The East 30s are mostly celebrated for what is likely Manhattan's most elegant skyscraper, the Empire State Building , a must on almost everyone's New York itinerary. The blocks that surround it are uneventful, as is the neighborhood to the east, Murray Hill , a tenuously tagged residential area that has little to recommend it besides the Morgan Library .

Explore Murray Hill 

Empire State Building 

Daily 9.30am-midnight, last trip 11.30pm; $9, $4 for under 12s, $7 for seniors, free for children under 5; combined tickets for New York Skyride and the Observatory $17, $10 for under 12s; tel 212/736-3100, www.esbnyc.com.

With the destruction of the World Trade Center, the Empire State Building , is once again the city's tallest sky-scraper. Nestling in a whole city block between 33rd and 34th Streets, it is easily the most potent and evocative symbol of New York, and has been since its completion in 1931. Its 103 stories and 1454 feet - toe to TV mast - rank the Empire State Building behind only the Sears Tower in Chicago and the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, but its height is deceptive, rising in stately tiers with steady panache.

Standing on Fifth Avenue below, it's easy to walk right by without even realizing that it's there; only the crowds serve as an indicator of what stretches above. Skip the eight-minute simulated flight New York Skyride (daily 10am-10pm; $13.50, $10.50 kids and seniors; tel 212/299-4922 or 1-888/SKY-RIDE, www.skyride.com ), which soars above skyscrapers and among other New York landmarks, but will leave the weak-hearted merely dizzy and the strong-willed wondering why they wasted their cash. Better to save your pennies for the ascent to the top of the world.

The first elevators, alarmingly old and rickety, take you to the 86th floor, summit of the building before the radio and TV mast was added. The views from the outside walkways here are as stunning as you'd expect. If you're feeling brave - and can stand the wait for the tight squeeze into the single elevator - you can go up to the building's last reachable zenith, a small cylinder at the foot of the TV mast that was added as part of a harebrained scheme to erect a mooring post for airships

Because the 102nd-floor Observatory is closed on weekends during the summer, be sure to go during the week if you want to reach the very top

Skycrapers
Manhattan is one of the best places in the world in which to view skyscrapers, its puckered, almost medieval skyline of towers the city's most familiar and striking image. In fact, there are only two main clusters of skyscrapers, but they set the tone for the city - the Financial District, where the combination of narrow streets and tall buildings forms slender, lightless canyons, and midtown Manhattan, where the big skyscrapers, flanking the wide central avenues between the 30s and the 60s, have long competed for height and prestige.

New York's first skyscraper was Madison Square's 1902 Flatiron Building, so called because of the obvious way its triangular shape made the most of the new iron-frame technique of construction that had made such structures possible. In 1913, the sixty-story Woolworth Building on Broadway gave New York the world's tallest building, and the city later produced such landmarks as the Chrysler Building (p.96), the Empire State Building, and the recently destroyed World Trade Center (p.28).

Styles have changed over the years, perhaps most influenced by the stringency of the city's zoning laws, which, early in the twentieth century, placed restrictions on the types of building permitted. At first skyscrapers were sheer vertical monsters, maximizing the floor space possible from any given site with no regard to how this affected neighboring buildings. City authorities later invented the concept of "air rights," limiting how high a building could be before it had to be set back from its base. This constraint forced skyscrapers to be designed in a series of steps - a law most elegantly adhered to by the Empire State Building, which has no less than ten steps in all - and forms a pattern you will see repeated all over the city

Morgan Library 

29 E 36th St (at Madison Ave); Tues-Thurs 10.30am-5pm, Fri 10.30am-8pm, Sat 10.30am-6pm, Sun noon-6pm; suggested donation $8, $6 students and seniors, free for children under 12; tel 212/685-0610, www.morganlibrary.org.

When Madison Avenue was on a par with Fifth as the place to live, Murray Hill came to be dominated by the Morgan family, the crusty old financier J.P. and his offspring, who at one time owned a clutch of property here. The Morgan Library was built for the old crustacean in 1906. A gracious Italian Renaissance-style mansion, it houses one of New York's best small museums.

Originating with Morgan's own impressive collection of manuscripts, the museum has grown to include nearly 10,000 drawings and prints (including works by Rembrandt da Vinci, Degas and Dürer), and an extraordinary array of historical, literary and musical manuscripts. The exhibits change so frequently that it's impossible to catalog what visitors will see - but a copy of the 1455 Gutenberg Bible (the museum owns a magnificent three out of the eleven surviving manuscripts) is always on display. There are also original scores by Mahler, Beethoven, Schubert and Gilbert and Sullivan; the only complete copy of Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur ; and letters from the likes of Vasari, Mozart and George Washington, and the literary manuscripts of Dickens, Jane Austen and Thoreau.

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