Travel and Tourism in United States of America

New York City : The City That Never Sleeps

No city in the world — not London, not Paris, not Tokyo — quite matches the concentrated energy and ambition of New York City. This metropolis of more than 8 million people (and over 20 million in the greater metropolitan area) is the cultural, financial, and media capital of the United States and one of the most important cities in the world. Its skyline — dominated by the Empire State Building (completed 1931), One World Trade Center (the Western Hemisphere's tallest building at 1,776 feet), the Chrysler Building, and dozens of other iconic towers — is one of the most recognizable on earth.

Manhattan is the heart of New York and the destination that most visitors prioritize. Central Park — 843 acres of designed landscape in the center of Manhattan, conceived by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux and completed in the 1870s — is one of the greatest urban parks in the world, a green oasis where New Yorkers jog, bicycle, row boats, attend Shakespeare performances in the summer, and watch the famous Bethesda Fountain against the backdrop of the surrounding skyscrapers. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) — on the eastern edge of Central Park — is one of the largest and most encyclopedic art museums in the world, with a collection spanning 5,000 years of human creativity across virtually every culture and medium.

Times Square — the neon-lit intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue — is the commercial and entertainment heart of New York, home to Broadway theaters (the world's most prestigious theater district, with more than 40 active venues), restaurants, hotels and retail flagships. The Theater District's productions range from long-running musicals to cutting-edge drama, and attending a Broadway show remains one of the quintessential New York experiences.

The Statue of Liberty — the 305-foot copper statue on Liberty Island in New York Harbor, gifted by France and dedicated in 1886 — is one of the most recognizable monuments in the world and the defining symbol of American ideals of freedom and immigration. Visitors can take the ferry from Battery Park in lower Manhattan to visit both the statue (crown access requires advance reservations) and nearby Ellis Island, through which more than 12 million immigrants passed between 1892 and 1954. The Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration is one of the most moving and historically significant museums in America.

The Brooklyn Bridge (1883) — connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn across the East River — is one of the most beautiful engineering achievements of the 19th century. Walking across its elevated pedestrian promenade offers spectacular views of the Manhattan skyline and the harbor that have made it one of the most photographed structures in the world.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Midtown Manhattan houses one of the greatest collections of modern and contemporary art in the world — from Van Gogh's "The Starry Night" and Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" to works by Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and countless other artists who defined the modern movement. The American Museum of Natural History, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum (in its iconic Frank Lloyd Wright spiral building) and the Frick Collection round out New York's extraordinary museum offerings.

The neighborhoods of New York are in many ways the real attraction for the discerning traveler: the trendy galleries and restaurants of Chelsea and the Meatpacking District; the brownstone-lined streets of the West Village and Brooklyn Heights; the vibrant Chinese community of Flushing in Queens; the hip cafes and music venues of Williamsburg in Brooklyn; the Latino energy of East Harlem; the jazz history of Harlem proper; and the street-art culture of the Bowery. Each neighborhood is a distinct world, and exploring on foot is the best way to understand New York's extraordinary human mosaic.

The food scene of New York is one of the finest in the world. The city has more Michelin-starred restaurants than almost any other city on earth, but its true culinary soul lives in its immigrant food traditions: a perfect New York slice of pizza (thin crust, generous cheese, slightly greasy, folded for ease of eating while walking), a bagel with lox and cream cheese from a Jewish deli, dim sum in Flushing, Dominican food in Washington Heights, Italian-American red-sauce classics in the Bronx, and street food from dozens of cuisines in Jackson Heights, Queens — "the most ethnically diverse urban area in the world" according to many urban geographers.

Chicago : City of the Big Shoulders

Chicago — on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan in Illinois — is the third-largest city in the United States with about 2.7 million people and one of the great cities of North America. Known as "the City of Big Shoulders" (after the Carl Sandburg poem), "the Windy City" (from political boasting, not meteorology), and "the Second City" (after New York), Chicago is a city of extraordinary architectural achievement, world-class museums, vibrant neighborhoods, and an outsized cultural influence — birthplace of deep-dish pizza, the Chicago blues, improv comedy, the skyscraper, and the architectural movement known as the Chicago School.

The Chicago Riverwalk — a scenic promenade along the Chicago River through the heart of downtown — offers some of the best architecture tours available anywhere in the world. Chicago has more landmark buildings per city block than almost any city in America, a legacy of the 1871 Great Chicago Fire that destroyed much of the city and prompted its rebuilding with the latest technologies: the first steel-skeleton skyscrapers (the Home Insurance Building of 1885 is credited as the first true skyscraper), Louis Sullivan's ornate commercial buildings, and the Prairie Style houses of Frank Lloyd Wright in the neighboring Oak Park.

Millennium Park is Chicago's crown jewel — a 24.5-acre urban park in the heart of downtown featuring Anish Kapoor's "Cloud Gate" sculpture (universally known as "the Bean"), Frank Gehry's Jay Pritzker Pavilion (an outdoor concert venue with a remarkable steel-frame trellis), and the Crown Fountain's twin video towers. The Art Institute of Chicago — one of the oldest and largest art museums in the United States — is home to one of the finest collections of French Impressionism outside France, including Seurat's "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" and Grant Wood's "American Gothic."

The deep-dish pizza of Chicago is one of America's great culinary contributions — a thick, buttery crust pressed into a deep pan, filled with mozzarella cheese, Italian sausage and other toppings, and topped with a chunky tomato sauce. Pizzeria Uno (which invented the style in 1943), Lou Malnati's, and Giordano's are the classic Chicago deep-dish temples. Chicago-style hot dogs (Vienna Beef hot dog on a poppy-seed bun with mustard, onions, relish, tomato, sport peppers, and a pickle spear — "never ketchup") are another institution.

The neighborhoods of Chicago — each with a distinct ethnic and cultural identity — are one of the city's great attractions: Pilsen's murals and Mexican culture, Chinatown's dim sum restaurants, Wicker Park's indie music scene, Lincoln Park's shops and restaurants, Wrigleyville's baseball culture around Wrigley Field (the second-oldest ballpark in Major League Baseball, opened 1914), and the historic jazz and blues clubs of Bronzeville and the South Side.

The National Parks : America's Greatest Idea

The American national park system — often called "America's best idea" (a phrase attributed to writer Wallace Stegner) — protects more than 85 million acres of the most spectacular natural landscapes in the world, from the Arctic wilderness of Alaska to the coral reefs of Florida and the volcanic craters of Hawaii. The National Park Service, established in 1916, administers 63 national parks and more than 400 national park sites of various designations.

The Grand Canyon — in northern Arizona — is simply one of the most overwhelming natural spectacles on earth. The Colorado River carved this chasm 277 miles long, up to 18 miles wide, and over a mile deep over the course of 5-6 million years, exposing nearly two billion years of geological history in its stratified walls. No photograph — however skillfully composed — adequately conveys the sensation of standing at the South Rim and looking down into a void of space and color that defeats human scale. The canyon's walls shift in color from gold to red to purple with the changing light through the day, and the quality of silence at the bottom, by the river, is something that visitors remember for the rest of their lives.

Yellowstone National Park — straddling the corners of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho — was the world's first national park (established 1872) and remains one of the most extraordinary. Yellowstone sits atop a supervolcano — one of the largest volcanic systems on earth — whose geothermal energy powers more than 10,000 geysers, hot springs, mud pots, and fumaroles. Old Faithful geyser, which erupts approximately every 90 minutes, shooting a column of boiling water 100-180 feet into the air, is the most visited geothermal feature in the world. The Grand Prismatic Spring — a 370-foot-wide hot spring whose vivid rainbow colors (produced by heat-loving microorganisms) make it look like a painting from science fiction — is arguably the most beautiful natural pool in North America.

Beyond its geothermal wonders, Yellowstone is a wildlife haven of extraordinary richness: bison herds numbering in the thousands, grizzly bears, wolves (reintroduced in 1995 in one of the great conservation success stories of the 20th century), elk, moose, pronghorn antelope, bald eagles, and trumpeter swans all inhabit the park's 2.2 million acres.

Yosemite National Park — in the Sierra Nevada range of California — is one of the most photographed landscapes in North America, with its glacier-carved valleys, dramatic waterfalls, ancient giant sequoia groves, and sheer granite walls that rise thousands of feet from the valley floor. El Capitan (3,000 feet of sheer granite, the largest exposed granite monolith on earth) and Half Dome (the distinctive rounded granite dome rising 4,737 feet above the valley floor) are among the most iconic rock formations in the world and among the most challenging climbs in the sport of rock climbing. Yosemite Falls (at 2,425 feet, the tallest waterfall in North America) and Bridalveil Fall add to the valley's drama. The Mariposa Grove contains some of the oldest and largest trees on earth — giant sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum) that can live for over 3,000 years and grow to over 300 feet in height.

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park — straddling the border of Tennessee and North Carolina — is the most visited national park in the United States (over 12 million visitors a year), a lush Appalachian landscape of ancient forests, diverse wildlife, historic Appalachian communities, and the mysterious "smoke" (actually water vapor from the dense vegetation) that gives the mountains their name. The Appalachian Trail — the 2,190-mile hiking trail from Georgia to Maine — passes through the park.

Other iconic national parks include: Zion (Utah — soaring sandstone canyons and the Narrows, a slot canyon walk through the Virgin River), Bryce Canyon (Utah — bizarre "hoodoo" rock formations of orange and crimson), Arches (Utah — over 2,000 natural stone arches including the iconic Delicate Arch), Glacier (Montana — soaring peaks and one of the most spectacular mountain road drives in the world along the Going-to-the-Sun Road), Olympic (Washington — rain forests, alpine meadows, and Pacific coastline in one park), Acadia (Maine — rocky New England coastline and the first national park east of the Mississippi), Everglades (Florida — the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States, with manatees, American alligators, crocodiles, and hundreds of species of birds).

The Great Lakes Region

The Great Lakes — Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario — form the largest system of fresh surface water on earth, containing about 21% of the world's supply and bordering eight American states. The cities that grew up around the Great Lakes — Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Duluth, Green Bay — were the industrial heartland of the American economy through much of the 20th century.

Detroit — once the motor city that dominated global automobile manufacturing — has experienced dramatic decline and rebirth in the 21st century. Once the fourth-largest city in the United States, it lost more than half its population over the second half of the 20th century as the automobile industry contracted. But Detroit in recent years has experienced a remarkable cultural and economic renaissance, driven by young artists, entrepreneurs, and a vibrant electronic music scene (Detroit is the birthplace of techno music, which developed in the abandoned warehouses of the city in the 1980s and spread to dance clubs worldwide). The Detroit Institute of Arts (with one of the great art collections in America, including the remarkable Diego Rivera frescoes of the Detroit Industry Murals), the Motown Museum (commemorating the record label that launched Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, and The Temptations among dozens of others), and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History make Detroit a genuine cultural destination.

Niagara Falls — straddling the border between New York State and Ontario, Canada — is one of the most famous waterfalls in the world and one of the most powerful natural spectacles in North America. The combined flow of the American Falls, Bridal Veil Falls, and the Canadian Horseshoe Falls (the most impressive of the three) carries more water than any other waterfall in the world by volume. The Maid of the Mist boat tour (operating since 1846) takes visitors to the base of the falls in a spray of mist and roar of water that is one of the most viscerally exciting natural experiences available to any tourist.

American Festivals and Cultural Events

The United States hosts thousands of festivals, fairs, and cultural events each year that offer visitors insights into the country's diverse regional and cultural identities.

The Burning Man festival — held annually in the Nevada desert for a week in late August and early September — is one of the most extraordinary cultural events in the world: a temporary city of 70,000 people dedicated to radical self-expression, creativity, and community, where elaborate art installations, theme camps, and a spirit of gifting economy create an environment unlike anything else in human culture. The culmination is the burning of the "Man" — a large wooden figure that gives the event its name — in a communal ceremony of fire and music.

The Sundance Film Festival — held in Park City, Utah each January — is the most important independent film festival in the United States and one of the most significant in the world, launching the careers of filmmakers and the wider releases of films that have shaped American cinema.

The New Orleans Jazz Fest, Austin's South by Southwest (SXSW — a convergence of music, film, and tech industries), Coachella in the California desert, Bonnaroo in Tennessee, and the Newport Folk Festival and Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island are among the most culturally significant music festivals in the world.

State fairs — held in virtually every state in late summer — are one of the most authentically American cultural events: agricultural exhibitions, carnival rides, competitions for the best pies and jams and livestock, and the annual creative tradition of deep-frying things that were never meant to be deep-fried (deep-fried butter, deep-fried Oreos, deep-fried Coca-Cola, deep-fried pizza). The Iowa State Fair and the Texas State Fair in Dallas are among the most famous.