The Bronx, Queens and Staten Island

Three of New York's five boroughs get almost no visitors, and between them they hold the largest metropolitan zoo in America, a fifty-acre patch of forest that has never been cut, the best food in the city, and the free boat ride with the famous view.

All of it is reachable on an ordinary subway fare, and each of these is a day trip rather than an afternoon.

The Bronx

The Bronx Zoo

The largest metropolitan zoo in the United States — around 265 acres with something over four thousand animals from some six hundred species, most of them in large outdoor enclosures built to resemble their habitats rather than in cages. It opened in 1899 and is run by the Wildlife Conservation Society, which does serious conservation work alongside the public attraction.

The exhibits worth planning around:

• Congo Gorilla Forest — six and a half acres of recreated African rainforest with two troops of lowland gorillas, colobus monkeys and red river hogs, with treetop walkways.
• JungleWorld — an indoor Asian rainforest, with gibbons, hornbills and tapirs.
• Himalayan Highlands — snow leopards and red pandas.
• Tiger Mountain, and the Baboon Reserve, which is built around a simulated archaeological dig explaining how the evolution of gelada baboons is studied.
• Astor Court, the original Beaux-Arts heart of the zoo, with the historic animal houses and the sea lion pool.

Two zoological corrections, since older writing on the zoo gets both wrong. Gibbons are apes, not monkeys. And tapirs are not small pig-like animals — they are large, closer to the size of a pony, and their nearest relatives are horses and rhinoceroses rather than pigs.

Practical notes: a few of the specialist exhibits carry a small charge on top of admission, several are seasonal and closed in winter, and the site is big enough that the internal shuttle is worth using. One day a week has reduced or donation-based admission, which is worth checking.

The New York Botanical Garden

Immediately next door, and arguably the better of the two. Two hundred and fifty acres with around fifty separate gardens and collections, and a serious research institution attached that has been working since the 1890s.

The centrepiece is the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, a vast Victorian-style glasshouse of domes and galleries, which is where the flower shows happen — the orchid show in late winter is the one that draws crowds, and the model train show at Christmas, in which the city's landmarks are rebuilt out of bark and twigs, is better than that description suggests.

But the remarkable thing is the Thain Family Forest: fifty acres of old-growth woodland that has never been cleared, the largest surviving remnant of the forest that covered the whole of New York before the city. Hemlock, oak and tulip trees, a river gorge, and waterfalls. There is nothing else like it within the city limits.

The rose garden, the native plant garden, the conifer collection and the rock garden are all substantial in their own right.

The rest of the Bronx

• Arthur Avenue — the real Little Italy, far more of a working food neighbourhood than the Manhattan version, with a covered market and old family shops.
• Yankee Stadium — the current one opened in 2009 beside the site of the old. Tours run on non-match days.
• The South Bronx is where hip hop was invented, covered under the making of New York.
• Wave Hill — a public garden and former estate above the Hudson with one of the best views in the city.
• City Island — a small fishing village improbably inside New York, reached by a bridge, full of boatyards and seafood.
• Woodlawn Cemetery, a Victorian garden cemetery with a remarkable list of jazz musicians buried in it, and the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, the small wooden house where he spent his last years.

Queens

Queens is, by most measures, the most ethnically diverse place on earth — something like half its residents were born outside the United States and a very large number of languages are spoken in it. The consequence, and the reason to go, is the food. Queens is where people who are serious about eating in New York actually eat.

Flushing Meadows–Corona Park

The site of two World's Fairs, in 1939 and 1964, and still full of their remains. The Unisphere — the enormous steel globe from 1964 — stands at its centre, and the New York State Pavilion nearby is a magnificent decaying ruin of concrete towers and a cable-roofed rotunda that has never been demolished and never quite restored.

The Queens Museum, in a building from the 1939 fair, holds the Panorama of the City of New York: a scale model of all five boroughs built for the 1964 fair, covering nearly ten thousand square feet, with every building in the city on it. It is one of the most extraordinary objects in New York and very few visitors ever see it.

Also in the park: Citi Field, where the Mets play, and the tennis centre.

One correction worth making plainly. The US Open is played at Flushing Meadows, in Queens. It moved there in 1978 from the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, and older writing that places the championship at Forest Hills is nearly fifty years out of date.

Long Island City and Astoria

Directly across the East River from midtown, and the best skyline views in the city — the waterfront parks here look straight at Manhattan.

• MoMA PS1 — contemporary art in a converted school, the adventurous sibling of the Manhattan museum.
• The Noguchi Museum — the sculptor's own studio and garden, arranged as he left it, and one of the calmest places in New York.
• Socrates Sculpture Park — large outdoor work on the waterfront, free.
• The Museum of the Moving Image, in Astoria beside the film studios that have been working there since the 1920s.

Astoria has long been the centre of the city's Greek community and remains one of the best places to eat in it.

The food neighbourhoods

• Flushing — a Chinatown substantially larger than Manhattan's, with regional Chinese cooking of a range not available anywhere else in the country, plus Korean and Taiwanese food.
• Jackson Heights — South Asian, Tibetan, Nepalese, Colombian and Mexican within a few streets of each other, and the single best eating district in New York.
• Rockaway Beach — a long Atlantic beach at the end of the subway, with actual surf, reached in about an hour from Manhattan.

The Queens Botanical Garden, which began at the 1939 World's Fair and moved to its present site in 1963, is smaller than the Bronx and Brooklyn gardens and quieter than either, with a large rose garden.

Staten Island

The least visited borough, and the one almost every tourist technically visits without getting off the boat.

The Staten Island Ferry is free, runs day and night, and passes close to the Statue of Liberty — the best view in New York at no cost, and covered under Lower Manhattan. Most people ride it both ways without disembarking, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

For anyone who does get off:

Snug Harbor, a former home for retired sailors, now a cultural centre with a botanical garden in its grounds. The New York Chinese Scholar's Garden there is a faithful walled garden of pavilions, rocks and covered walkways built in the Ming tradition by craftsmen from Suzhou, and it is genuinely remarkable — the sort of thing that would be a major attraction anywhere else and has almost nobody in it.

Historic Richmond Town is a preserved village of original buildings from the seventeenth century onwards, with the oldest schoolhouse in the country.

A practical correction. Older guidance suggests travelling between Staten Island and Brooklyn by subway under the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. There is no subway to Staten Island at all. The island's railway does not connect to the rest of the system. The options are the free ferry to Manhattan, or a bus across the bridge to Brooklyn — and the bridge itself was officially respelled with a double Z in 2018, to match the explorer's name.

Timing a visit around the gardens

Each borough has a botanical garden, and two events are worth building a trip around rather than catching by luck:

• Cherry blossom at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, in spring, with a festival attached. The dates move by a fortnight either way with the weather, so check close to the time.
• The orchid show at the New York Botanical Garden, in late winter, which is the best thing to do in New York in February.

Admission arrangements differ at each and several have a free or reduced day, which is worth checking before setting out. The Conservatory Garden in Central Park is free and is the only formal garden in Manhattan.

How much time to allow

The zoo and the botanical garden are next door to each other in the Bronx and together make a full day — attempting both properly in an afternoon does neither justice. Flushing Meadows and a meal in Jackson Heights or Flushing is another full day. Staten Island is a half day unless Snug Harbor and Richmond Town are both on the list.

Travel time from midtown runs between forty minutes and an hour and a quarter in each direction for most of this, which is the thing that catches people out.