The Weekender: A Local's Itinerary for the Perfect New York City Staycation
My husband and I are Manhattanites of modest means with a second home, not unusual in a gritty city that loses its charm for some on weekends. But when we decided to rent out our West Village walkup, we didn’t want to deal with keys, cleaning, linens, and trouble-shooting.
There are many options for short-term apartment rentals in New York. (Photo: Thinkstock)
One Fine Stay seemed better for us than Airbnb. The high-end company rents out carefully curated properties in London, New York, Los Angeles, and Paris to visitors willing to pay more to have the security of a service that has a staff available during visits. Due to the price, we didn’t end up booked very often for our first few months.
But when the service informed us that our place had been rented on the one weekend all year when we wanted to stay in the city because it was New York Fashion Week, and we had a million fun things do, we had no choice but to turn our evacuation into a staycation.
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The Wythe Hotel is a trendy place to stay in Brooklyn with great views of Manhattan. (Photo: Wythe)
With the mere $450 we’d get from renting, where to go? Williamsburg was beckoning. But the Wythe and the McCarren, the neighborhood’s two cool artisanal hotels, would cost too much. The budget options in Manhattan, where it really made sense to stay because of all our activities there, were not able to take our little dachshund. The most appealing was an Airbnb rental that was, ironically, one block from our home. It was already booked.
We had become a new kind of refugee couple — without real problems but with no place to stay in our own city. Perhaps there was a manger for us and our dog somewhere, with central heating? After days of online searching, we gave up and borrowed an Upper West Side apartment from friends, relieved to save money and not to be trapped in a small hotel room.
The Cooper Hewitt Museum. (Photo: Cooper Hewitt)
We spent much of the frigid weekend commuting downtown, where so many events were taking place. But we also got into the mode of exploring uptown, which any good trip to Manhattan inspires. On the least frigid day, we walked across a snowy Central Park to check out the recently renovated Cooper Hewitt Museum, a gem of a place that we rarely visit, in a Gilded Age mansion on the Upper East Side. We had a perfect casual lunch at nearby E.A.T., where we sat looking out on an elegant corner of Madison Avenue as enraptured as if we were in Vienna. Later, we hit a Moncler fashion show in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and got there by water taxi, an easy adventure we had never tried before, even though it stops on the pier where we live.
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The tasty and beautiful Storico. (Photo: Storico)
On our final day, after walking around the corner from where we were staying, only to flee mobs of families flooding the American Museum of Natural History, we hit the New York Historical Society, a stately building on Central Park West. We toured its exhibitions and ate a hearty and unhurried lunch in its sunny new Italian restaurant, Storico. Then we caught a clamorous Lion Dance troupe in the lobby celebrating Chinese New Year and saving us the trouble of going to Chinatown.
We even watched a poetic film about New York City history that we would never have watched had we not been accidental tourists in our own town. It was inspiring and invigorating.
Our staycation evacuation had become a rejuvenation, and it was well worth all the trouble. If you’re looking to do something similar, here is a recent comprehensive list from The New York Times of alternatives to Airbnb for renting or guesting in New York City.
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