Running tour · Manhattan

Upper West Side

2.1 mi run

Open in Stride Stories

The stories on this route

1. Lincoln Center

   Look up the steps at the round fountain, and the arched glass front of the Metropolitan Opera House behind it. Before any of this, these blocks were a neighborhood called San Juan Hill. Its residents were mostly African American, Afro-Caribbean and Puerto Rican.

2. The Ansonia

   Look across at the Ansonia, the white wedding cake with the domed corner towers. William Earle Dodge Stokes built it around 1900. And on the roof, next to his own apartment, he kept a small farm, complete with a cattle elevator. One account says there were over 500 chickens, some ducks and goats.

3. Beacon Theatre

   Look at the marquee, and under it the open-air lobby with its gilded ticket booth. This is the Beacon Theatre, one of the last surviving movie palaces in Manhattan.

4. The Dakota

   Look at the big buff-brick building with the steep roofs, gables and dormers. This is the Dakota. It went up between 1880 and 1884, for a businessman named Edward Clark. He was frank about why. He wanted, he said, "to make money".

5. American Museum of Natural History

   Look up at the entrance on Central Park West: tall columns, statues on top, carved animals on the pedestals. It's built like a Roman triumphal arch, and it's the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial. Its cornerstone was laid in 1931 by another Roosevelt: Franklin, then Governor of New York.

6. Zabar's

   Look at the long Zabar's storefront, with the half-timbered, mock-Tudor floors above. Zabar's is known for bagels, smoked fish, olives and cheeses.

Stories researched October 2026 · every fact checked against a source