Midtown West runs from 5th Avenue west to the West Side Highway and from 34th Street up to the southern tip of Central Park. Midtown is the main hub in NYC for business, shopping, entertainment and tourism. There is so much to find and so much to do you can’t help but come here at least once a week.

What was once a rundown neighborhood has been cleaned up into a very presentable and lively residential district. Making up Midtown West is Hell’s Kitchen and Clinton. Both neighborhoods are an eclectic mix of people ranging from Yuppies to Central American Immigrants to the last of the remaining Westies (the Irish gangs who ruled the area through the 80’s). What makes this neighborhood special is that everyone seems to know each other here.

The area’s architecture is mostly comprised of 3-5 story walk-up buildings that generally do not offer as much space and aesthetics as the brownstones of the Upper West Side or the hi-rises of Downtown. On the positive side, unless you are living directly in Times Square, chances are your rent or mortgage will not be as high as in most other neighborhoods in the city.

Ninth Avenue has become a hotbed of fun and chic bars, restaurants and shops. There have been some new galleries that have opened in the area recently along with Kenneth Cole and Prada moving their corporate headquarters into the neighborhood. Residents say they are the next Soho, without the attitude.

Theater Row, a mini Broadway hot spot of Off and Off-Off Broadway shows is currently getting a makeover. Because of the big boom in theater in the last few years, Theater Row is being torn down to bring in new and improved theaters. Located on 42nd Street between 8th and 9th Avenues.

The east side of Manhattan may be slightly more elegant and neater than the west side, but when it comes to energy at the heart of the city’s cauldron, West Midtown wins easily. This is where New Yorkers and non-New Yorkers collide. This is where dreams are fashioned and legends made. This is the turf. This is where Ratzo in "Midnight Cowboy" bangs on a cab and yells, "Hey, I’m walking here."

At times, the walk has been proud and at time it has been hangdog. It’s up, again.

Two of the city’s most important attractions, Rockefeller Center and the Times Square Theater District, and two of its three most important transportation gateways, the Pennsylvania/Long Island Rail Road stations and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Bus Terminal, are located in this area and make it the city’s most tourist-filled.

In addition, the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, which opened in 1986, and the Garment Center are in this district and make it the city’s most congested.

The commercial core of the area is east of Eighth Avenue and the residential section, known as Clinton, is west of Eighth Avenue, although there is a fair amount of "luxury" housing in the section east of Eighth Avenue as well.

This area has undergone many changes.

For the first two-thirds or so of the 20th Century, the Hudson River piers were amongst the world’s busiest with many of the world’s most famous ocean liners romantically gracing the waterfront. The decline in North Atlantic crossings, however, resulted in the decline in the piers’ usage, not long after the city built a major new passenger ship terminal at 47th Street. The city, in fact, for a long time considered building a major new convention center along the river at 47th Street, but finally opted to erect the Javits Convention Center further south between 34th and 39th Streets. That center replaced the city’s former major convention center, the New York Coliseum at Columbus Circle, but it proved inadequate for the needs of the nation’s largest conventions and the city is studying how to expand it so that the city does not lose more convention business.

The Javits Center was designed by I. M. Pei & Partners using "space-frame" technology that original renderings indicated would make it sparkle at night like a jewel. The huge, black-glass structure has a very awe-inspiring entrance at 35th Street as well as a four-block-long, skylit corridor, but despite its location along the West Side Highway it has no views of the Hudson River. Because of its proximity to the Lincoln Tunnel to New Jersey and the garment center, it also has considerable traffic problems, which would probably be exacerbated by the construction of a new stadium, proposed in 1997, for the New York Yankees over the rail yards of Pennsylvania Station to the south of it.

Pennsylvania Station used to be the city’s most impressive and glorious gateway, but the great McKim, Mead & White structure between Seventh and Eighth Avenues and 31st and 33rd Streets was demolished to make way for a mixed-use project that relegated the Pennsylvania and Long Island Railroad stations to the basement and erected a large office building and a new facility for Madison Square Garden, which relocated from its former site between Eighth and Ninth Avenues and 49th and 50th Streets, above them.

In the late 1990’s, the city sought to create a major new facility for the Pennsylvania and Long Island Railroad stations in the General Post Office Building between Eighth and Ninth Avenues and 31st and 33rd Streets, also designed, but with less brilliance and heavier hands, by McKim, Mead & White. The plan would create a large, skylit waiting and ticket area in the massive building’s courtyard, but preliminary renderings indicated that while it would be a vast improvement over the existing cramped conditions, it would be nowhere near as grand as the old station, whose demolition finally sparked the city into enacting a Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1965.

After decades of having a terribly overcrowded and shabby facility, the Long Island Railroad station underwent a major renovation in the early 1990’s that resulted in a very attractive new entrance on 34th Street with some fine public art.

After many years of being used as a parking lot, the former Madison Square site was redeveloped by William Zeckendorf Jr., into a major mixed-use project known as World Wide Plaza. The Eighth Avenue end of the block was developed with a large office building designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill that was modeled in part on the great pyramidal top of the New York Life Insurance Building on Madison Square Park and the rest of the block was developed with a high-rise apartment tower in the center and low-rise residential structures along Ninth Avenue designed by Frank Williams & Associates.

Zeckendorf’s decision in the late 1980’s to proceed with this major project was very noteworthy for it was located in a very unappealing area noted mostly for its porno shops at the time. The project’s high quality, however, quickly attracted several very major tenants who helped bolster the viability of the entire Times Square/Theater District area as an attractive and safe environment. The project provided Eighth Avenue with a significant new, albeit unofficial, landmark, but also was contextual in its low-rise Ninth Avenue frontage to the surrounding Clinton residential community. The center of the project has a large attractive plaza and a very handsome and inexpensive cineplex.

Perhaps the most important postwar West Side office building project after the dull, but important, westward expansion of Rockefeller Center was the Equitable Center on Seventh Avenue between 51st and 52nd Streets and designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes. Although the building’s exterior and mass are a bit bulky and uninteresting, this project was a very major commitment to the West Side, had a great art program and has several very interesting public spaces.

The West 50’s were in much better shape than the West 40’s, which is not surprisingly given such anchors on Fifth Avenue as the Plaza Hotel and Rockefeller Center. The dramatically sloped glass tower at 9 West 57th Street was developed by Sheldon Solow who rejected the first design for it by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill that was subsequently used for the similar tower facing Bryant Park on 42nd Street that was developed by Swig, Weiler & Arnow. The Solow Building, and its large orange sidewalk sculpture on a "9" on 57th Street, gave the Plaza district a flair that soon made it the city’s leading office location.

Indeed, 57th Street has regained its lost luster and now is one of the world’s most spectacular streets. Harry Macklowe erected a stunning black-glass, mixed-use monolith known as the Metropolitan Tower, designed by Schuman, Lichtenstein, Claman & Efron, at 135 West 57th Street and Rockrose built the Carnegie Hall Tower nearby, designed by Cesar Pelli to be remarkably compatible with the famous concert hall. These two towers together with CitySpire another mixed-use tower directly south of them at 150 West 56th Street, dramatically transformed the midtown skyline with a pronounced shift to the west. CitySpire was designed by Helmut Jahn for developer Ian Bruce Eichner and used air rights from the adjacent City Center for the Performing Arts, whose Byzantine-style domed roof it imitated at its top.

Another major apartment tower nearby is the pale-green Central Park Plaza on the northwest corner of 57th Street and Eighth Avenue, designed by Davis, Brody & Associates. It is across the street from the yellow Hearst Building and down the block from the attractive Park Vendome apartment complex.

Other major landmarks in this area include Eero Saarinen’s famous CBS Building, known as the "Black Box," on the Avenue of the Americas between 52nd and 53rd Street, the blue-glass, bay-windowed slab of the New York Hilton Hotel across the avenue between 53rd and 54th Street, the Museum of Modern Art and its justly famous sculpture garden at 11 West 53rd Street, and the "21" Club with its jockey statues and fabulous bar with hanging toys at 21 West 52nd Street.

The city’s greatest observatory used to be atop the great skyscraper at Rockefeller Center at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, but it was closed to the public when the Rainbow Room, the building’s nightclub near the top of the tower, was renovated. Another great observation spot used to be the restaurant at the Top of the Sixes at 666 Fifth Avenue, the steel-clad building at 53rd Street, but it was closed and converted to a club. The Peninsula Hotel, formerly the Nova Park and originally the Gotham Hotel, at 55th Street, however, has a fine rooftop bar with good midtown vistas and it has open terraces during pleasant weather.

The area has several good religious structures included St. Thomas Episcopal Church and the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, both on Fifth Avenue, the Episcopal Church of St. Mary the Virgin at 145 West 46th Street, and the Holy Cross Roman Catholic Church on West 42nd Street across from the great "Green Giant" skyscraper designed by Raymond Hood originally as the McGraw-Hill Building. The publishing company subsequently moved to the Avenue of the Americas where it had its name attached, as did Time-Life and Exxon to buildings that were part of the westward expansion of Rockefeller Center. Rockefeller Center has designed another tower for the west side of Seventh Avenue at 50th Street that has been designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox.

Many of this area’s best buildings are not the tallest. The former Aeolian Hall and Steinway buildings on West 57th Street are very interesting as is Raymond Hood’s design for the former American Radiator Building on 40th Street overlooking Bryant Park, and the Osborne Apartments on the northwest corner of 57th Street and Seventh Avenue has a splendorous lobby, as well as many large apartments. The Alwyn Court apartment building on the southeast corner of 58th Street and the Avenue of the Americas has the city’s most decorated facade as well as a great trompe-l’oeil mural by Richard Haas in its enclosed courtyard. One of the great landmarks of modern architecture, of course, is the very modest, three-and-a-half story, bank building with glass facades at 510 Fifth Avenue at 43rd Street that was built in 1954 and designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

The northern boundary of this area is Central Park South and its best building is the Gainsborough studio apartments between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. There are several hotels including the Plaza, the Park Lane, the St. Moritz, and Essex House. The former Barbizon, which has a great Art Deco roof, was converted by Donald Trump into apartments.

For older New Yorkers, there is nothing much better than having a drink in the Oak Bar with its great, large murals by Ash-Can artist Everett Shinn in the Plaza Hotel in lush leather club chairs looking at Central Park and passing horse-drawn carriages through large picture windows. More literary types, of course, might prefer the smaller, more sedate bars and lounges of the Algonquin Hotel on 44th Street east of the Avenue of the Americas with its great intellectual traditions. Non-alcoholic literary types, of course, can be found at the New York Public Library, designed by Carrère & Hastings and one of the world’s finest Beaux Arts buildings that unfortunately and incredulously is not open 24 hours a day seven days a week as it should be.

For others, of course, clubs are wonderful and this area has the great Italian Renaissance palazzo-style University Club on Fifth Avenue at 54th Street with its very sumptuous interiors and great library, the Century Association with its very important collection of 19th Century American paintings by many of its famous members at 7 West 43rd Street, the neo-Georgian-style Harvard Club with its enormous cups of coffee, and the exuberant New York Yacht Club with its fanciful facade and very impressive model room on 44th Street east of the Avenue of the Americas. All these clubs were designed by McKim, Mead & White with the exception of the yacht club, which was designed by Warren & Wetmore, who also designed Grand Central Terminal nearby. Another major club is the New York Athletic Club at 180 Central Park South.

The area abounds in special streets. 47th Street between Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas, which most New Yorkers call Sixth Avenue, is the city’s Diamond District with more jewelers than there are customers at Tiffany’s. 46th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues is Restaurant Row with such famous restaurants as Orso and Barbetta and between Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas it is a Brazilian festival. 48th Street between the Avenue of the Americas and Seventh Avenue is Music Instrument Street where you can buy synthesizers and guitars at Manny’s and Sam Ash. 32nd Street between the Avenue of the Americas and Seventh Avenue is a Ginza Strip of electronics and photography emporiums and some of the sidestreets in the 30’s specialized in fabrics and buttons and fashion accessories. 42nd Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues is Off-Off-Broadway theaters. Ninth Avenue in the high 30’s is a gastronome’s delight.

Most of the world celebrates New Year’s Eve watching a globe drop from a flagpole atop the former Times Tower in Times Square. In the past, it seemed that most of the world was literally in Times Square, but the police now cordon off much of it for their "emergency" vehicles, but it is still something that everyone should attend in person at least once in their life as well as falling on one’s backside in Rockefeller Center’s skating rink under the furl of so many colorful national flags and tourist costumes all watching you with fascination, if not awe.

The greatest interior in this district is the first floor bar of Palio, one of the restaurants in the Equitable Center. It has large, vibrant, intense and wonderful murals by Sandro Chia, in stark contrast with the sepia murals inside the lobby of 30 Rockefeller Center.

The art at both Equitable Center and Rockefeller Center is both inside and outside, but the real art of New York and this area in particular is people, those standing outside the theaters during intermissions, those standing on line to get into the delightful Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde theme restaurant on the Avenue of the Americas between 57th and 58th Streets, those waiting for a bus at the bus terminal, those lunching on a summer day’s on the great lawn of Bryant Park, those imbibing at the bar at Aquavit in a townhouse basement across from the garden of the Museum of Modern Art and just down the block from the cylindrical bay windows of the Rockefeller Apartments at 17 West 54th Street, those chomping on a hot dog from a street vendor on the Avenue of the Americas in the 50’s at lunch time, those seeking advice in the back of Lee’s Art Supplies on West 57th Street or from fellow students across the street at the Art Students League, or those giving advice to all passersby in Times Square, or those waiting for passports in the great International Building up the escalators in the tall lobby behind Lee Lawrie’s great statue of Atlas across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, or waiting and waiting and waiting at TKTS, the discount theater ticket facility at the uptown side of Duffy Square at 47th Street, or at Radio City Music Hall for tickets for the "Christmas Spectacular," or at Macy’s children’s department waiting to talk with Santa Claus.