Even if you’re visiting New York for the first time, you’ve undoubtedly seen some version of this city before. Its images are ubiquitous—in movies and on television, in novels high- and low-brow, in songs, in classic photographs, and on the nightly news. You’ve probably watched enough Times Square ball drops and late-show lead-ins to anticipate its blaring horns, mega-watt neon lights, and skyscraper canyons—and, to be sure, New York will deliver them all. Perhaps you first fell in love with New York through Woody Allen movies—and imagine it to be full of neurotic writers and fledgling actors, who have affairs in Bohemian apartments and somehow can afford to eat out every night. While few live a lifestyle that glamorous, artists, intellectuals, and pseudo-intellectuals of every stripe do seem to gravitate here. Does your family tell stories of immigrant ancestors arriving at Ellis Island, penniless but hopeful? The 300 languages spoken on the city’s streets and its incomparable array of ethnic cuisines prove that New York is still a melting pot today. Perhaps you were raised on Eloise stories at bedtime, and you dream of luxuriating in plushly decorated hotel suites. New York certainly has no shortage of those to offer, though unless you’re here on an expense account, you’ll likely have to content yourself with a drink in a chic hotel bar. If, with some trepidation, you’re expecting the Gotham City of crime novels and the tabloid press—grimy and congested, dangerous and macabre—the extent to which New York has cleaned itself up in recent decades may surprise you, though a host of urban problems persist. On the other hand, if you’re expecting New York’s sidewalks to be as celebrity-packed as the pages of Us Weekly , you’ll probably be let down—but who knows who you might spot parading in SoHo? The truth is, each of these facets of New York life contains an element of truth, but what makes the city so intense is that it’s beyond any single cliché—and more than all of them put together. You could spend your whole life exploring New York and never exhaust its riches.
For 50 years, we have published the world’s favorite budget travel guides, written entirely by students and updated every year. With pen and notebook in hand and a few changes of underwear stuffed in our backpacks, we spend months roaming the globe in search of travel bargains.
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