Muscling in between Sixth and Eighth avenues from 34th to 42nd streets, the Garment District , which takes in the twin modern monsters of Penn Station and Madison Square Garden, offers little of interest to the casual tourist. The majority of people who cross the Garment District do so for a specific reason - to catch a train or bus, to watch wrestling or basketball, or to work - and it's only a wedge of stores between Herald and Greeley squares that attracts the out-of-towner.

Three-quarters of all the women's and children's clothes in America are made here, though you'd never believe it: outlets are strictly wholesale with no need to woo customers, and the only clues to the industry inside are the racks of clothes shunted around on the street and occasional bins of off cuts that give the area its look of an open-air rummage sale. Every imaginable button, bow, boa and bangle is on display. The Garment District can best be reached by taking the #1, #2, #3, #A, #C and #E to Penn Station or the #N, #R, #Q and #W to Herald Square

Explore Garment District 

General Post Office
Immediately west of Penn Station, the General Post Office is a 1913 structure that survived from an era when municipal pride was all about making statements - though to say that the Post Office is monumental in the grandest manner still seems to underplay it. The old joke is that it had to be this big to fit in the sonorous inscription above the columns - "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds" - a highly incredible claim. In early 2001, Fraport AG, a German architectural firm, won the highly contested and much-delayed contract to create a new Penn Station for Amtrak in the General Post Office building, an edifice that will aim to expiate the destruction of the original structure.

Belying its tawdry reputation as a hideout for the desperate and lonely in the area, the Port Authority Terminal Building , at 40th Street and Eighth Avenue, is a spruced-up and efficiently run modern bus station. Greyhound leaves from here, as do regional services out to the boroughs, and (should you arrive in the early hours) it's a remarkably safe place, station staff keeping the winos and weirdos in check. Incidentally, the station holds an exceptional (if expensive) bowling alley. To the west of Port Authority, at 330 W 42nd St, is the McGraw-Hill Building , a greeny-blue radiator built in 1972 that architects raved over: "proto-jukebox modern," the critic Scully called it. The lobby should definitely be seen.  

Greeley and Herald Squares
One block east of Penn Station, Sixth Avenue collides with Broadway at seedy Greeley Square . Perhaps Horace Greeley, founder of the Tribune newspaper deserves better than this triangle. Known for his rallying call to the youth of the nineteenth century to explore the continent ("Go West, young man!"), he also supported the rights of women and trade unions, denounced slavery and capital punishment and commissioned a weekly column from Karl Marx. His paper no longer exists and the square named after him is one of those bits of Manhattan that looks ready to disintegrate at any moment.

Herald Square opposite is perhaps best recognized as the one George M. Cohan asked to be remembered to in his 1904 hit song. These days its grimy mediocrity wouldn't inspire anyone to sing about it, and the area's unkempt and seedy nature is tempered only by that American temple of commercialism, Macy's , the world's largest department store, on the corner below.