New York by
Panache .Voyage
Panache.Voyage’s NEW YORK TEAM IS PASSIONATE ABOUT THE CITY. We
are constantly checking out art
openings and Broadway shows, going to architecture open houses, and vetting walking tours and guides, as well as
eating at the newest restaurants, of course. We also rely on our rolodexes of chefs, professors, magazine editors,
theater producers and actors, and many others to assure
that we are always on top of “the city that never sleeps”
and able to open every door so you can experience the best
New York
of New York.
Lower East Side: Long infamous for its crowded tenements, the neighborhood today is home to some of Manhattan’s trendiest bars and boutiques.
Harlem: The city’s famous African-American neighborhood is buzzing again—at the Apollo Theater, in its gospel churches, and in the many new restaurants and bars.
SoHo: Cast-iron 19th-century buildings house galleries, upscale shopping, and restaurants.
Upper West Side: The more liberal counterpart to the stuffy Upper East Side, this is a neighborhood of writers and professors, as well as Columbia University and the Museum of Natural History. Upper East Side: “Museum Mile,” home to the Met, the Guggenheim, and the Frick, is found here. Broadway: The theater capital of the country, where actors dream of performing. Midtown: Office towers share the streets with many of the city’s top attractions including Grand Central, MoMA, Rockefeller Center, and Fifth Avenue shopping. Chelsea: Eighth Avenue is the center of the city’s gay life while near 10th and 11th there are literally hundreds of art galleries. Greenwich Village: Long a bohemian enclave, “the Village” is the best preserved neighborhood of Manhattan, with stately and charming row houses—and plenty of places to discuss the world and life over a coffee.
Battery Park/Wall Street: This is where it all began, with the small Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, while today skyscrapers loom over the streets of lower Manhattan. Brooklyn: The Brooklyn artisanal aesthetic is one of New York’s most successful exports. We’ll take you to the bars, restaurants, and shops that have made the borough the epicenter of cool. Queens: New York’s largest borough (in area) is home to the US Open, CitiField, the Steinway Studios, and the Museum of the Moving Image, among other sights. Bronx: We’ll take you to the highlights of this borough north of Manhattan: Yankee Stadium, the Grand Concourse, the Botanical Gardens, the Zoo and the Italian restaurants of Arthur Avenue.
bronx
Washington Heights
harlem
Upper West Side
central park
Washington Heights: This neighborhood’s most famous site is the Cloisters, a medieval art museum that includes portions of five European abbeys.
Upper east Side queens
Broadway midtown chelsea greenwich viilage soho
lower east side
Battery Park Wall street
brooklyn
Art Galleries and Private Collections New York has long been the epicenter of American art, both the home and muse of artists as diverse as Alfred Stieglitz, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and many others whose names you don’t know yet, but soon will. You’ll also find some of the world’s most important art museums here, including the Met, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim. It can feel overwhelming, this embarrassment of riches, which ranges from medieval tapestries at the Cloisters to video installations at the New Museum. Our guides will not only make sure you don’t get lost in the Byzantine galleries if you are looking for the Baroque ones, but also provide after-hours access to many museums, get you to the head of the line at blockbuster shows, and can even arrange for gallery tours with an NYU art history professor. We will point you in the right direction depending on your particular interests, whether it be Himalayan art at the Rubin or perhaps visiting the recently opened SoHo home of sculptor Donald Judd. There are more than 300 art galleries just in Chelsea, but you don’t need to worry about keeping on top of all of them if you visit New York with Panache.Voyage. We’ll take you to the gallery shows that everyone is talking about, as well as those that we know will appeal especially to you.
New York
New York
Architecture The architect Le Corbusier described New York as a “beautiful catastrophe.” Wander the avenues of Midtown or the tangle of streets in Greenwich Village, and you’ll soon understand his point. Despite the order imposed by the city’s famous grid, a unique chaos characterizes this city and its buildings. Stately brownstones sit next to 1960s apartment blocks; an abandoned railroad track has been transformed into the High Line, a urban garden running for twenty blocks, suspended twenty feet about the city streets. The most famous buildings of New York can be found in any guidebook—the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, Grand Central—but our guides will also point out gems that are easily overlooked. Stops on a walking tour might include a synagogue on the Lower East Side, now lost amid boutiques and bars; the mews houses off of Washington Square Park; and the sole New York building by famed Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, found on an otherwise unremarkable downtown block. When it comes to New York’s famous landmarks, we’ll provide you with exclusive access you might not have otherwise, beginning with admission to the September 11 Memorial. Our guides will put Frank Lloyd Wright’s only building in New York, the Guggenheim, in the context of its time and draw your attention to details like the tile work in the lobby of the Woolworth Building or a Harry Bertoia screen that sits on the second floor of a Joe Fresh store (there’s a long, onlyin-New-York story behind that screen that our guide will share). Our helicopter tours of Manhattan can be literally breathtaking and provide a dazzling perspective on the city’s skyscrapers. With our guides leading you, you’ll leave New York with a new appreciation of the skyline and streetscapes of this beautiful, chaotic, unique metropolis.
Performing Arts On any given night in New York, you can choose among Broadway musicals and plays; a symphony, opera or ballet at Lincoln Center; dance performances at City Center or the Joyce; jazz clubs in the Village, or dozens of smaller venues with bands playing country, pop, rock, or folk music. The lineup of performances you would find only during a muchcelebrated annual cultural festival in other cities is simply Friday night in New York. To make sure you are there, in the best seats, is where we come in. We’ll get you tickets to even the most coveted events and after the show is over, take you backstage to meet the actors, singers, and ballerinas. New York’s cultural calendar is also crowded with seasonal events like the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City with the Rockettes and the Nutcracker at Lincoln Center in December, Shakespeare in the Park and Summer Stage in July and August. These tickets can be hard to come by even for New Yorkers, but if you want to see them, we’ll take care of it, and in addition get you a table for a post Christmas-show hot chocolate or arrange a picnic for the summer events in Central Park. A Broadway veteran, Hugh Jackman, said of the experience of being on stage in New York, “There’s something magical about Broadway. The audiences are smart, they’re educated. They go in ready and they’re up for it, they’re up for the party.” Whether it’s a Broadway show or one of New York’s other cultural events, Panache.Voyage will work to get you in.
New York
New York
Gourmet Experience A 2013 survey reported that New Yorkers eat out or buy their lunches and dinners 58 percent of the time. That’s a lot of meals that support a lot of restaurants—more than 24,000 according to the city. Those establishments range from basic pizzerias to haute cuisine restaurants helmed by chefs from around the world. Our guides will take you the city’s green markets, where chefs search for the best produce each morning, and if you want to taste some of the reasons why foodies are flocking to Brooklyn, they will guide you through Smorgasbord in Williamsburg, a collection of food stalls from many of the borough’s best restaurants. The highlight of many of our clients’ visits to New York is our program with top chefs. You’ll meet the men and women who helm some of the city’s top restaurants, hear about their approach to cooking and their inspirations, and then sit down to a meal of their signature dishes. Check with our team for the latest list of celebrity chefs available. If you have a sweet tooth, then we can arrange a meeting with Margo Lewis of Cake Bliss whose couture creations have been featured in Bride’s and the New York Times. If you want something with more of a kick than a simple sugar rush, we’ll arrange a brewery and distillery tour, with stops at the Brooklyn Brewery, Kings County Distillery, and the New York Distilling Company as you learn the art of making beer and whiskey from entrepreneurs giving New York a high-proof edge.
Fashion & Shopping New York remains the city that sets the tone for high fashion, as well as popular fashion, for America and much of the world. We provide our clients with the chance to tour the studios of famous, established designers and rising stars in the field. A contributing editor at Vogue will introduce you to her favorite designers for a unique perspective on New York’s fashion world. When it comes to shopping, our guides can take you to the best stores on the prime stretches of Fifth and Madison Avenue, but their knowledge goes much further than that and they can also take you to the designer boutiques of Nolita (that’s short for North of Little Italy) and the funky shops of Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, where designers’ handcrafted vintageinspired pieces have had an impact on street fashion from Stockholm to Tokyo. Whatever you want to bring back from your trip to New York—from clothes to electronics or even, say, pickles—our guides know where you can get the best deal.
New York
Literary Lore “Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book — and does,” quipped Groucho Marx. Fortunately at least a few of those books have been pretty good ones. Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, and Henry James lived and wrote here; today the novelists Jonathan Franzen and Dave Eggers, the poet Sharon Olds, and the essayist Daniel Mendelsohn call the city home. New York is also home to most of the United States’ major publishing houses. Any literary pilgrimage to New York should start at the Morgan Library, with its superb collection of manuscripts housed in J.P. Morgan’s early 20th century house made even more stunning with an addition by Renzo Piano in 1991. (Bookish travelers will appreciate that the library was the setting for large parts of E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime.) Our guide will take you to other literary haunts—the White Horse Tavern where Dylan Thomas, Hunter Thompson, and Norman Mailer were regulars, and some of the many independent bookstores that somehow manage to survive in our digital era. You may find a favorite author giving a reading, or just browsing the shelves. Our guides can open the doors to the fascinating rare book room of the Jewish Theological Seminary and arrange after-hours tours at the Society of Illustrators and the Grolier Club. The Grolier is a private organization that celebrates the history of printing and typography; you’ll get a look at their extensive collection of books dating back to the 15th century. If you are then ready to learn about printing first hand, we’ll introduce you to an independent printer who continues to produce hand-bound volumes at her press.
New York
New York History & Culture New York is, famously, a city of immigrants, both from around the world and from other parts of America. Approaching New York through their experiences can provide a different perspective on Manhattan. For many immigrants, their first stop was Ellis Island. The immigration processing center is now a museum where you can see the buildings where 12 million immigrants first set foot on American soil from 1892 to 1924. Many Jewish immigrants passing through Ellis Island settled on the Lower East Side. Our guides will take you to the Tenement Museum and point out the synagogues that have been converted to other uses, the Forward Building (home to the first Jewish daily newspaper in the United States, originally published in Yiddish), and the other traces of a once thriving community. Your guide can then take you to synagogues uptown that announced the success of New York’s Jewish community, like the elaborate Central Synagogue, modeled on Budapest’s Dohany Street Synagogue. Manhattan’s Chinatown is the country’s oldest, dating back to the 1860s. While in recent years the city’s Chinese population is increasingly moving to Brooklyn and Queens, the neighborhood around Canal Street remains the largest concentration of Chinese in the Western hemisphere. Our guides will take you to the historic sites, temples, and stores as well as the best noodle restaurants and dumpling shops. A different sort of immigration took place from roughly 1910 to 1930, when some two million AfricanAmericans left the southern United States and headed north, many to Harlem. Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and W.E.B. Dubois were some of the most notable cultural figures associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Arthur Schomburg was another key figure and our tours of Harlem include a visit to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. At the Apollo Theater you’ll be able to see headliners and young performers take the stage. At the services at Abyssinian Church, the Gospel choir will soon have you on your feet. Harlem has been enjoying another renaissance in recent years, and our guide will take you to the bars and restaurants, like Marcus Samuelsson’s Red Rooster, that are bringing new energy to this historic neighborhood.
For Children New York is where Madeline lived in the Plaza, where Tom Hanks lived out every kid’s fantasies in the movie Big, and Harriet the Spy perfected her sleuthing. If the bright lights and energy of New York dazzle even many adults, it perhaps makes sense that many kids also find the city fascinating. Our guides are experienced catering to our youngest clients and their particular requests. Stops at the huge toy store FAO Schwarz (where Tom Hanks played the oversized keyboard), the Lego Store, and the Entrepid Museum are popular. Perhaps it is self-evident why, but on visits to Dylan’s Candy Store, with its encyclopedic selection of favorite sweets, our young guests are like, well, kids in a candy store. At Brooklyn’s Transit Museum they can explore vintage subway cars, while the NY Fire and NY Police Museums provide kid-friendly introductions to the histories of the city’s fire and police departments. Meetings with naturalists at the Central Park and Bronx zoos let kids get a closer look at the animals, while a cooking class at a classic New York pizzeria will appeal to any budding chef. Our private dinners at the American Girl café also get positive reviews from many of our young guests. We will pull out all the stops for birthdays and other celebrations, from meetings with cast members of kid-friendly Broadway musicals to securing spaces at the occasional “Night at the Museum” events at the Museum of Natural History. You need Anna and Elsa from Frozen to appear at a slumber party? We’ve got you covered.
New York
New York Sports New York is a sport mecca as the only city in America that is home to two major league baseball teams—the Yankees and the Mets. Few teams are more storied than the Yankees, who have won 27 World Series and count among their past players Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, and Mickey Mantle. The Mets aren’t that bad either, and their fans take a pride in sticking with them through good and bad seasons. At both stadiums you can indulge in hot dogs and cold beers, or opt for the more gourmet choices that both now offer—like Two Boots pizza or Lobel’s steak sandwiches. We can get you prime tickets (that’s behind home plate if you aren’t a baseball fan) as well as access to one of the stadiums’ private clubs. New York is also home to two basketball teams, the Knicks and the Brooklyn Nets, who play at the new Barclay Center. Our guides can arrange pre- or post-game visits with players from all four teams. At the end of each August, everyone in New York gets tennis fever when the US Open takes place in Flushing, Queens. Many of the big matches sell out months in advance, but we can secure even the most coveted tickets. We’ll also help you get from Manhattan (or Brooklyn) to the site of the US Open and arrange for VIP admission to luxury courtside suites and reservations at the village’s restaurants.
New York
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