Agoraphobic visiting New York City for the first time. Advice? Suggestions? Comments?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I have always had a dream. Number one on my bucket list, visit New York City someday. Well, I have some extra money and a friend who is willing to drive me. We’re actually just going to make a day trip. I know that it’s not really feasible to just visit New York City for a day,…I live in Buffalo, New York right now…

But my friend is going to drive out here and then we’re going to drive to a train station about halfway there and take the train the rest of the way. Spend the day there, leave at night, take the train back, possibly stay over in a motel somewhere… Outside of New York city, obviously, so that it’s cheap…

And there you go, that’s all she wrote.

I don’t really have any plans, I just want to see New York City as a whole. I do have some minor wishes like seeing times square seeing a little bit of Central Park, and maybe going to a museum or the library, but beyond that… Nothing. I’m pretty much going to stay with my friend, because I find it hard to be outside alone by myself. I have severe agoraphobia and I very rarely leave the house. For the last 25 years I have not really left the house, I’m a shut-in, I’m a hermit, I’m a recluse. I don’t like living this life, and I’m always looking out the window and wishing I could interact with it, but I don’t like being outside, I don’t like being alone outside, and I don’t like people or human interaction very much. I know, I know, so why the hell do I want to go to New York City one of the most populated places in the entire us? Biggest city by population. And me, an agoraphobic, wants to go. I can’t explain it.

So does anyone have any suggestions? Advice? Recommendations? Offers to help? I don’t know who posts here who lives in New York City or next to New York City, and even if you do I don’t think I could find the time to meet you anywhere because I’m mostly going to be staying with my friend and sticking with them wherever they go, but I think one of the places we’re going to see is the Statue of Liberty at the very least, so if you want to meet up maybe we can meet there or somewhere else?

Anyway, I was just posting to talk about it… Because I’m so excited that I need to talk about it..

We’ll be going tomorrow, Sunday.

2

I know you love food, so my recommendation is to explore restaurants. Since you’ll be coming into Penn Station, you’ll be right next to my favorite NYC pizza place, NYC Pizza Suprema. I’m not a New Yorker, so I haven’t tried everything, but for visitors I think it’s a great choice.

Other options depend on your tastes. Do you want to try some cuisines you’ve never had (like Korean, or Pakistani, or Malaysian, or Jamaican, or anything else)? You can find every kind of food in NYC.

Good luck! I hope you have a wonderful time.

3

Seconded! Well worth a visit.

Re: “the library,” bear in mind that the Schwarzman Building (the ornate historic NYPL location with the stone lions) is closed on Sundays in the summer. OTOH, the privately owned Morgan Library and Museum will be open.

4

I saw the Statue of Liberty decades ago, so this may no longer apply but at the time (1987 or so), doing so took most of the day. We had to get to Battery Park early in the day, buy tickets from a booth, ride a ferry to Liberty Island and then walk to the pedestal (which is itself enormous). We chose to climb the stairs all the way to the crown but I don’t think everyone does that. (I was surprised at how small the windows in the crown were. Also, the platform at the very top was tiny, so lingering wasn’t really possible as others were coming up behind us.)

5

Any major attraction you want to see, such as MoMA, you’ll definitely want an advance reservation and tickets. Or else you’ll spend 6 hours standing in line on sunny Sunday. 6 hours you don’t have to waste.

Decent bet there are few if any reservations available for that kind of place for tomorrow.

A pleasant thing I like to do is ride the Staten Island ferry. It’s free, if you’re not at weekday rush hour it’s relatively uncrowded, and it’s a chance to get outside the concrete canyons and see the gestalt of the city and harbor. It’s 10-15 minutes each way, and although there’s not much to do near the Staten Island terminal, you can hop on the next ferry back with only a few minutes’ wait in the terminal. So for ~45 minutes invested you get a mini harbor tour with no irritating narration. And there’s a bunch of neat or at least famous stuff to see down in the Battery Park area of Lower Manhattan from which the ferry departs.

6

One thing I noticed about NYC is that even though there are a lot of people, people there pretty much ignore everyone else. Everyone is in their own world. You can walk around a big crowd and all the other people feel like just part of the background. When you see someone walking towards you in a smaller city, you might be thinking about how much eye contact to make, whether to say hi or nod, how soon to look up, etc. But in NYC, no one is looking at anyone else. The people on the sidewalk are like trees or mailboxes. You can totally ignore them. Yes, there are a lot of them, but you don’t have to acknowledge they are there in any way. That’s the case even when you’re walking on a deserted sidewalk and someone is walking towards you. You both just ignore each other and it’s not awkward at all. That kind of anonymity is one of the things I liked about being in the city. I think it’s why celebs like to live there. No one notices them, and those that notice them, don’t care.

Based on what you said, I might recommend you don’t try to pack in a lot of stuff on this trip. NYC has so much stuff that it can be overwhelming and exhausting if you try to do a lot. You might want to make this a simple trip to get a taste for the city. I loved just walking around NYC. The city itself is a great attraction. If you don’t like being in enclosed spaces with a lot of people, experiencing the city itself can be lots of fun. Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge was amazing. Taking ferries between Manhattan and Brooklyn gets you great views of the city. The observation deck of the Rockefeller Center gives you great views of the city (make reservations). There’s also a lot of creative enclaves for niche interests. If there’s some oddball thing that you’re into, there’s probably a tiny museum somewhere about that topic.

7

Wow, Times Square on an 80+ degree sunny summer Sunday is about the last place I would ever expect an agoraphobic to want to go, so if this is like immersion therapy props to you. The crowds will be crazy intense. Like shoulder to shoulder pushing through people to move crowded.

I think walking the High Line may be nice since the weather will be perfect. It’s completely free and the views are cool. It’s an unused elevated railroad that was converted into a park.

8

Bingo.

I worked in NYC for a couple of years, and being an introvert with sensory issues, I expected to hate it. But it was actually really nice. Nobody talks to you. You don’t have to worry about feeling observed or judged. There is so much diversity of humanity that you’re not even close to the weirdest thing they’ve ever seen.

The only rule of thumb I suggest is try not to slow them down. Don’t stand in the middle of the sidewalk or block any paths and you’ll be good.

9

If you’ve just got one day in New York City, I think you’re going to have to limit what you see and do. You might consider one of the Gray Line sightseeing tours. That would probably get you most of the highlights in a few hours. Some of these tours offer hop-on, hop-off options so you can disembark at points and catch a later bus.

And many of these tours are on open-top double-decker buses with a guide, which might help.

10

I’m back now. The people I was with and I spent about 12 hours in New York City., maybe about 7 hours alone in times square by itself. It was pretty impressive and I enjoyed it and I have no regrets. I took along $1,000 to spend and I wound up spending $800 of it, which is less than I thought but probably way more than I needed to spend. I was spending it friviously on three people expecting to spend all of it, so it was a surprise when I had $200 left over.

The crowds were indeed very huge, sometimes it was front of the chest right to the back of the very next person and the front of another person pressing against your back, when we were traveling through times square, even at 12:30 a.m. … I mean, I had never seen that many people in one place at the same time in my life. The hordes of the crowd just kept coming and coming, it was non-stop, there would be like … A huge amount of people, a huge crowd, coming through and it would just be constant. It would be never ending. Even if you pressed against the building on the side, you were still just squeezing through. I thought maybe at the point of it being one a.m. or maybe 2:00 a.m. it would abate a little bit, but it never did. And this was 1:00 a.m. on a Sunday to Monday morning. Not exactly a time when I would think it would be the busiest.

It wasn’t always like that and it wasn’t like that everywhere, but in the heart of times square it was like that constant. But it was still a very enjoyable experience and we walked up one side of times square and then down the other, over about a 7-hour period. We stopped in a couple places like popeyes, and we stopped at a bar, and we stopped to get a New York slice which I had never had before at Val’s pizza… And I got a ton of pictures, so did my two traveling companions. Overall it was really enjoyable and I loved it, even though I’m agoraphobic, that usually means it applies to being outside, not among people, I was fine with being in large crowds. I probably got more used to it as the time went on.

We are already planning future trips, not only to New York City again but also to places like San Francisco and Boston / Salem. My traveling companions are travel lovers who love to road trip everywhere, so yes, we will probably be driving to these other places too. My traveling companions actually live in Massachusetts so they say that a trip to Boston would actually be a shorter distance then to New York City. I mean when you wager in coming to pick me up first and then having to travel back home. I funded the entire trip, but they did all the work, they drove out to get me which was a 5-hour trip, then we made a 6-hour trip from Buffalo to New York, then we made a 6-hour trip back from New York to Buffalo and then they went back home from Buffalo to Massachusetts that was another 5 hours.

Somehow, though, they say that coming to get me in Buffalo and going to Boston and then driving me back to Buffalo and then going back home to Pittsfield massachusetts, would be a shorter time than New York, mostly because it’s a more straight line. I will be funding that entire trip too, however, so as long as they do the work I will do the money

And I got along really well with them too. I had already been friends with one of them on Facebook for a decade or so and although I had never met her in real life. The person she brought along with her daughter… Age 25, and she was just as awesome.

So anyway, yeah, there’s an update for you.

11

That’s great! I’m so glad you enjoyed it. Can you tell us more about the food you ate? What did you like best?

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I had no idea how your agoraphobia might affect you (especially with the crowds), so I’m glad you enjoyed the trip.

13

This^^

Happy you’ve come away with a positive experience. No matter how idiosyncratic it may have been.

Bravo! Well done!!

14

I’m really happy to hear this!

I had one very memorable night in Times Square with a number of Dopers around 2008-2009. Probably one of the highlights of my time there.

I never got to do a lot of the fun things because after commuting 1:45 there and back every day during the week I did not often feel up to going back on the weekend. That Dopefest was one of my rare weekend excursions.

But it really did seem like a tremendously fun place. I look forward to learning about your other traveling opportunities!

15

Has anyone mentioned the Cloisters?