The Most Beautiful Places in New York
17 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in New York are Flatiron Building, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art. The list covers 17 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
New York State reaches from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, but its most famous beauty is man-made: Manhattan, where a narrow island, a rigid street grid and a booming economy pushed architecture upward. Between the 1900s and the 1930s, the race for height produced the skyscrapers that defined the form, and the city's grand civic buildings of the same era show Beaux-Arts ambition at its fullest. Upstate, glaciers and rivers cut deep gorges through layers of shale.
The Flatiron Building squeezed a steel-framed tower onto a triangular plot where Broadway crosses Fifth Avenue, and the Woolworth Building wrapped its height in Gothic detail that earned it the name Cathedral of Commerce. The Chrysler Building crowned Art Deco with a stainless-steel spire, only to be overtaken within a year by the Empire State Building. Grand Central Terminal hides a vaulted ceiling painted with the constellations, while the New York Public Library is guarded on Fifth Avenue by its two stone lions.
Later buildings answer with curves: Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim coils its galleries along one spiral ramp, the Rose Center sets a giant sphere inside a glass cube, and Santiago Calatrava's Oculus opens white ribs like wings. Central Park, designed by Olmsted and Vaux, turns the whole grid into a framed landscape. Far from the city, in western New York, Eternal Flame Falls keeps a small fire burning in a grotto behind falling water.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Flatiron Building | Skyscraper | |
| 2 | Metropolitan Museum of Art | Museum | |
| 3 | Museum of Modern Art | Museum | |
| 4 | Central Park | Urban park | |
| 5 | Empire State Building | Skyscraper | |
| 6 | Woolworth Building | Skyscraper | |
| 7 | Brooklyn Bridge | Bridge | |
| 8 | Chrysler Building | Skyscraper | |
| 9 | Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum | Museum | ✓ |
| 10 | Grand Central Terminal | Railway station | |
| 11 | Oculus (World Trade Center Transportation Hub) | Railway station | |
| 12 | Eternal Flame Falls | Waterfall | |
| 13 | Rose Center for Earth and Space | Planetarium | |
| 14 | The Morgan Library & Museum | Library building | |
| 15 | New York Public Library Main Branch | Library building | |
| 16 | Watkins Glen State Park | Canyon | |
| 17 | Storm King Art Center | Sculpture garden |
01 Flatiron Building
United States · 2.2 km from New York City40.741° N 73.990° W
Image by kokygonzalez from Pixabay Few buildings have a better site than the Flatiron.
Did you know? Its steel bracing was designed to resist four times the strongest wind it could ever be expected to face.
02 Metropolitan Museum of Art
United States · 7 km from New York City40.779° N 73.963° W
Image by marekr from Pixabay The Metropolitan Museum of Art occupies almost a quarter of a mile of Fifth Avenue along the eastern edge of Central Park, and inside it holds something close to the whole history of art. 5 million works across 17 curatorial departments, from Palaeolithic flints to contemporary painting.
03 Museum of Modern Art
United States · 4.7 km from New York City40.762° N 73.978° W
Erremm · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Museum of Modern Art on West 53rd Street in Manhattan did more than any other institution to shape the idea of modern art, and many of the pictures that define it hang here. Three collectors started it in 1929: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan.
04 Central Park
United States · 7.2 km from New York City40.782° N 73.966° W
Image by Josmanu1970 from Pixabay Central Park looks natural, but almost none of it is.
Did you know? All eight of the park’s lakes and ponds were created artificially by damming natural springs and streams.
05 Empire State Building
United States · 3.1 km from New York City40.748° N 73.986° W
Image by Olga_Fil from Pixabay The Empire State Building is the skyscraper against which other tall buildings are still measured, and it earned that status in a single burst of work at the start of the Great Depression. It stands on the west side of Fifth Avenue between 33rd and 34th Streets, on the site of the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
Did you know? The spire was originally meant as a mooring mast for airships, which would have docked at the level of a notional 106th floor.
06 Woolworth Building
United States · 1.5 km from New York City40.712° N 74.008° W
No machine-readable author provided. Aude assumed (based on copyright claims). · Public domain For sixteen years the tallest building on Earth was a Gothic cathedral built for a five-and-dime fortune.
Did you know? The elevator doors in the lobby were made by Tiffany Studios, with arabesque tracery etched in steel against a gold-plated ground.
07 Brooklyn Bridge
United States · 1.8 km from New York City40.706° N 73.996° W
Image by laretalo from Pixabay The man who designed the Brooklyn Bridge never saw a single cable strung. In June 1869, while surveying the site, John Roebling had his foot crushed against a piling by an approaching ferry.
Did you know? The Manhattan caisson was stopped about 24 metres down without reaching bedrock, because deeper work risked killing more men with decompression sickness.
08 Chrysler Building
United States · 3.7 km from New York City40.751° N 73.976° W
Image by RJA1988 from Pixabay The Chrysler Building is the purest expression of the optimism New York built for itself at the end of the 1920s. It was designed by William Van Alen and paid for by Walter P. Chrysler out of his own pocket, as an investment for his children rather than as a headquarters for his car company.
Did you know? Its gleaming cladding was the first use in an American project of the so-called 18-8 stainless steel, made with 18 percent chromium and 8 percent nickel.
09 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
United States · 7.5 km from New York City40.783° N 73.959° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Jean-Christophe BENOIST · CC BY 3.0 The Guggenheim on Fifth Avenue is a museum people visit as much for the building as for the art. Frank Lloyd Wright designed it as a top-heavy spiral that widens as it rises, a shape that looks nothing like the apartment blocks around it on the Upper East Side, facing Central Park.
Did you know? It is the only museum Wright ever designed, and because he was not licensed in New York a local firm handled dealings with the city authorities.
10 Grand Central Terminal
United States · 3.8 km from New York City40.753° N 73.977° W
Image by jplenio from Pixabay Grand Central Terminal is a commuter station that became one of the most visited buildings in the world: some 21 million people came in 2018 just to look, not counting passengers.
Did you know? The T in the interlocking GCT monogram is shaped like an upside-down anchor, a nod to Cornelius Vanderbilt's beginnings in steamships and ferries.
11 Oculus (World Trade Center Transportation Hub)
World Trade Center
United States · 1.7 km from New York City40.712° N 74.011° W
Image by Schmid-Reportagen from Pixabay At the World Trade Center site, the architect Santiago Calatrava built a railway station that looks as though it might take off. The World Trade Center Transportation Hub, known for its main hall, the Oculus, opened on 3 March 2016.
Did you know? The hall is aligned so sunlight through the skylight falls along the floor as a strip Calatrava calls the Way of Light, strongest around 11 September.
More about Oculus (World Trade Center Transportation Hub) →
12 Eternal Flame Falls
United States · 22.7 km from Buffalo42.702° N 78.752° W
Mpmajewski · CC BY-SA 3.0 Behind the veil of a small woodland waterfall near Buffalo burns a fire that nobody has to feed.
Did you know? The same researchers found that a larger eternal flame in Pennsylvania's Cook Forest State Park is no natural seep but a leak from an abandoned gas well.
13 Rose Center for Earth and Space
United States · 6.9 km from New York City40.782° N 73.973° W
ESA/Hubble, AMNH · CC BY 4.0 The Rose Center for Earth and Space is the part of New York's American Museum of Natural History that turns the cosmos into architecture.
Did you know? The first Hayden Planetarium was paid for largely by a $650,000 federal Reconstruction Finance Corporation loan, with Charles Hayden adding $150,000.
14 The Morgan Library & Museum
United States · 3.3 km from New York City40.749° N 73.982° W
Photograph by Mike Peel ( www.mikepeel.net ). · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Morgan began as one man's private study and is still, at its heart, a building made for holding precious paper. J.
Did you know? Thin metal sheeting was laid between the dry-jointed marble blocks to cope with New York's climate, and any cracked stone was rejected.
15 New York Public Library Main Branch
United States · 3.7 km from New York City40.753° N 73.982° W
ajay_suresh · CC BY 2.0 The main building of the New York Public Library, officially the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building since 2008, occupies the stretch of Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets in Midtown Manhattan.
Did you know? Construction cost about 9 million dollars, far above the original estimate of 2.5 million.
16 Watkins Glen State Park
United States · 32.3 km from Elmira42.377° N 76.872° W
Flickr user: Peter Rivera Stamford, Connecticut https://www.flickr.com/people/riverap1/ · CC BY 2.0 Watkins Glen is a gorge on a small, human scale, and that is what makes it so absorbing. In about two miles, Glen Creek drops some 400 feet on its way to Seneca Lake, and in doing so it has cut a narrow, winding slot through the bedrock, with cliffs up to about 200 feet high and nineteen waterfalls along the way.
Did you know? The gorge walls are Devonian sedimentary rock, laid down as mud and sand on the floor of a shallow sea more than 350 million years ago.
17 Storm King Art Center
United States · 32.7 km from Poughkeepsie41.425° N 74.059° W
Eldan Goldenberg · CC0 Storm King Art Center, in the Hudson Valley north of New York City, is a landscape of about 500 acres in which very large sculpture and open ground were made for each other.
Did you know? Splitting that boulder produced a form that reminded Noguchi's assistants of Momotaro, the Japanese folk hero born from a peach pit, which gave the work its name.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in New York?
- On our list, Flatiron Building ranks first, followed by Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art.
- Which was taller, the Chrysler Building or the Empire State Building?
- The Chrysler Building became the world's tallest building in 1930 thanks to its spire, but the Empire State Building surpassed it on completion in 1931 and held the title for about four decades.
- Why does a flame burn behind Eternal Flame Falls?
- Natural gas seeps from the shale bedrock in a small grotto behind the waterfall in Chestnut Ridge Park, near Buffalo. Once lit, the gas can keep burning, though the flame occasionally goes out and is relit.
- Who designed Central Park?
- Central Park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, whose Greensward Plan won the design competition in 1858. Almost all of its seemingly natural lakes, hills and woods were built by hand.
- What kinds of places are there to see in New York?
- In our collection, the places in New York are most often skyscrapers (4), museums (3), railway stations (2) and libraries (2).
- How many places are on this list in New York?
- The list covers 17 places.