The Views

Why go up

From the street Manhattan is a series of canyons: you see one block at a time, and the towers above you are cut off at the tenth floor. From the top of one of them the island finally makes sense. The grid appears as a pattern, Central Park as a green rectangle in the middle of it, the two rivers on either side, and the harbor and the Statue of Liberty to the south. It is one of the few experiences in the city that really does live up to its reputation, and it is worth doing once, early in a visit, to fix the map in your head.

There are now five major decks, and they are not interchangeable. Each looks at something different, and what you see from one is often the building you would be standing on at another. This page compares them and ends with three ways to see the skyline without going up at all. Booking ahead explains which of them to book.

The Empire State Building

The oldest and most famous deck is on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building, at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street. It has an enclosed viewing gallery and an open-air terrace that runs all the way around the building, so you stand in the wind with the city on every side, behind a tall mesh fence put up in 1947. A second, smaller observatory sits at the 102nd floor, and an indoor observatory on the 80th floor opened in 2019. Around four million people come up every year, through an entrance on West 34th Street.

Its great virtue is its position: in the middle of the island, it looks north up the length of Midtown to Central Park and south down to Lower Manhattan and the harbor. Its one drawback is that you cannot see the Empire State Building from it.

Top of the Rock

The deck on top of 30 Rockefeller Plaza at Rockefeller Center, called Top of the Rock, first opened in 1933. Elevators rise to a double-height indoor observatory on the 67th floor, escalators continue to the 69th, and the open deck on the 70th is 850 feet above the street, edged by a parapet of frameless safety glass added in the renovation of 2005.

It is about 200 feet lower than the Empire State Building's terrace, but many people think it has the better view, because it looks straight at the Empire State Building. The famous picture of Midtown with the Empire State in the middle is taken from here, and to the north the whole of Central Park is laid out below you, with the towers of the Upper East and West Sides on either side.

One World Observatory

The observation floors of One World Trade Center, at the World Trade Center, opened in 2015 on floors 100 to 102. The tower is 1,776 feet tall to the tip of its spire, and at 1,268 feet the observatory is the highest vantage point in New York City.

Because it stands at the southern end of the island, it sees Manhattan the other way round: the whole length of the city rises to the north, with Midtown's towers in the distance, while below you lie the harbor, the Statue of Liberty and the bridges of the East River. It is the deck to choose if you want to understand how the island meets the water.

Summit One Vanderbilt

One Vanderbilt, the tower that rose beside Grand Central in 2020, opened its observation deck, Summit One Vanderbilt, in October 2021. It fills three levels near the top, numbered 91 to 93, and it is as much an art installation as a viewpoint: a room called Air, designed by Kenzo Digital, has a ceiling forty feet high and walls and floors of mirrored glass, so the skyline repeats in every direction, and Levitation is a set of glass balconies that stick out from the facade into the air. Another room, Clouds, by Yayoi Kusama, is filled with drifting balloons.

Its view is Midtown at close quarters: the Chrysler Building's crown just across the way, the Empire State Building to the south, and the East River beyond.

Edge

The newest of the big decks is Edge, on the 100th floor of 30 Hudson Yards, at the north end of the High Line. It opened in March 2020: a triangular outdoor deck that juts out from the side of the tower, 1,100 feet above the street, with a section of glass floor you can stand on and look straight down. Reviewers have compared the shape of the tower with its protruding ledge to a duck.

From the West Side it looks east across the whole of Midtown, and west over the Hudson River. It is the best deck for sunsets over the water, and the easiest to combine with a walk on the High Line.

Three views that cost nothing

The first is the Staten Island Ferry. It has been fare-free since 1997, and it runs day and night from the Whitehall Terminal at the southern tip of Manhattan across the harbor, a crossing of about twenty-five minutes each way. It is popular with visitors for exactly this reason: it passes the Statue of Liberty, and on the way back the towers of Lower Manhattan rise straight out of the water ahead of you. Getting around explains how to ride it.

The second is the walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, on the raised promenade for people on foot between the two roadways. Walk it toward Manhattan, and the skyline of Lower Manhattan fills the view through the cables.

The third is the Roosevelt Island Tramway, an aerial cable car that crosses the East River from the Upper East Side, the first commuter aerial tramway in the country. It rides on the ordinary transit fare, and the cabin swings high over the East River, with the towers of Midtown alongside.

Choosing one

If you only go up once, choose by what you want to see. For the Empire State Building in the picture, go to Top of the Rock. For the feeling of standing on the classic tower in the wind, go to the Empire State. For the harbor and the whole island at once, go to One World Observatory. For something stranger and more modern, go to Summit or Edge.

All five are ticketed, and each sells its own tickets. Sunset is the most dramatic hour on any of them, when the city lights come on as the sky goes dark, and on a hazy day the view shrinks, so it pays to watch the weather and keep the day flexible.