New York City (Fodor's, 2012) - Fodor's [76]
Both campuses have beautiful buildings, but the area’s architectural winner is the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, the world’s largest Gothic-style cathedral. And when you get hungry, well … with students come great cheap eats: peruse a local newspaper at an old-school diner, or sample the authentic Mexican and South American cooking on Amsterdam Avenue.
ENJOY A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC
Have a night on the town without heading south of Central Park. The Upper West Side is New York’s epicenter of the performing arts, especially classical music. The acoustic star is Lincoln Center, a 16-acre collective of concert halls and other institutions (including Juilliard) that draws the world’s greatest musicians, dancers, and other performers. In 2009 the center finished major renovations, making the complex much more a part of the neighborhood. Its sparkling main plaza (W. 63rd St. at Columbus Ave., Upper West Side), with its gorgeous and dramatic fountain, is a thrilling place to wander through.
Sharing the neighborhood’s energetic vibe are the busy Columbus Circle destinations, the Museum of Art and Design and the 55-story Time Warner Center. The skyscraper complex, essentially a supercharged mall, includes a great collection of shops, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and a blue-chip lineup of restaurants, including Per Se, Masa, and Porter House New York.
And the area around Lincoln Center isn’t the only place to find star turns on the Upper West Side. Symphony Space, at Broadway and 95th Street, is famed for its “Selected Shorts” reading series as well as other events, and the jazz club Cleopatra’s Needle, a few blocks away, is an institution.
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TOP ATTRACTIONS
Fodor’s Choice | Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.
The largest Gothic-style cathedral in the world, even with its towers and transepts still unfinished, this divine behemoth comfortably asserts its bulk in the country’s most vertical city.
The seat of the Episcopal diocese in New York, it acts as a sanctuary for all, giving special services that include a celebration of New York’s gay and lesbian community as well as the annual Blessing of the Bikes, when cyclists of all faiths bring their wheels for a holy-water benediction. The cathedral hosts musical performances (www.stjohndivine.org) and has held funerals and memorial services for such artists as Duke Ellington, Jim Henson, George Balanchine, James Baldwin, and Alvin Ailey. Reopened at the end of 2008 after a 2001 fire left it damaged, the church now looks newly scrubbed and magnificent.
Built in two long spurts starting in 1892, the cathedral remains only two-thirds complete. What began as a Romanesque-Byzantine structure under the original architects George Heins and Christopher Grant Lafarge shifted (upon Heins’s death in 1911) to French Gothic under the direction of Gothic Revival purist Ralph Adams Cram. You can spot the juxtaposition of the two medieval styles by comparing the finished Gothic arches, which are pointed, with the still-uncovered arches, which are rounded in the Byzantine style.
To get the full effect of the cathedral’s size, approach it from Broadway on West 112th Street. Above the 3-ton central bronze doors is the intricately carved Portal of Paradise, which depicts St. John witnessing the Transfiguration of Jesus, and 32 biblical characters. Then step inside to the cavernous nave. More than 600 feet long, it holds some 5,000 worshippers, and the 162-foot-tall dome crossing could comfortably contain the Statue of Liberty (minus its pedestal). Turn around to see the Great Rose Window, made from more than 10,000 pieces of colored glass, the largest stained-glass window in the United States.
At the end of the nave, surrounding the altar, are seven chapels expressing the cathedral’s interfaith tradition and international