The 7 train food crawl
The single best food experience available in New York that most visitors never do. Take the 7 train from Times Square and eat your way outward: Woodside (Filipino bakeries and Thai food), Jackson Heights (South Asian sweets and Latin American street food), Elmhurst (Southeast Asian), and Flushing (the largest and most varied Chinese food scene in the city). Budget $30–40, go hungry, and allow four to five hours. See our ethnic food trails guide for the detailed breakdown.
Flushing: Chinatown, the US Open, and the Unisphere
Flushing is three things at once: one of the largest and most authentic Chinatowns in the US; the home of the USTA National Tennis Center (site of the US Open each August/September); and the site of two World's Fairs, with the 12-story Unisphere globe sculpture still standing in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The Queens Museum inside the park has a remarkable scale model of all five boroughs. See our Flushing guide.
Astoria: art, food, and the waterfront
Astoria Park has one of the best views of the Manhattan skyline and the Hell Gate Bridge from a waterfront position that's genuinely uncrowded. The Museum of the Moving Image is one of the best film and media museums in the US. And the food scene — Greek, Middle Eastern, Brazilian, South Asian — is wide enough that a day of walking and eating here costs a fraction of the equivalent Manhattan experience. See our Astoria guide.
Gantry Plaza State Park, Long Island City
A waterfront park built around restored industrial gantries with the closest, most direct view of the Manhattan skyline from Queens — you're looking almost straight across a narrow stretch of the East River at Midtown. MoMA PS1 is nearby, with a serious contemporary art programme including the summer Warm Up series. See our Long Island City guide.
Getting around Queens
The 7 train is the main tourist-accessible corridor. The N/W serve Astoria; the E/M/G serve Long Island City. Queens is large — do not try to do all of it in a day. Choose one or two areas and do them properly.