When you spend your days surrounded by concrete and skyscrapers, you can easily forget that an expansive waterfront park is just blocks away. Riverside Park -- bordering the Hudson from 72nd to 159th streets -- dishes out a dose of perspective. Designed by Olmsted and Vaux of Central Park fame and laid between 1873 and 1888, it is often, somewhat unfairly, outshone by Olmsted's "other" park. But with its waterfront bike- and walking paths and lesser crowds, Riverside Park holds its own.

From the corner of West 72nd Street and Riverside Drive -- where a statue of Eleanor Roosevelt stands at the park's entrance -- head down the ramp (through an underpass beneath the West Side Highway) to the 79th Street Boat Basin, a rare spot in Manhattan where you can walk right along the river's edge and watch a flotilla of houseboats bobbing in the water. Behind the boat basin, the Rotunda is home in summer to the Boat Basin Cafe, an open-air spot for a burger and river views.

Farther north at the end of a formal promenade, a community garden explodes with flowers. Cresting a hill along Riverside Drive at West 89th Street stands the Civil War Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument (1902, designed by Paul M. Duboy), an imposing 96-foot-high circle of white-marble columns.