New York City Guide - Culture

New York City continues to be one of the most diverse and heavily textured urban cultural centres in the world. As author Tom Wolfe wrote: ‘Culture just seems to be in the air, like part of the weather.'

The principal entertainment district is the Theater District in the Broadway/42nd Street/Times Square area, with Off- and Off-Off-Broadway theatres sprinkled throughout Manhattan. More high-brow culture is headquartered in the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, 70 Lincoln Center Plaza, Columbus Avenue at 64th Street.

You can buy tickets through Telecharge (tel: (212) 239 6200 or 1 800 545 2559; website: www.telecharge.com) and Ticketmaster (tel: (212) 307 7171; website: www.ticketmaster.com). Reduced-priced tickets for same-day Broadway and Off-Broadway are available for purchase at the TKTS booth, near 46th Street, between Broadway and Eighth Avenue (open Monday to Saturday 1500-2000, also Wednesday and Saturday 1000-1400, Sunday 1100 until 1930). Cash or traveller's cheques only.

Information on cultural events in the city is available online (website: www.nycvisit.com). Time Out New York (website: www.timeoutny.com) also is a good source of information published weekly and sold at newsagents and kiosks.

Music: The Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center, 70 Lincoln Center Plaza, Columbus Avenue at 64th Street (tel: (212) 875 5456; website: www.lincolncenter.org), is the permanent home of the New York Philharmonic (tel: (212) 875 5656; website: www.newyorkphilharmonic.org) and a temporary one to visiting orchestras and soloists.

The greatest names from all schools of music, from Toscanini to Gershwin, have performed at Carnegie Hall, 154 West 57th Street, at Seventh Avenue (tel: (212) 247 7800; website: www.carnegiehall.org), which boasts an astonishing and eclectic repertoire.

Known as the Met, the Metropolitan Opera House, in the Lincoln Center (tel: (212) 362 6000; website: www.lincolncenter.org), is New York's premiere opera venue and home to the Metropolitan Opera (website: www.metopera.org), from September to late April. The New York State Theater, also in Lincoln Center (tel: (212) 870 5570; website: www.lincolncenter.org), is where the New York City Opera (tel: (212) 870 5570; website: www.nycopera.com) perform. Its wide and adventurous programme varies wildly in quality but seats go for less than half the Met's prices.

Theatre: Theatre venues in the city are referred to as Broadway, Off-Broadway or Off-Off-Broadway - groupings that represent a descending order of ticket price, production polish, elegance and comfort and an ascending order of innovation, experimentation, and theatre for the sake of art rather than cash.

Manhattan Theatre Club performs at the Biltmore Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, and Stages I and II at City Center, 131 West 55th Street (tel: (212) 581 1212; website: www.mtc-nyc.org), produces some of the finest new plays in American theatre. For a more ethnic flavour, Harlem's Apollo Theatre, 253 West 125th Street (tel: (212) 531 5300; website: www.apollotheatre.com), has celebrated the legacy and culture of African-American music and entertainment since 1934.

Dance: New York has five major ballet companies as well as dozens of contemporary troupes. The Metropolitan Opera House, in the Lincoln Center (tel: (212) 362 6000; website: www.lincolncenter.org), is the home of the renowned American Ballet Theater (tel: (212) 362 6000; website: www.abt.org), which performs the classics from early May into July. New York State Theater, also in the Lincoln Center (tel: (212) 870 5570; website: www.lincolncenter.org), is home to the revered New York City Ballet (website: www.nycballet.com), which performs more contemporary ballet for a nine-week season each spring.

Universally known as BAM, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Street, between Flatbush Avenue and Fulton Street, Brooklyn (tel: (718) 636 4100; website: www.bam.org), is America's oldest performing arts academy and one of the busiest and most daring producers in New York. During autumn, BAM's Next Wave Festival showcases the hottest international attractions in avant-garde dance and music.

The most eminent and celebrated troupes in modern dance perform at New York City Center, 131 West 55th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues (tel: (212) 247 0430; website: www.citycenter.org). Big-name companies include Merce Cunningham Dance Company (tel: (212) 255 8240; website: www.merce.org), Paul Taylor Dance Company (tel: (212) 431 5562; website: www.ptdc.org), Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (tel: (212) 405 9000; website: www.alvinailey.org), Joffrey Ballet (tel: (212) 254 8520; website: www.joffreyballetschool.com) and Dance Theater of Harlem (tel: (212) 690 2800; website: www.dancetheatreofharlem.com).

Film: New York has hundreds of modern cinema complexes and art house cinemas. Cinemas worth visiting include Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street (tel: (212) 727 8110; website: www.filmforum.org), the IFC Center, 323 Sixth Avenue at Third Street (tel: (212) 924 7771; website: www.ifccenter.com), and the Angelika Film Centre, 18 West Houston Street (tel: (212) 995 2000; website: www.angelikafilmcenter.com), all of which screen independent and art house cinema. General information, show times and advanced tickets are available from Moviefone (tel: (212) 777 3456/FILM; website: www.moviefone.com).

New York has been portrayed through celluloid in a number of ways, beginning most famously with King Kong, swinging from the Empire State Building, in the 1933 classic starring Fay Wray. Other intriguing films include Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), where Robert De Niro plays the part of a mentally isolated New York cabbie amid the decadent metropolis. More recently, films shot in NYC have included Gangs of New York (2002), Spiderman 1, 2 and 3 (2002, 2004 and 2007 respectively), The Devil Wears Prada (2006), I Am Legend (2007) and Sex in the City (2008).

Literary Notes: New York has spawned some of America's most celebrated writers. Washington Square, at Fifth Avenue and Waverley Place, was home to the 19th-century aristocracy and provided the inspiration for the classic study of the American upper classes, Washington Square (1881), by New Yorker Henry James. Bohemian Greenwich Village has long been the favoured haunt of America's literati and is featured in the works of writers like Dawn Powell and later Jack Kerouac. The Chelsea Hotel, on West 23rd Street, is something of a writers' emporium. Here Arthur Miller penned After the Fall (1964) and William Burroughs worked on Naked Lunch (1959). One of New York's top contemporary novelists is Paul Auster, who won acclaim for The New York Trilogy (1987), a book comprising three novellas all set in New York. Recent novels set in the city include Richard Price's Lush Life (2008) and The Invention of Everything Else (2008) by Samantha Hunt.