Things to do nearby

The big park, five stops east

Flushing Meadows Corona Park holds a science museum, a zoo, a botanical garden, a lake with boats and the steel globe left over from a world's fair. It is a full day and the 7 drops you at the gate.

Eat along Roosevelt Avenue

The four blocks between the inn and 69th Street, and then the run east through Jackson Heights, are the reason a lot of people stay in this part of Queens. Ask at the desk in the morning and you will get a specific answer rather than a list.

The waterfront at Long Island City

Eleven minutes on the 7 and then a five-minute walk to Gantry Plaza State Park, which has the best unobstructed view of the Manhattan skyline in the city and almost nobody on it on a weekday morning.

Sunnyside Gardens

A planned garden community from 1924, one stop west, laid out around shared interior courts. Twenty minutes of walking and a completely different idea of what a city block can be.

Baseball, from April to October

The ballpark is four stops east on the 7 and the train is genuinely the best way to get there. Ask at the desk whether there is a home game the night you arrive, because it changes how full the train is at eleven o'clock.

Walk the elevated line

Not on it, under it. The 7 runs above Roosevelt Avenue on a riveted steel viaduct built in 1917, and the light through the girders in the late afternoon is the thing photographers come to this neighbourhood for.

And the thing we will not do

We are not going to print a list of forty attractions with a stock photograph beside each one. The desk knows this neighbourhood, has an opinion about it, and will give you a specific answer to a specific question — which is worth more than a page nobody reads. Ask.

The neighbourhood, area by area