Midtown Guide

The world converges in Midtown, the pulse of New York City. A business hub, a tourist destination, a dining deluge, an entertainment capital and a residential area – essentially, a city within the city – Midtown stretches from West 53rd to West 43rd streets, with the east-west boundaries formed by Sixth and Eighth Avenues. Both an entertainment venue and an important economic district, many restaurants, businesses, tourist attractions, including world-famous commercial buildings such as Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall, and the Empire State Building, are found here. More than 700,000 commuters work in Midtown’s offices, hotels, and retail establishments; the area also hosts many tourists, visiting residents, and students. Some areas, especially Times Square and Fifth Avenue, have massive clusters of retail establishments and comprise the epicenter of American theatre.

While the NYC Theater District is vital to Midtown West as a commercial attraction, Clinton, formerly known as “Hell’s Kitchen”, houses many of New York’s luminaries, working actors and West Side enthusiasts who enjoy the activity of the city and the serenity of the Hudson. Once a bastion of poor and working-class Irish Americans, over the last three decades of the 20th century and into the 21st, Clinton NYC has undergone tremendous gentrification as a result of its proximity to Midtown. Zoning had long restricted the extension of Midtown Manhattan’s skyscraper development into Hell’s Kitchen, but the city recently relaxed the laws leading to a real-estate building boom with Clinton (Hell’s Kitchen) reaping some of the biggest projects in the city.