Lonely Planet - New York City

3. Zip to the top of the rock

With twenty-two ornate, luxurious acres of shops, gardens, banks and art deco sculptures right in the heart of pulsating Manhattan, what could be more magnificent on a cold winter's night than this iconic location with its immense Christmas tree and romantic skating rink? Only the view from 70 stories up. Top of the Rock, the city's most expansive and vertigo-inducing observation deck, shut down for 20 years, is back in business.

Rockefeller Center was conceived by oil magnate John D. Rockefeller during the Great Depression. Engaging in a mammoth project to house clothing stores and other high-end shops at a time when most Americans barely had two coins to rub together was a risky enterprise. But the decade-long project provided 70,000 workers with jobs and created a celebrated 'city within a city' that now houses several major media corporations, including NBC Studios and the Associated Press.

It also contains more than 100 works of art, including a major mural in each building - all but the one by Mexican artist Diego Rivera.

Rivera included Lenin in his work, which didn't please his capitalist boss. It was destroyed, and replaced by Jose Maria Sert's painting of Abraham Lincoln. Other important works include Prometheus, overlooking the skating rink, Atlas carrying the world on Fifth Ave, and News, an installation by Isamu Noguchi at 45 Rockefeller Plaza.

4. Take in a Broadway show amid the Times Sq neon

This maelstrom of human activity and flashing neon lights is definitely the city's most famous intersection. Synonymous in the late 1960s with sex shops, peep shows and colorful off beat characters, today's Times Sq has a comparatively clean and healthy image (although its 40 miles of neon does turn night into day, and can make you feel a bit like a french fry under a hot lamp). Nonetheless, its trademark, high-energy theater buzz still abounds, especially on weekend nights when the lights are flashing, sidewalks are jumping and everybody is hustling for that 8pm curtain.

Formerly known as Long Acre Sq, this placid horse-trading plaza changed forever in 1904 with the advent of the subway and the addition of the New York Times newspaper, which eventually lent its name to the location. The paper threw itself a little party on December 31, which has now become the annual New Year's Eve ball-dropping bacchanalia.

Don't worry if you miss it though - the full-on, high wattage effect of Times Sq is a daily occurrence. Known as the Crossroads of the World, it remains the brashest, boldest piece of in-your-face infotainment the world's ever seen.

5. Explore Central Park's pathways

Welcome to the lungs of New York City, a place where verdant grasses, dappled forests, wild flowers and cool, meandering streams erase the memories of traffic jams and crowded sidewalks. This is the people's park, designed in the 1860s and '70s by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux to provide an open space for everyone.

This oasis of rolling pastures and gardens stretches from midtown to the beautifully restored Harlem Meer. Walkers, joggers, cyclists, inline skaters, rock-climbers, cross-country skiers and horseback riders share the ample supply of roadways. Couples, friends and sometimes even strangers meet at the center, Betheseda Terrace, recognizable by the famous Angel of the Waters statue in its middle.

So much communing with nature gets done in Central Park that it's hard to believe it's almost entirely artificial - it was the first landscaped park built in US history. To make space for it, several communities and businesses were razed, including Seneca Village, Manhattan's first prominent gathering of free African-American property owners. Olmsted and Vaux also drained a swamp, moved fi ve million cubic yards of soil and built four transverse roads to carry cross-town traffic beneath the park's hills (66th, 79th, 86th and 96th Sts run right underneath).

The park's northern sections were deliberately left untamed, with the exception of the Conservatory Gardens, a sensory overload of tulips and flowering apple trees. Most of the area above 79th St is craggy and wild.

One of the most famous parts of the park is the Great Lawn, between 72nd and 86th Sts, where you can catch the New York Philharmonic Orchestra each summer. Nearby you'll find Delacorte Theater, home to the annual Shakespeare in the Park Festival, panoramic Belvedere Castle, the bird-watching (and gay-male cruising) haven of the Ramble, and Loeb Boathouse, where you can take a romantic row around a glassy pond.

You can also check out the penguins, polar bears, sea lions, pandas and tamarin monkeys at the Central Park Wildlife Center, housing a children's discovery center as well. Sea lions chow down frenzy by tossing in some fish.

Walkers and joggers will appreciate the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir. Its circular 1.58-mile track is a favorite training ground for the New York City marathon.

On the park's west side, near the 79th St Tranverse, is Strawberry Fields, home to an ever-evolving, changing memorial to John Lennon, who liked to hang out in that ethereal stretch of park and who was shot by a deranged fan while entering his apartment across the street in 1980. The list of must-sees and dos goes on and on in Central Park; for more information, visit the Dairy Visitor Center (Tel: 212- 794-6564; www.centralpark.org).