Ganesh Temple
45-57 Bowne Street
(at Holly Avenue)
The Ganesh Temple is a great place to get a taste (literally and figuratively) of Hindu culture. You are welcome to enter the colorful interior (after taking off your shoes), where you’ll find shrines to the elephant-faced deity, along with local believers in prayer. Around the corner, the temple canteen offers superb vegetarian fare. — Dan Saltzstein
Gantry Plaza State Park
474 48th Avenue
(at Center Boulevard)
Since opening in 1998, this Long Island City park has offered spectacular views of the Midtown skyline, and thanks to a recent expansion it’s now a favorite spot for Queens residents on sunny days. Stroll amid reminders of the site’s industrial past, like the hulking gantry cranes that once transferred cargo off East River boats onto trains headed to Long Island, or lounge in a green area, complete with deck chairs and hammocks, that sits between the piers and the iconic Pepsi sign — the perfect place to catch a glorious sunset over Manhattan. — Dan Saltzstein
Swallow Cafe
49 Bogart Street
(near Moore Street)
There’s good technique behind the bar, and the dark Italian-style beans give the cappuccinos a nostalgic ring. Get a shot at the counter or nurse your coffee on the couch, then graduate to a michelada at Roberta’s around the corner. There’s no reason to leave Bushwick. — Oliver Strand
Stumptown Coffee Roasters
18 West 29th Street
(between Broadway and Fifth Avenue)
Travertine floors, walnut bar, natty staff: When Stumptown Coffee Roasters opened in the Ace Hotel in 2009, it was one of New York’s most elegant coffee bars. Now it’s one of the busiest, and for a good reason. The cappuccinos and mochas (made with Mast Brothers Chocolate) are worth the wait. Coffee geeks and the coffee-curious should trek out to a second coffee bar that opened in the warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where the beans are roasted. There’s no espresso, just coffee brewed by the cup, with a mind-spinning selection of up to 35 kinds of beans. The Red Hook location is open Friday, Saturday and Sunday only. One of the City’s Best. — Oliver Strand
Port’s Coffee and Tea
251 West 23rd Street
(between Seventh and Eighth Avenues)
A small, solid coffee bar across the street from the Chelsea Hotel. Halfhearted nautical theme, Stumptown done well. — Oliver Strand
Peels
325 Bowery
All the neighborhood’s coltish young things are drawn to the second restaurant from the duo behind Freemans. Mornings are a delight: claim a stool and order a cappuccino and a buckwheat muffin with lemon and rosemary. Nights are a different scene. — Oliver Strand
Ost Café
441 East 12th Street
(at Avenue A)
Excellent coffee, including a fine cappuccino. Most people here seem to nurse their drinks, a tacit rent for the comfy chairs and WiFi. — Oliver Strand
Nolita Mart & Espresso Bar
156 Mott Street
(near Broome Street)
A coffee bar in front of a convenience store that, despite the name, is decidedly in Chinatown. The espresso is Stumptown’s Hair Bender, the pour over bar is outfitted with Beehouse drippers. Stand and sip at counters made with reclaimed wood. — Oliver Strand
Ninth Street Espresso (Tompkins Square Park)
341 East 10th Street
(near Avenue B)
A white shoebox-shaped storefront across the street from Tompkins Square Park that serves some of the best espressos and cappuccinos in New York. It’s a pleasant spot, a part of the fabric of the neighborhood, with narrow counters inside for quick drinking and a bench outside for sitting with your dog. One of the City’s Best. — Oliver Strand
Little Skips
941 Willoughby Avenue
(at Myrtle Avenue)
A funky Bushwick coffee spot that serves its neighborhood well: tattered chairs, overstuffed couches, a sideways view of elevated train tracks through the plate-glass windows. The coffee is serious, even if the baristas stray a little with the tasty Bushwick Egg Cream, a traditional egg cream with a shot of espresso from Counter Culture Coffee. — Oliver Strand
La Colombe Torrefaction (SoHo)
270 Lafayette Street
(near Prince Street)
Small, sleek, busy. Coffee is a crapshoot. Sometimes it measures up to the reputation the roaster earned in Philadelphia; sometimes the baristas couldn’t care less. — Oliver Strand
Blue Bottle Coffee (Rockaway Beach)
106-01 Shore Front Parkway
A summer fling: a fully equipped coffee bar (espresso, pour over, New Orleans-style iced coffee) shares a stand on the boardwalk with Caracas Arepa Bar. It’s a part of the Rockaway Beach Club, Rockaway Taco’s plan to turn New York’s best surf spot into a food scene. (Through September.) — Oliver Strand
Various gyms around New York
Join raucous fans to cheer on the hard-hitting women of the Gotham Girls Roller Derby league as they race around the flat track. Skaters with noms de guerre like Carmen Monoxide, Roxy Gibrawlter and Dainty Inferno have sharp elbows and lots of heart. Bouts often take place at the Hunter College Sportsplex, but check the league’s Web site for other venues. — Alice DuBois
Rockaway Beach
Beach 90th Street
(across Shore Front Parkway)
The longboards being lugged on the subway in the wee hours of the morning are a telltale sign: surf’s up in Rockaway. The only official spot to hang 10 in the city, rock rock Rockaway Beach still has the urban grit — and the summertime jams — of the Ramones era. The break across Beach 90th Street is a haven for crews of hard-core year-round surfers, some of whom occupy the bungalows nearby, for just-getting-their-toes-wet newbies and for locals alike. Join them or just ogle them; either way, it’s the East Coast answer to Malibu — especially if you hit the Rockaway Taco stand after. And the picturesque — really! — ride on the A train out there, hanging low over the waters of Jamaica Bay, is enough to mellow anyone out. — Melena Ryzik
The Rum House
228 West 47th Street
(between Broadway and Eighth Avenue)
A beloved dive reborn and – believe it or not – improved. The former incarnation of the Edison Hotel bar was dark, tacky and odd: like many camp pleasures, it teetered on that knife-edge between charming and depressing. The sharp downtown team that took it over stripped out carpeting and ennui, but kept the piano and the nautical theme. It’s now a vibrant grown-up bar that feels like it’s been around forever – the perfect New York classic it was always meant to be. — Steven Stern
Lenox Lounge
288 Malcolm X Boulevard
(between West 124th and 125th St)
The drinks are nothing special, and can add up to real money, particularly when there’s a cover charge. But between the movie-set-perfect Deco interior and the big windows on Lenox Avenue, there is no space like it in New York, or anywhere else. — Pete Wells
Get The Scoop, a free iPhone app from The New York Times: nytimes.com/thescoop
Freddy’s Bar
627 Fifth Avenue
(between 17th and 18th St)
After the much-loved Dean Street dive was eminent domain-ed out of existence by the Atlantic Yards project, a bunch of former employees packed up all the furniture and funky knickknacks, brushed off the dust and moved the whole lot to the South Slope. The reborn Freddy’s is, wonderfully, as odd and as charming as the original. — Steven Stern
An Beal Bocht Cafe
445 West 238th Street
(between Greystone and Waldo Avenues)
Up on a hill in the Bronx, near Manhattan College, a real live pub filled with real live Irish people – and other folks who are almost as friendly. There’s no television, but there is a resident theater company, a weekly poetry night, fiddlers on Sunday, home-baked brown bread, arguments about politics and – of course – a perfect pint of Guinness. — Steven Stern
Accademia di Vino
2427 Broadway
(between 89th and 90th Streets)
The full list of something like 500 bottles has been culled, thank goodness, to around 30 wines by the glass. Nearly all are Italian, and many are obscure, but the menu and the bartenders bring enlightenment. — Pete Wells
Cricket in Flushing Meadows Corona Park
11101 Corona Avenue
(In the park, near Meadow Lake)
Not far from the Unisphere, the giant globe that stands in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, is a global sporting ground. There, cricket pitches beside Meadow Lake feature local players, mostly of South Asian descent, and the intense games occasionally attract world-class talent. Watch from the lakeside pavilion area nearby. — Sarah Maslin Nir
Bronx Culture Trolley
Departs from 450 Grand Concourse
(in front of the Longwood Art Gallery @ Hostos)
For nearly 10 years, the Bronx Council on the Arts has run the Bronx Culture Trolley, a free tour in a San Francisco-style car that loops around the Grand Concourse and stops at local galleries and arts institutions, including the Bronx Museum (all offer free admission to trolley riders). It departs Longwood Art Gallery @ Hostos on the campus of Hostos Community College, starting at 5:30 p.m. on the first Wednesday of each month, and occasionally on Saturdays during the day. — Sarah Maslin Nir
Habana Outpost
757 Fulton Street
(at South Portland Avenue)
On April 16, Habana Outpost flung open the doors to its food-truck kitchen, rooted permanently in an outdoor courtyard, transforming the corner of Fulton Street at South Portland Avenue into a fiesta featuring “famous corn”: fiery corn on the cob on a stick, often cooled with gulps of $8 frozen moritas: the lovechild of a mojito and a margarita. The restaurant there is environmentally friendly, too; the bathroom alone is worth a trip just to check out the water recycling system. — Sarah Maslin Nir
The Waterfall in Morningside Park
West 114th Street, midpark
(between Morningside Drive and Morningside Avenue)
Swarms (or is it schools?) of liberated pet turtles paddle about the pond under Morningside Park’s several-stories-high waterfall, north of 110th Street in Morningside Heights. Years ago, the turtles almost lost their lake when Columbia University proposed building a gym over the park, helping to incite the 1968 student riots. The craggy, stepped park is a serene place now, unless you’re a terrapin — then it’s really a happening place. — Sarah Maslin Nir
Village Vanguard
178 Seventh Avenue South
Open since 1935, the Village Vanguard isn’t expanding and diversifying and developing its brand.
It fills its function and nothing more: roughly, the world’s best jazz groups playing in the world’s best jazz club. It’s from a time when Manhattan was dirtier, more generous, and more fun. It offers no food, limited bar options, a friendly if cryptlike feel, and exceptional sound in the front half of the wedge-shaped subterranean space.
Musicians feel lucky to be here. So will you. — Ben Ratliff
Wave Hill
Independence Avenue
(at West 249th Street)
The New York aristocracy once flocked from the city to the cliffs of the Hudson, where expansive vistas cured urban claustrophobia.
You need go only as far as the Bronx, where you’ll find this 28-acre estate, once enjoyed by Theodore Roosevelt and Mark Twain (not at the same time) and now open to the public. Its grounds and buildings are linked by walkways that command breathtaking panoramas of the Palisades and suggest why there was an art movement known as the Hudson River School. — David W. Dunlap
Brooklyn Brewery 
79 North 11th Street
(at Wythe Avenue)
This is old and new Brooklyn in one block.
At the turn of the last century, the borough of Kings was ale-central, with a dozen breweries in Williamsburg alone. Now they have been replaced with innumerable bars and restaurants selling dozens of microbrews, only a few of which can truly be called local.
Take a tour of the Brooklyn Brewery on North 11th Street any weekend to get a sense of its history and how beer is made, and score some discounted lagers and seasonal offerings while you’re at it.
Then head next door to Brooklyn Bowl, a one-stop palace of fun. It’s an eco-minded combination of rock club, bowling alley and gourmet comfort food restaurant, that may best symbolize the area’s transformation, from warehouses full of beer to … warehouses full of beer and hipsters. Rock out, dance, drink, eat, avoid gutter balls, repeat. — Melena Ryzik
The subway tunnel zoetrop
The right side of the Manhattan-bound Q train, leaving DeKalb Station
At first glance, it appears to be the most diabolically brilliant work of subway graffiti ever created.
But the strange sight you see out the right-hand side of a Manhattan-bound Q train leaving the DeKalb Avenue station in Brooklyn is legit and permanent, created by the artist Bill Brand in the late 1970s: a mass-transit zoetrope. Think of it as a cartoon flip-book that flips because you’re zooming past it. It’s over in 20 seconds, so don’t blink. — Randy Kennedy
Musical Mondays at Splash Bar
50 West 17th Street
(between Fifth and Sixth Avenues)
Every Monday night at Splash, a gay bar in Chelsea, Broadway’s chorus boys and girls — and their admirers — spend their night off watching videos and singing along to their favorite show tunes.
Jennifer Holliday’s original version of “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” from “Dreamgirls” is a must-see. — Erik Piepenburg
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
(at East 82nd Street)
Crowds do not enhance the experience of looking at art. Every Friday and Saturday, however, when the Met installs a bar and classical musicians on the mezzanine (or when the bar in the rooftop sculpture garden opens in summer), the crowd is drawn away from the galleries and toward the martinis. Bonus: a glass of Champagne is sure to make pottery shards beautiful. — Christine Muhlke
The Morgan Library and Museum
225 Madison Avenue
(between East 36th and 37th Streets)
We revere the Met, we adore the Frick, but the Morgan is in a class of its own. No place looks like it, feels like it or has as many of the most sensationally compact art treasures in this treasure-loving town. — Holland Cotter
Spa Castle
131-10 11th Avenue
(between 131st and 132nd Streets)
Located past La Guardia in College Point, Queens, Spa Castle is an impressive five-story Korean mega-spa.
Sure, the building looks more like a mall than a castle, but the amenities inside are fit for a king. Buy a day pass and spend hours hopping from outdoor hot tubs to massage pools to saunas lined in gold, jade and salt. With a food court, a Korean restaurant and designated napping areas, you’ll have little motivation to leave. — Amy Virshup
El Nuevo Bohío
791 East Tremont Avenue
(between Prospect and Mapes Avenues)
The home-style cuisine of El Nuevo Bohío, a Puerto Rican restaurant in the East Tremont section of the Bronx, has clouded minds — if not arteries — for some 30 years.
It is a temple of pork — lechón — where garlic wafts like incense and a figurine of a pig presides on a small altar alongside assorted statues of the Virgin Mary. Diners barely notice the salsa tunes blasting inside; the real music comes from the slap and thud of machetes hacking golden slabs of freshly roasted pork. Once you’ve had your fill of carne mechada (Puerto Rican pot roast); bacalaitos (codfish fritters) and empanadillas, take the 20-minute walk to the Bronx Zoo, one of the largest in the nation with more than 4,000 animals on 265 acres. — David Gonzalez
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