseeing in a Turkish bath, but from September through to Thanksgiving, the air is crisp, temperatures are mild and walking up and down the avenues is a pleasure. No wonder, then, that autumn is parade season, the perfect time to see New Yorkers at play.
It is also the season when new exhibitions come to the city’s excellent museums and new shows open on Broadway. And an autumn break in New York is the perfect opportunity to do your Christmas shopping.
In the city that never sleeps, there is enough to keep the most energetic visitor busy for a lifetime of New York holidays. So, here are just a few of my favourite things to do on a New York break this autumn.
Outdoors
Parks
New York is blessed with green spaces and when the leaves start to turn the spectrum of colours is incredible.
Central Park is huge, but my favourite spots are all reachable on a good walk. Strawberry Fields with its circular Imagine mosaic memorial to John Lennon is across from his home at the Dakota building at W72nd St. It is a quiet zone with benches, surrounded by rocks and foliage. Gapstow Bridge, a perfect curve over the pond near 59th St is just the spot for leaf peeping, with Grey Birch, Black Cherry and Tupelo trees turning yellow, red and orange, shedding their leaves onto the still water. The Ramble, rocks laced with walking paths throngs with foliage – purple Sweet Gum, red Maple and bronze Pin Oak.
The High Line, created out of a long abandoned railway used to transport carcasses to the butchers of the Meatpacking District, is a delightful elevated walk way. Stroll for a mile and a half (or take the lifts or stairs up or down a various points) from W 34th St to Gansevoort St between planted beds, sculptures and picnic benches with views of the Hudson River, the Empire State Building and downtown New York.
Fort Tryon Park, all the way uptown at Manhattan’s skinny top, these delightful woodlands and gardens (laid out in 1935 by the son of the architect of Central Park) look down to the Hudson River and are particularly lovely in the Fall. The New Leaf Café restaurant makes a great spot for an elegant brunch.
Parades
Autumn the perfect season to watch a parade and New York certainly knows how to pull of spectacular ones. On the first Sunday of October thousands of New Yorkers take their pets to the St Francis Day Blessing of the Animals at the Cathedral of St John the Divine. Watch the animals and their owners in their Sunday bests line up and walk past in order of size, from minnows to an elephant.
On October 31 every year, 50,000 people put on scary and hilarious costumes for the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. Bring your own costume and join in, or watch the characters, hundreds of puppets and 50 bands swarm up 6th Avenue starting at 7pm.
The Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade on the morning of the last Thursday of November is a three-hour extravaganza of floats, giant balloons, bands and baton twirlers starting at Central Park West and ending at Macy’s the iconic department store in Herald Square. The following day is Black Friday, kicking off the Christmas shopping season with irresistible discounts in shops all over the city of as much as 80 per cent.
Indoors
Museums
Weather a bit iffy? Set off on a walk and just a let any squalls blow you into one of New York’s wonderful museums.
Right opposite Central Park on Fifth Avenue, you can’t miss the outline of the Guggenheim Museum, the spectacular circular, white inverted pyramid of a building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1950s. Inside the magnificent collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and early Modern art is displayed on a continuous, spiral ramp.
The new Whitney Museum of American Art, a vast, glass and metal asymmetrical building designed by Renzo Piano, the architect who gave London the Shard, is just steps from the High Line. The vast, glass and metal, asymmetrical museum has a blockbuster exhibition opening on October 30, Frank Stella: A Retrospective, showcasing works from the 1950s to the present day by the artist best known for his colourful, geometric hard-edge paintings.
The charming Cloisters, constructed from the remains of five French and Spanish Abbeys of the 12th to 15th century, is a serene outpost of the Metropolitan Museum set in Fort Tryon Park. Inside you’ll find Medieval art and artefacts including Flemish tapestries, a rare pack of 15th-century playing cards, illuminated manuscripts and a mysterious, Romanesque altar cross, intricately carved in walrus ivory and believed to come from Bury St Edmunds Abbey which was stripped bare in the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII.
