Lincoln Square 101: A Neighborhood Primer

Lincoln Square is small. If you draw a rectangle from 60th Street to about 72nd, from Central Park West to the West End Avenue side of Broadway, you have it. Inside that rectangle live Lincoln Center, the Juilliard School, the Beacon Theatre, the New-York Historical Society at the northern edge, the Time Warner Center to the south, two Whole Foods, a Trader Joe's, three subway stations, and several thousand people who have decided that this is where Manhattan settles down without leaving Manhattan.

If you are moving here for three months or three years, here is what is worth knowing before you arrive.

The geography is unusually friendly

Most Manhattan neighborhoods are organized around a single subway line. Lincoln Square is organized around two and a half. The 1, 2, and 3 trains meet at the same platform at 72nd and Broadway. The B and C run a parallel route under Central Park West, with a station at 72nd. The A and D pass through at 59th Street, which is a walkable distance south. The N, Q, R, and W are reachable at 57th Street. Four crosstown buses pick you up. The Hudson River Greenway, the longest continuous bike path on the island, runs along the western edge.

The practical version of this: it is hard to be in Lincoln Square and more than fifteen minutes from anywhere else in Manhattan. The 2 and 3 are express trains; they put you in Times Square in five minutes and in the Financial District in twenty.

The cultural density is the point

There are very few places where you can leave your apartment at 7:55 PM and be in a seat at the Metropolitan Opera at 8:00. Lincoln Center is that place for residents of Lincoln Square. The campus contains the Met, the New York Philharmonic, the Vivian Beaumont Theater, the David Rubenstein Atrium with its free Thursday-night concerts, the Walter Reade Theater and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center for arthouse and revival cinema, and the campus of Juilliard. The Beacon Theatre, four blocks north on Broadway, programs almost every night of the year. Symphony Space is twenty blocks up, the New-York Historical Society is on Central Park West at 77th, and the American Museum of Natural History is at 79th.

You do not need to plan around any of this. Most of it is walkable from a single bench on Columbus Avenue.

The food is good and also not the point

Lincoln Square is not a destination food neighborhood the way the Lower East Side or Greenpoint is. It is a neighborhood with very good restaurants tucked into its long-term residential fabric. Cafe Luxembourg on West 70th is one of the city's classic neighborhood bistros and has been for forty years. Bar Boulud across from Lincoln Center has a charcuterie program. Magnolia Bakery has a Columbus location. Levain Bakery is on West 74th. There is a Citarella on Broadway at 75th for cheese, fish, and prepared foods, and a Trader Joe's on Broadway at 72nd for everything else. Sushi Yasaka on West 72nd is the quietest reservation in the area. The coffee map is small: Joe Coffee, Bluestone Lane at Lincoln Center, and a handful of independent counters along Columbus.

If you cook, the day-to-day grocery story is Trader Joe's or West Side Market on Broadway between 76th and 77th. If you do not cook, plan for Lincoln Square to be a coffee-and-snack neighborhood and an evening-out neighborhood, with most of your weekday lunches happening wherever you happen to work.

The park access is unusual

Most Upper West Side blocks are two or three blocks from Central Park. Lincoln Square's east edge is the park. If you live on the west side of Central Park West, you are inside the park within thirty seconds. If you live on 70th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam, like our residents, you are at Strawberry Fields in three minutes and at Sheep Meadow in five. The 70th Street entrance opens onto a quieter part of the park than the 86th Street entrance does, and the loop road, the Lake, the Boathouse, and Bethesda Terrace are all an easy walk south.

The other park, Riverside, sits along the Hudson three blocks west. The two parks together give you about ten miles of continuous green and a continuous run that crosses from one to the other through 72nd Street. Most longer-term residents fall into a pattern of doing one in the morning and the other in the evening.

What it feels like

Lincoln Square is, more than most Manhattan neighborhoods, an unhurried place. The buildings are residential. The retail is mostly local. The streets are tree-lined. People walk dogs in the morning and read paperbacks in the park in the afternoon. The cultural calendar fills weeknights. The neighborhood empties slightly in August when the opera company travels and refills in September when school starts. You can have an entirely satisfying week here without leaving a four-block radius, and you can also walk to Times Square in twenty minutes if you want to.

If you are coming to New York for the first time, this is, with the possible exception of the West Village, the most New York place to live in New York. It is the city's idea of itself.