A spin around the park on a bike makes me feel good. One lap is about 6.13 miles. I've trained here for longer rides (including this London to Paris ride on a track bike that was 86 miles one day, rest on the second day, and 136 miles on the third day). I've sat there on a Sunday afternoon and have done as many as 10 laps (with rests in between). I switch in-between my carbon road bike and my steel track bike.

My favorite wall in New York. The wall outside St Patrick’s old cathedral on Mulberry Street in Manhattan. It changes with the light, so beautiful. It was also in the movie “The Pope Of Greenwich Village” and that’s just plain cool.

Since September this year, the very best place to hear an authentic voice, keeping Wall Street sharp.

I discovered the Frick my first week in New York, during a heat wave in August. The galleries were surprisingly empty, with only the occasional visitor strolling through the rooms, gently creaking the floorboards. I stood for a while in front of the Bronzino, a portrait of a boy standing against a background of green drapery, and then sat in the courtyard for a long, cool hour.

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.”