Niche travel

HOW IRONIC TO find that one of the sponsors of New York Tenement Museum, specifically of an exhibition entitled An Irish Family in America, should have been Anglo Irish Bank.

Still, if you’re lucky enough to be in New York on holidays, check out the Museum, which is on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side.

Entry is by guided tour and one of the featured tours, entitled “Irish Outsiders”, is of the restored home of the Moore family, charting their daily struggles to keep their family together and healthy.

It’s just one of the visitor attractions currently being promoted by newly renovated hotel, The Hotel at Times Square, in a bid to get guests off the obvious tourist tracks and into something a bit different. This includes Paley Park, a stroll away from the hotel on 520 Madison Ave and unexpected home to five large sections of the Berlin Wall.

The hotel will also direct you to drinking establishments that hark back to the Prohibition-era’s speakeasy culture, such as PDT in the East Village, entered through a telephone booth at the back of a hot dog joint. The acronym, if you hadn’t guessed, stands for Please Don’t Tell.

It is also promoting the city’s Dark Dining events, where customers don blindfolds for an evening in an atmosphere designed to tantalise your taste buds and put your other senses on high alert.

If however you insist on making like a traditional tourist, it will of course help you out here too. The hotel keeps giant white boards and coloured markers behind reception, so you can stand outside the glass studios of a morning show and say hi to the folks back home. If you have a home that is.

[ thehotelattimesquare.com ]