Linden

Liberty Island sits in upper New York Harbor, about 1.6 miles southwest of Manhattan's Battery. The 305ft statue (designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, internal frame by Gustave Eiffel) was dedicated October 28, 1886. From altitude, Lady Liberty is surprisingly small — the surrounding harbor, Ellis Island just north, and the Manhattan skyline rising to the northeast give the scale. Ellis Island processed over 12 million immigrants between 1892 and 1954. Both islands sit in the Hudson estuary where the river meets the harbor.

From the air, Manhattan is two cities. The first is the downtown cluster — Lower Manhattan's financial district at the southern tip of the island, where One World Trade (1,776 feet, the symbolic height a deliberate choice) stands where the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001. The original WTC was 1,368 feet, opened 1973; One WTC opened 2014 and is the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. The 9/11 Memorial pools occupy the original tower footprints. The Oculus transit hub (Santiago Calatrava, 2016) sits between them. The second cluster is Midtown — the Empire State Building (1,454 feet to tip, opened 1931, the world's tallest building until 1972) and the Chrysler Building (1,046 feet, opened 1930, the Art Deco masterpiece with the stainless-steel spire), plus the newer One Vanderbilt (1,401 feet, 2020) and the slender 432 Park, 111 W 57th, and Steinway Tower — the "pencil towers" that define the new Billionaires' Row along the southern edge of Central Park. The Statue of Liberty stands on Liberty Island in New York Harbor — Frédéric Bartholdi designed it as a gift from France, Eustache de Marigny's gift of copper sheets riveted to Gustave Eiffel's iron internal armature; it was dedicated October 28, 1886. The statue is 305 feet from ground to torch. Ellis Island, the immigration station that processed 12 million arrivals between 1892 and 1954, sits just NW. Both are National Park Service sites; ferry from Battery Park. Central Park (843 acres, opened 1858, Olmsted and Vaux design) is the rectangular green rectangle that breaks the grid in the middle of the island. The Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens wrap the island; the Hudson River separates Manhattan from New Jersey to the west; the East River separates it from Brooklyn and Queens to the east.

Founded in 1746, Princeton is one of the oldest universities in America and among the most beautiful — a campus of collegiate Gothic towers, ivy, and courtyards in a leafy New Jersey town. Nassau Hall, built in 1756, was the largest stone building in the colonies, briefly served as the capitol of the United States in 1783 (the Continental Congress met here), and still bears scars from a cannonball fired during the 1777 Battle of Princeton. The town and university have hosted an extraordinary concentration of minds: Albert Einstein spent his last decades here at the Institute for Advanced Study, walking to his office on Mercer Street, and the campus and town have appeared in everything from "A Beautiful Mind" to F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels.

On May 20, 1927, a 25-year-old airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh took off from a wet dirt strip on Long Island called Roosevelt Field, bound for Paris in the Spirit of St. Louis. Thirty-three hours and 30 minutes later he landed at Le Bourget. The flight changed aviation forever. Roosevelt Field is gone — it is a shopping mall now, the largest in New York State — but the adjacent Mitchel Field is preserved, and on its grounds sits the Cradle of Aviation Museum: a 130,000-square-foot complex covering Long Island's outsized role in American aviation. Long Island built every Grumman Wildcat, Avenger, Hellcat, and Bearcat of WWII. It built the Lunar Module that landed Apollo 11 on the Moon. The museum holds an actual LEM, Charles Lindbergh's engine, and dozens of historically significant aircraft.