The only graphic design bookstore in New York City. Shameless plug—it's also my company! Our design office, Order, is operated in the back, in full view of all visitors. Come say hi!
I'm a huge Japanophile: if there's one other place I'd like to live, it's Tokyo. I must have been there seven or eight times, most recently just after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Anyway, EN is a gem on Hudson Street, serving real Japanese cuisine. It turns out that EN is a chain in Japan; there are a lot of branches making lovely bosky food in cosy neighbourhood locations. But their New York incarnation is grand in scale and ambition, with solid, warm interiors (not unlike if the Whitney were a Japanese restaurant, oddly) - a remarkable hybrid of this city, and the other one that I'd love to live in.
The Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park is a four-acre memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt designed by Louis Kahn that celebrates the Four Freedoms Roosevelt articulated in his 1941 State of the Union address.
One of the best curated visual art books in New York and the World, with a bent towards a crossover of music/art/psychedelics. A place to feed the art habit, remembering that the greatest images are still locked in books and not online.