If you love Greenwich Village: New York’s neighbourhoods and their international twins

Seven New York neighbourhoods, from Greenwich Village to Lower Manhattan, each paired with the districts in our other city guides that share its mood, its streets and its reasons to linger.

Every great city has a neighbourhood that feels like home the moment you arrive. If yours is Greenwich Village, SoHo or the Upper East Side, our other guides know where to find its twin abroad: a district with the same mood, the same kind of streets and the same reasons to linger.

Each pairing below comes from our own guides to those cities. Read what the two places share, then follow the links to each guide’s page for the area. No two neighbourhoods are alike, and that is part of the pleasure: the twin is a way into a new city, not a copy of an old one.

Greenwich Village

Greenwich Village and the West Village are a maze of tree-lined streets, with Washington Square Park at their heart. The Village Vanguard has kept its small basement room since 1935, the Blue Note and Smalls present jazz every night, and the White Horse Tavern has been a writers’ bar for generations.

Soho, in London, made its name with jazz clubs and pubs too. French Huguenots, then Italian, Greek and other communities gave it its cosmopolitan character, and artists, writers and musicians followed; end the night with a late set at Ronnie Scott’s.

Saint-Germain-des-Prés, on the Left Bank in Paris, has its literary cafés, the Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots, facing Brasserie Lipp on the boulevard Saint-Germain, with Le Procope close by.

Beyoğlu, around the Galata Tower and İstiklal Avenue, gathers Istanbul’s meyhanes, rooftop bars, jazz and cafés, with the best hotels of the European quarter.

SoHo and Tribeca

SoHo’s cast-iron buildings and cobbled streets are lined with shops, with Balthazar, Dominique Ansel Bakery and the Mercer among its landmarks. To the south, Tribeca has loft apartments, quiet hotels such as the Greenwich Hotel and some of the city’s best tables, Jungsik and Atera among them.

Palermo Soho, in Buenos Aires, has low streets of designers, cafés, bars and restaurants beside the great park of the Bosques de Palermo. Book Don Julio well ahead, or go early and wait on the pavement with a glass of wine.

The Marais, in Paris, mixes 17th-century mansions around the Place des Vosges with museums, shops and some of the city’s best bars, Little Red Door among them.

Brera, in Milan, fills its lanes with galleries, shops and small restaurants, with palazzo hotels such as the Bvlgari and the Mandarin Oriental. Come back in the evening, when the lanes fill for the aperitivo.

The Upper East Side

The Upper East Side lines upper Fifth Avenue with museums, from the Frick Collection at East 70th Street to the Met, the Neue Galerie and the Guggenheim, with Central Park alongside. Madison Avenue is its shopping street, and the Carlyle, the Mark and the Lowell its grand hotels.

Amsterdam’s Museumplein gathers the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk, with the luxury shops of the P.C. Hooftstraat and the green length of the Vondelpark beside them.

Mayfair, in London, was laid out by the great estates as squares and streets of elegant houses; Bond Street and Savile Row are its shopping streets, and Claridge’s, The Connaught and The Dorchester its grand hotels.

Salamanca, in Madrid, is a 19th-century grid of broad streets with the luxury flagships of Serrano and Ortega y Gasset, and a collector’s house, the Museo Lázaro Galdiano, to set beside the Frick.

Recoleta is the Buenos Aires of the grand manner: French apartment buildings with wrought-iron balconies, the boutiques of the Avenida Alvear and the Bellas Artes. Take tea at the Alvear Palace.

Midtown and Fifth Avenue

Midtown is Fifth Avenue’s grand hotels and flagships, Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick’s, MoMA, Grand Central, Billionaires’ Row and Carnegie Hall: the New York of the postcards, in one walk.

The Golden Triangle, between the Champs-Élysées and the Seine, has the couture houses of the avenue Montaigne and Paris’s palace hotels, among them the George V, the Plaza Athénée and Le Bristol.

The twin is a way into a new city, not a copy of an old one.

Between the Imperial Palace and Ginza lies Tokyo’s most polished square mile: towers and tree-lined avenues around Tokyo Station, and Ginza’s department stores, flagships and the city’s densest cluster of MICHELIN stars.

Paseo de la Reforma, in Mexico City, runs from Chapultepec to the Centro past the Ángel de la Independencia, lined with towers and grand hotels such as the Four Seasons and the St. Regis.

Times Square and Broadway

Broadway’s theatres cluster in the Theater District around Times Square, from the New Amsterdam, finished in 1903, to the Lyceum, the oldest continually operating. TKTS by TDF sells same-day discount tickets in the square; book the big musicals ahead.

London’s West End crowds its theatres around Shaftesbury Avenue, the Strand and Drury Lane, with the Royal Opera House and the London Coliseum for music. Pre-theatre dining is a local art.

Downtown Los Angeles has its own Broadway, lined with historic theatres below Grand Avenue, where Walt Disney Concert Hall, The Broad and The Music Center stand on Bunker Hill.

The centre of Buenos Aires has the Teatro Colón a block from the Avenida 9 de Julio, the theatres of Corrientes and the Gran Café Tortoni on the Avenida de Mayo. Save it for a weekday: the centre empties at weekends.

DUMBO and Brooklyn Heights

DUMBO, Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, has turned its warehouses into homes, offices and shops, with the piers and lawns of Brooklyn Bridge Park facing Lower Manhattan. Next door, the Brooklyn Heights Promenade looks across the river above streets of 19th-century houses.

London’s South Bank is one long riverside walk of theatres, galleries and views, from the Southbank Centre to Tate Modern in the old Bankside Power Station and Borough Market beyond.

Karaköy, Istanbul’s old port quarter, has restaurants in old warehouses, galleries in old banks and the Galataport promenade along the water, with Istanbul Modern at its edge.

Puerto Madero is built on the four docks of Buenos Aires’s old port: brick warehouses turned restaurants and offices, the Puente de la Mujer, and the nature reserve of the Costanera Sur beyond.

Lower Manhattan

Lower Manhattan is the oldest part of New York: the 9/11 Memorial and the Oculus, Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street, Federal Hall and the Stock Exchange, and the Battery for the Statue of Liberty ferries.

The City of London, the Square Mile, is where London began, and it is now a financial district of towers around Wren’s St Paul’s. It is quiet at weekends, which makes that a good time to explore its churches and lanes.

Central is Hong Kong’s heart: Statue Square and the Mandarin Oriental, the banks and the grand hotels, the Star Ferry on the waterfront, and above Queen’s Road the steep old lanes of Tai Kwun and PMQ.

DIFC, the Dubai International Financial Centre, centres on Gate Village, where art galleries share low buildings with restaurants such as Zuma and LPM. Take sundowners at Luna, facing Burj Khalifa.

Our advice: use the twins as a way in. On your first night in a new city, stay or dine in the twin of the New York neighbourhood you love, then explore outwards from there.