You've heard about the reading room at the New York Public Library, haven't you? Then I need not go on. Just look at it. And you're allowed to hang around in there!

Petra “Petee” Paradez’s pies don’t just taste amazing—they’re made with amazing ingredients, like seasonal local produce, organic flour, grass-fed butter, and natural fair-trade sweeteners.

By chef Ignacio Mattos, it’s just great,.

A legendary basketball court in the West Village that is a popular destination for basketball aficionados, deflated hoop-dreamers, and gawking tourists.

In 1963, the Italian-born sculptor Costantino Nivola filled a playground that covers an entire city block with avant-garde abstractions. In the middle of an Upper Manhattan housing project, there are cuboid cutouts sculpted in cement, a fountain made with two diamond-shaped boulders, concrete play horses, and a sand-casted relief carved high into a wall. In the northeast corner, a matriarchal figure known as “The Nanny” rises from the ground. The artist’s sculptures were built in an era when urban development incorporated art in its effort to uplift communities and express democratic ideals. “A work designed for a public space is less a work of art than a civic act,” Nivola once said. “It concerns the ways in which we live together, and in which we influence each other.”