New York Travel Guide

New York is bigger than the skyline — Long Island's beaches and wreck-diving coastline, Montauk's fishing-town end of the island, and a harbor that's in the middle of one of the most ambitious urban ocean-restoration efforts in the country: rebuilding a billion oysters in New York Harbor.

JFK, LaGuardia and Newark cover the city; Long Island's beach towns and Montauk are a couple of hours further east by car or the Long Island Rail Road.

Summer (June–September) is the season for Long Island's beaches, diving and boat traffic. Fall (September–October) turns the Hudson Valley into a foliage destination.

Late summer gives the warmest coastal water of the year for Long Island diving, before the water cools into fall.

The city's food scene needs no introduction, but Long Island's own seafood and oyster culture, upstate apple orchards, and the classic bagel-and-pizza staples all belong on the list.

Harbor seals winter in New York Harbor and around Long Island, striped bass run the coastal waters, humpback whales are increasingly sighted off the Rockaways and Long Island as the harbor's water quality has improved, and the harbor's oyster reefs — once wiped out — are being deliberately rebuilt as habitat.

Long Island's coast holds a real wreck-diving scene, cold Atlantic water off Montauk with genuine history in the wrecks scattered along it. Closer to the city, the Billion Oyster Project's restoration reefs are less a dive destination than a living case study in what urban-harbor recovery can look like when a city decides to rebuild what it lost.