Luxury holidays in Lower East Side
Manhattan hasn’t cleaned up its act entirely: the Lower East Side (LES for short) is no longer riddled with full-to-bursting slums – its tenements are now filled with extremely desirable and rather expensive apartments – but it maintains a curiously charming pre-gentrification grittiness. Roughly sandwiched between the Bowery and East River (its actual borders are hotly debated), the LES has a history of anarchic art and punk rock. It was the stomping ground of Lou Reed and Richard Hell, and today the neighbourhood’s modern-art galleries and venues such as the Bowery Ballroom and Cake Shop NYC still keep the city’s cool kids out till first light. Its Jewish-immigrant roots are well preserved too: the Tenement Museum offers a glimpse of the past, eateries Katz’s Deli and Russ & Daughters still serve mountainous portions and historic synagogues sit by graffiti-clad buildings.
When to go
Summer in the city is sublime, but there's nothing cosier than crowding into a Lower East Side bar and toasting the neighbourhood's rock and roll luminaries come winter.