About Access Manhattan

What this site is

Eighteen sights in Manhattan, one page each, and eleven sections on how the island works: arriving from three airports and two great railroad stations, getting around by subway, bus, ferry and on foot, reading the grid, the views from the observation decks, the seasons, what to eat, where to stay and what to book ahead. There is also a journal of longer answers to the questions visitors ask most.

Every page tries to answer what a visitor actually needs: what a place is, what you see when you get there, how to visit it, what to combine it with, and where a well-known story is a legend rather than a fact.

It is not a listings site. There are no opening hours, admission prices or fares anywhere on it, because those change, and the operator is the only source that is right on the day you travel.

What Manhattan means here

This site keeps to the borough of Manhattan: the island itself, from the Battery to the northern tip, with Liberty Island and Ellis Island in the harbor, which is where the Statue of Liberty stands. Brooklyn, the Bronx, Coney Island and the Hudson Valley are close and much visited, but they are other boroughs and counties, and they appear on the day trips page rather than as sights of the island.

How it is written

Each page is built from sources that are named at the foot of it, and the facts in it, such as dates, heights, distances and who built what, are checked against those sources before the page is published. Where the sources disagree, the page says so or leaves the number out.

Access Manhattan is written and maintained with the assistance of AI, edited and fact-checked before publication. Anything wrong is worth pointing out, and will be corrected.

The photographs

Every photograph comes from Wikimedia Commons and is credited on the page it appears on, with the photographer's name, the license and a link to the file.

They are chosen by looking at them: recent rather than archival, showing the place the page is about, and captioned from what is actually in the frame. Many files labeled New York show Brooklyn, New Jersey, a conference or a replica somewhere else in the world, so each one is checked before it is used.

What it costs you

Nothing. A few planning pages carry affiliate links, marked as such before the first one, and the privacy page explains what that means. No page about a sight carries one, and nothing on this site is recommended because of a commission.