I'm going to NY from 18th July to 31st with my family. We've visited NYC in the past and we're good on typical tourist-y places.
I'm wondering if there are some places, events or other not-really-touristic experiences that we can have.
We plan on renting a car to get around, my folks don't speak English (almost) at all but they're up for anything.
I was personally thinking about trying to buy some NTSC retro consoles since those are a bitch to find over here and 60hz are sweet, any tips on this? Maybe there's some big garage sale like in the movies
Go to Anchor Bar in Buffalo, NY and have glorious wings and then go around town ordering beef on weck and such. Then goto Niagara Falls and enjoy the beauty of tourism.
I'd recommend fishing, if you are into it. Walleye out of Lake Erie are 'yuge, and they fight like bats outta hell. You can also go to Pennsylvania and find a gunrange which rents firearms, and do some pew pew.
If you are into hookers, Toronto.
if your going to be close enough to Pennsylvania you can try to take a tour at the Martin Guitar Factory
Its a bit of a cliche, but while in New York you could visit the original Nathan's in Coney Island. Might be a bit pricey, but its a damn good hot dog and some damn good cheese fries too.
Do not go to NH. There is absolutely nothing to do there.
A lot of towns have "Garage Sale" days, where everyone has a garage sale and tons of people just drive around buying stuff. Look into towns that host those near where you'll be.
I'm from Upstate New York, so I'm familiar with a lot of things to do up here. If you're willing to go a few hours north of NYC you'll find a few hidden gems.
There's a place called Jacksonhole Diner with huge burgers at a pretty good price. Get them with waffle fries to experience heaven's light
Every Saturday at Williamsburg they have something called Smorgasburg where a metric fuck ton of different culture food trucks open up and you can go around. They do it on Sundays at Prospect Park as well. Go during nice weather, keep your stuff secure though
If you're into the beach, there's the rockaway beach and boardwalk which always proves a nice place to look around. Coney Island is always a nice place to visit, though in both cases expect shit to be EXPENSIVE
There's two famous comic book places: one near time square ( Midtown Comics ) and one near Union Square ( Forbidden Planet ). Neat trinkets there, wide selection of stuff
If you're into partying there's a lot of cool places in Bedford that open up at night ( there's a car shop that was bought out and made into a club, pretty cool ) or you can go to Webster Hall if you like waiting
You can probably get some concerts at Irving Plaza or the Barcalay's Center. Check the listings around those days to see if you like anything. There's other places too but that's the range of cheap to expensive.
There's some great parks around too. Queensbridge park is along the water next to a bridge, looks great at night. The High Line was a train line that was discontinued and eaten by nature, and the community around it maintained the plants to make it a strip park. Really nice to walk through. There's some others in Astoria along water but I forget their name.
All in all be weary of your surroundings, as many safe neighborhoods as there are: there are the same unsafe. Brooklyn can get pretty bad in some areas, places deeper uptown can get 100x worse.
JNL Game in Midtown and Videogames New York near East Village might be your best bets. There's also some retro game bar arcades (like Barcade with multiple locations around NYC) that you might like if you can visit with family, assuming you're over 21.
If you're going with family, definitely check out the High Line as mentioned above; just walk up or down it to get a nice cross section view of the city. Or you could always go to places like Central Park or Prospect Park, where there's always events happening in them, just check their calendars. Biking through them isn't a bad idea, especially in Central Park. Though, always keep in mind that after dusk in the parks is a bit shady.
If you're into doing outdoors activities, all around New York there's plenty of hiking trails outdoors near Bear Mountain or Minneskawa State Park upstate or you can go west into New Jersey for some trails. Fruit picking is an option, but probably not if you're just visiting. But while you're out there, there's amazing art museums like Storm King and Dia:Beacon that you can visit via Metro North trains for a day visit.
If you want to see different cultures and eat great food in the city other than "old" Chinatown (being gentrified) and Little Italy in lower Manhattan, you can always try Koreatown in Midtown for some KBBQ or Korean fried chicken, Greek seafood in Astoria, or Chinese food in Flushing ("new" Chinatown). Also, across the river in Edgewater, NJ, there's a Japanese marketplace called MITSUWA that has authentic Japanese goods and food.
Visit Connecticut, plenty of neat stuff there. While it's a big museum, it's not the busiest time of year right now, I recommend the Mystic Seaport Museum. They're opening an exhibition this weekend of Viking artifacts, the first time these artifacts have left Scandinavia. As well, they have a variety of boats to visit and other really cool things to see and explore. Only a couple of hours from NYC.
Managed to go to a flea market at Englishtown, NJ and bought this for 40 bucks, really good condition on the labels for all of them!!
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/57869/23cc00b4-45e9-462d-a311-f140e870306d/image.png
Anchor Bar is just a tourist trap, and their wings have just been shitty over the past few years.
Downtown Niagara Falls is a shithole and so is Buffalo, in fact just avoid Western New York.
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