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In town this holiday week? How to enjoy NYC during peak tourist season.
By
Ryan Kailath
Published Dec 25, 2024
Modified Jan 2, 2025
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Michael Hull
By
Ryan Kailath
Published Dec 25, 2024
Modified Jan 2, 2025
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The week between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve can be a surreal one in New York City – transplant-heavy neighborhoods empty out as New Yorkers leave town to visit their families, while Midtown seems to turn into one enormous shoulder-to-shoulder crowd of shuffling tourists.
What’s a New Yorker in town for the holidays to do? Here are some ideas for making the most of this strange, alternate-reality New York that emerges once a year.
Photo by Brad Farwell for the Museum of the City of New York
See the city recreated in gingerbread at The Great Borough Bake-off
You can’t blame the Museum of the City of New York for getting in on bake-off mania. This year, their Great Borough Bake-Off, in which contestants compete to recreate iconic New York City landmarks out of gingerbread, will be judged by a panel that includes the chief baking officer of Magnolia Bakery, a curator from the Met Museum, and Melba Wilson of Melba’s in Harlem.
Previous contests have included gingerbread versions of the Met Cloisters, Washington Square Arch, the Brooklyn Bridge and more. Last year an architect recreated the whole of Madison Square Park and its surrounding buildings.
The exhibit runs now through Jan. 12.
Enjoy the city’s holiday music programming, in-person or on air
Fans of choral music know that December offers an embarrassment of riches in New York City, from Christmas Eve and Christmas Day sung services at St. Thomas on Fifth Avenue to the improvised chanting night prayer at Trinity Church on Wall Street.
The Harlem Gospel Choir is also in residence at the Blue Note jazz club in Greenwich Village, with daily shows each afternoon at 1:30 p.m., through Jan. 1.
But if you want to bring that spirit home while entertaining or having a quiet holiday moment, you can do worse than NYC’s wealth of holiday radio broadcasts, such as the world famous “Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols,” broadcast live from King’s College in Cambridge, England to dozens of radio stations around the world, including WQXR 105.9 F.M.
And on WKCR 89.9 F.M., the eight days between Christmas Eve and the new year is devoted to Bachfest, where the station devotes its airwaves exclusively to J.S. Bach. It’s the station’s most popular program of the entire year, which its student volunteers and loyal listeners all look forward to.
Can't get a reservation at Tatiana in Lincoln Center? Maybe this is your moment.
Photo by Michelle Giang / Courtesy of Tatiana
Get a reservation you normally can’t
Once upon a time, diners who wanted to eat at a buzzy new restaurant could simply wait a few months for the hype to die down. But now wrangling reservations even for reliable neighborhood restaurants has become a blood sport in NYC, with bots snapping up seats on Resy and OpenTable, or other newer platforms where people buy or trade reservations. There are even professional line-sitters who will do the hard work for you.
But in the days just after Christmas, before the New Year’s Eve party crush swamps restaurants anew, tables can magically appear. Food blogs have lists devoted to the difficult reservations in New York — and whether you want to try one of those, or just your local favorite, this can be a great chance.
And it’s not just reservations. Takeout spots and even specialty stores with long lines, like Radio Bakery or Taqueria Ramirez in Greenpoint, Café Sabarsky on the Upper East Side, or Nom Wah Tea Parlor or Di Palo’s Italian deli in Chinatown often see their usually long lines shrink down to small-town proportions.
See a museum or gallery show without the crowds
New Yorkers know the crowds at MoMA and the Met Museum too well. And while those might be even worse with extended hours for Christmastime tourists, other museums and gallery shows can be far less crowded.
Gallery highlights right now include Alvaro Urbano’s warehouse-sized “Tableau Vivant” at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City. It's a Midtown skyscraper office lobby reimagined as an ancient ruin, with plants pushing up through the concrete floor and vines creeping up the building columns.
Dia Chelsea has a major exhibition of the filmmaker Steve McQueen’s films and videos, and the Flag Art Foundation has a series of new paintings from Lubaina Himid, the first Black woman to win the prestigious Turner Prize in 2017.
Swing by a swanky hotel bar
Sometimes, you can’t avoid Midtown, whether you're there with visiting family members who want to see the tree or a show, or meeting guests near Grand Central or Penn Station.
If you find yourself in that situation, you can do worse than cozying up to one of Manhattan’s many cozy hotel lobby bars or restaurants. Favorites include the bar at Bourbon Steak in the JW Marriott on Central Park South and the newly renovated King Cole Bar in the St. Regis.
Further downtown, the Bowery, Ludlow and Marlton Hotels all have fireplaces in their lobbies, which make for extra winter-y nights.
A "Midnight Moment" earlier this year in Times Square.
Michael Hull
Catch a 'Midnight Moment' in Times Square
Every month, a different artist turns Times Square into an open-air art gallery for exactly three minutes, from 11:57 p.m. to midnight, taking over every digital billboard in the crossroads of the world to showcase their work.
Past artists have included Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, Nick Cave, Olafur Eliasson — and this month, the Midnight Moment is by the Queens-born artist Laurie Simmons, whose digitally manipulated photographs are in the permanent collections of the Met, MoMA, Guggenheim, Whitney and more.
Simmons’ work, titled “Autofiction,” takes over Times Square to present images of women moving through different spaces real or imagined from Simmons’ own life, in swimming pools, bedrooms, roadways and more.
The box office at the Metrograph in the Lower East Side
Photo by Jeremy Liebman / Courtesy of the Metrograph
Enjoy the curated holiday programming at NYC’s indie cinemas
A number of NYC’s independent cinemas bring out the big guns for their holiday programming. Metrograph, a theater on the Lower East Side, is showing classics like “Edward Scissorhands” and “The Muppet Christmas Carol” along with new entries to the holiday canon like “Phantom Thread” and “Carol,” the Todd Haynes movie about two women who meet in a New York department store at Christmas.
The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens is bringing both parts of the Timothee Chalamet/Zendaya “Dune” series back to the big screen, along with “Flow,” a new animated feature about a cat and its friends on a return journey home after a flood that won “Best Animated Feature” at the New York Film Critics’ Circle Awards.
And another festival favorite is getting a special 70mm release at two theaters — “The Brutalist,” starring Adrian Brody as a Hungarian émigré who rebuilds his career in the U.S., will screen at Village East Angelika and Film at Lincoln Center.
Tagged
new york city
art
Ryan Kailath
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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