What are you looking for: music, theater, museums, high culture, high finance, a sense of anonymity or a sense of community? It’s all here, bundled into a mere 22.7 square miles known as Manhattan. What appears from the outside as a chaos of traffic, people, and buildings, is from the inside a collection of close-knit neighborhoods.

New Yorkers, often seen as rude, cold, and uninvolved, love their city and are proud to show it off. If you stop any residents on the street, they’ll gladly give you directions and probably recommend their favorite city spots. The city is built on traditions, history, and gold. The vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank on Maiden Lane store more than one-quarter of the world’s gold bullion and, around the corner, Alexander Hamilton and Robert Fulton are buried in the Trinity Church graveyard.

In 1969, the Stonewall riots in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village changed the course of GLBT history, starting a movement toward equality that continues to be fought around the world today.

Reprinted, with permission of the publisher, from 50 FABULOUS GAY-FRIENDLY PLACES TO LIVE (www.FabCities.com) © 2005 Gregory A. Kompes. Published by Career Press, Franklin Lakes, NJ. 800-227-3371. All rights reserved.