After-Hours Tour of "Lower East Side, 1975" at the Museum at Eldridge Street
Explore a new exhibit of Lower East Side photographs that show a changing Manhattan neighborhood in the 1970s!
Following up our master list of 160 secrets of New York City, we bring to you 160 hidden gems of New York City! Every one of these hidden gems are places for you to discover. Some show the uniqueness and quaintness of New York City’s architecture, others reveal the infrastructure that supports New York or the history hidden in plain sight. Some are simply off-the-beaten path. All, we believe, are hidden gems in their own right. The majority are publicly accessible although some only on limited occasions. Some come from our book about the secrets of Brooklyn, but this list covers all five boroughs of the city. Many others come from the archives of Untapped New York and some come from exciting user-generated submissions on our Facebook page (thank you!). So without further ado, here are the hidden gems of New York City!
The Chinese Scholars Garden is a true hidden gem of New York City. It lies in an unexpected place: Snug Harbor, a place founded for retired seamen. The Neoclassical-style campus-like cultural center has both this Chinese garden and a botanical garden, among many other great gems.
You may have seen this clock in Pretend It’s a City recently! Untapped New York supplied the image that was applied using CGI (since the clock has been walked over and scratched up since it was restored, in the photo above). The Barthman Clock remains one of our favorite hidden gems in New York City.
In fact, this New York City hidden gem up in Washington Heights near the Morris-Jumel Mansion was used as a filming location in Boardwalk Empire!
This hidden gem right in Lower Manhattan continues to surprise even the most jaded New Yorkers. The “Oyster Pasty” is hidden in plain sigh.
The iconic game Scrabble was created by a Jackson Heights resident and this street sign is a tribute to him. If you don’t look up, you might miss this hidden gem!
There are people buried in the wall of this Gothic church in Upper Manhattan, but the real gem is the fact that the space is repurposed for concerts and events.
The candy store is the quirky addition of an oddball developer named Melvyn Kaufman. In fact, 77 Water Street is full of surprising finds, including an astroturf runway on the roof adorned with a World War I-era model fighter plane. These types of hidden gems help keep New York City’s streetscape a place of serendipity.
Courtesy of the New York Marble Cemetery
At the end of a small alleyway off of Second Ave and East 2nd Street, the New York Marble Cemetery is the oldest public non-sectarian burial ground in New York City. It’s one of our favorite hidden gems (and we’ve hosted tours there!)
This spot is perhaps one of the quirkiest hidden gems of all. The basketball court of Long Island University is one of the fanciest out there, repurposed for a former Paramount theater. The last we heard, it was going to be transformed back into an entertainment venue. This is one of the locations in our book Secret Brooklyn.
One of these townhouses is not like the other! Guess which one?
Photo courtesy Louis Armstrong House Museum
This tiny museum is located on Cortlandt Alley, a popular filming location and secret spot in Chinatown. The freight elevator is jam packed with items that take you quite some time to peruse. It’s open 24/7, and you can call the phone number on the door to get an exhibition audio guide guide.
Check out our latest explorations into the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch and the Washington Square Park Arch, two items in our hidden gems of New York City bucket list.
We’ve bowled here! Here’s a video. Henry Clay Frick commissioned a stylish subterranean bowling alley in 1916, along with a billiards table for playing billiards or pool. This fabulous secret of New York City is not open to the public, but it’s in great working condition. (It’s not the same was the bowling alley in There Will Be Blood, which was filmed in the Greystone Mansion in Los Angeles).
Not visible from street view, the secret gardens at Rockefeller Center provide a respite from the urban jungle. One is an event space and the other is part of an office.
You can actually adopt a building in this Panorama in the Queens Museum and it gets updated (although The World Trade Center towers have remained). It was recently featured in the Netflix documentary, “Pretend It’s a City” from Martin Scorsese and Fran Lebowitz. You can see this and other fun finds in our tour of the Remnants of the World’s Fairs.
This is a popular spot we show on our tour of the Secrets of Grand Central Terminal.
Photo by Augustin Pasquet
You can discover many of these hidden gems in our book Secret Brooklyn. Get free shipping on autographed copy with code BROOKLYN!
Subscribe to our newsletter