Quiet New York
"a guide to finding some peace in the frenetic cityscape. With 150 places across the five boroughs, ranging from restaurants, to museums, to houses of worship, to hidden parks, the book aims to show what other guidebooks do not in providing an escape from one of the busiest cities in the world. Wall has previously published quiet guides to London, Amsterdam, and Paris, but New York may be the greatest challenge yet with its density of population and sleepless nature. ..Quiet New Yorkis a great resource to find some spots of stillness in the constant movement of NYC" -Atlas Obscura"This is a wonderful guide book to NY's best places to escape from it all! Great for tourists but especially us frazzled NYers who can't afford to actually get away from the city for whatever reason." -Book Bargains and Previews"In the city that never sleeps, it can be tough to find a moment of Zen. Siobhan Wall, an expert on discovering peaceful places in chaotic cities and the author of "Quiet New York," explored every inch of every borough to profile 120 quiet places. Her book makes it easy to find beautiful, hidden places in New York where the main sounds are birdsong or the barely audible sound of turning pages in an impressive public library." -METRO New York"steers both tourists and natives seeking solace and refuge in a city where both are hard to come by. ..In its subtle and unassuming manner, the book - the latest in a series of guides to Quiet London, Amsterdam, and Paris - seeks out uncommon calm everywhere from lesser-known museums to secret gardens and idiosyncratic shops. Beloved stalwarts are listed alongside imperfect idylls - the author is as drawn to the boat wrecks on the battered Greenpoint waterfront as she is to the plotted plantings and medieval tapestries of the Cloisters - but the book's primary criterion for inclusion is a lack of noise. The restaurants and bars Wall mentions play no ambient music; at one establishment, bartenders shush the patrons, and even the resident dog in an East Village guesthouse is described as "placid." But rather than inspiring stillness, this book will send you wandering - to private collections of art and antiquities, to the sunken Staten Island kitchen where the photographer Alice Austen sifted through her glass-plate negatives, or to the cramped cottage where Edgar Allan Poe lived with his dying wife and wrote of his Annabel Lee; it will take you searching for red-tailed hawks in a bird sanctuary in the Bronx or sitting down with one of the 60,000 books of poetry in a free library overlooking the Hudson River." â??The New York Times Style Magazine