Me and my SO will be spending new year’s eve in New York (December 29 to January 2nd approximately). It’s an improvised last minute trip so we have no plans whatsoever on how to spend our time there.
We’ll be staying with her grandmother somewhere in Harlem (I’d have preferred Manhattan but hey! free lodging 
). And well, i’d like to make my visit an enjoyable one.
I’m open to all kinds of suggestions/advices/warnings/propositions/tomatoes…
Thanks in advance
Gozu
I forgot to mention we’re going to be on a tight budget so take that into consideration please. Good thing we get free lodging and food…
Harlem is in Manhattan – more or less the northwesternmost part of it.
American Museum of Natural History is a must-see, as of course is the ferry ride out to the Statue of Liberty. I’d suggest making a list of things and places that are located there that fit into stuff that you personally are particularly interested in – the Columbia University ntomology Department’s collection of tropical beetles may interest some and be totally repulsive to others; likewise Broadway plays, two of the great cathedrals of North America, and so forth and so on.
Harlem’s in Manhattan, close to all the subways, so don’t worry.
Buy a fun pass for each of you each day for $4–it’ll pay for itself in three trips. That way you can do more than round trip to Grandma’s–if you’re in midtown and want to go to Greenwich Village, you can hop on and off a bus w/o spending another buck fifty.
Bring good walking shoes and buy a good, detailed map.
Visit Ground Zero. Everybody should. And the Winter Garden area next to it has nice restaurants and sandwich places where you can sit without tipping and all.
Walk around Soho (between Canal St. and Houston) and Greenwich Village (Washington Square and environs). Go to Sutton Place (43-57th Streets on the East River) to see how the other half lives. Avoid the Times Square area on Dec. 31st–it’ll be mobbed. Watching the ball drop really isn’t worth it. Get a First Night schedule–there’ll probably be one in the NY Post or NY Times–and go to the concerts and fireworks in Central Park for New Year’s.
TKTS has half-price tickets for Broadway and off-Broadway shows. You should take in at least one if you can. NY Theater is fantastic. Avoid the touristy stuff like Les Mis and Phantom, and the Disney shows like Aida.
Walk to Lincoln Center and see the tree. Visit the Rockefeller Center tree early in the morning to avoid some of the crowds.
Enjoy!
If you like WWII era military stuff, the Intrepid Museum is an old Aircraft Carrier with a bunch of great aircraft, up to the SR-71 Blackbird, (OK, it is an A-12 Blackbird, same diff). I’ve never been, but plan to go.
Dude, thesemaps by Streetwise are pretty good. Laminated, weather-proof, accordian-folded so you don’t have to wrestle with them, and it’s got my criteria street: Commerce St. in the West Village, where the Cherry Lane Theater is. If I can find that theater on a map on that little crooked street, I know it’s a good map.
Barnes & Nobles have them, and many large drugstore type things.
Oh yeah, there’s only two K-marts and no Walmarts, Targets, etc. And the K-marts suck-diddly-uck.
Grand Central Terminal is dazzling. So’s the NY Public Library, a block and a half from it.
Can you let us know what your interests are? History, science, architecture, transporation, art?
Note to UncleBill: the INTREPID is wonderful, inside and out, but if you want to go up topside you might want to wait for warmer weather. Certain weather conditions they don’t even let you go up there at all, and it would be like seeing half the museum. It gets windy up there–wait til it’s 50 or above.
Mehitabel, what exactly is wrong with the K-Mart on Astor? I get lost in there…
Well, last time I was there, there wasn’t a staff member to be found, I saw three mice in the food section, and empty boxes from which the stuff had been shoplifted right out of were spilling off the shelves. And they didn’t have the humidifier filter I needed. I finally came across a few staff members chatting and asked them–a couple had no idea what a humidifier was and nobody bothered to go to the back to check for one.
It was just generally depressin’. Gozu, New Yorkers don’t really bother with chain stores. Uhm, except for Starbucks. Hell, right in Astor Place you can sit in one and stare into another.
Read what I have to say here. Lots of cheap, fun and off-the-beaten path tourist advice from a native NYer who knows of what he speaks:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=29170&highlight=vacation+and+advice
A tight budget necessitates a trip down Orchard St. (Lower East Side, or L-E-S as natives call it), and in and around Alphabet City, where you can find some great smaller thrift stores.
Two words: Carnegie Deli. You don’t have to be Jewish to love this place. The sandwiches are so big you could make 20 smaller ones out of the meat. Cheesecake is great too.