Whether you’re thinking of visiting classic attractions in Manhattan or exploring a new borough this holiday season, we’ve got you covered.

Please note: All events and activities here are outdoors or virtual. Those that are outdoors are subject to COVID-19 rules and changes. Please take the proper precautions, follow city and state guidelines, and visit the sites’ individual websites to get more information.

Manhattan

The Winter Village at Bryant Park
Lace up your skates and enjoy some free ice skating at Bryant Park’s 17,000-square-foot outdoor rink, just a few blocks from Grand Central. Surrounding the rink are more than 170 shops and food stands where you can grab local gifts or try something new to eat.

Explore Rockefeller Center
There’s nothing that screams the holiday season more than the legendary tree at Rockefeller Center. This year’s 79-foot-tall Norway spruce will be up and lit until Jan. 16, so there’s plenty of time to stop by and grab a photo or two. Visitors can also reserve time to skate at the Rockefeller Center ice skating rink for $20 and up, or head up to the Top of the Rock and take in 360-degree outdoor views of the city, with tickets starting at $34.

New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
Go behind the scenes of The Nutcracker thanks to a new virtual exhibition from the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. “Winter Wonderland: George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” aims to take viewers through the early years of the classic holiday ballet’s life.

Bronx

New York Botanical Garden: GLOW
Just across the street from the Rose Hill campus, the New York Botanical Garden has an outdoor exhibit called GLOW, a 1.5 mile outdoor illuminated light spectacle and a holiday night market holiday featuring diverse vendors and booths. Tickets for GLOW are $35 for adults and $20 for children under 12.

Bronx Zoo: Holiday Light Show
An immersive light display, more than 260 lanterns of animals and plants, and animated light shows, are just a few of the features of the Holiday Light Show at the Bronx Zoo. Ice carving demonstrations and competitions, a holiday train, wildlife theater, and seasonal treats are also available. Tickets are $39.95 for adults, $34.95 for seniors, and $24.95 for children 3-12.

“Chill Out” at Wave Hill
Enjoy the outdoors at Wave Hill, a public garden overlooking the Hudson River and Palisades in the Bronx that aims to “connect people to the natural world in meaningful and lasting ways through myriad programs.” During “Chill Out,” visitors are encouraged to explore the winter gardens with the help of expert naturalists, gardeners and wellness guides. Tickets are $10 for adults and $6 for students.

Brooklyn

Dyker Heights Christmas Lights Tour
Walk around the Dyker Heights, Brooklyn neighborhood to see some of the most extravagant decorations in the city. The breathtaking displays feature ground to roof lights, life-size Santas, and Christmas carols coming from the houses. They can be seen from 11th to 13th Avenues (also known as Dyker Heights Blvd) from 83rd to 86th St in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Botanic Garden: Lightscape
Explore more than 1 million illuminated lights along an enchanting trail that also features a holiday soundtrack. Displays include the Winter Cathedral Tunnel, Fire Garden, and Sea of Light. There will also be displays from local artists, such as a series of poems by author Jacqueline Woodson. Tickets are $34 for adults and $18 for children 3-12.

Queens

Queens County Farm Museum: Illuminate the Farm
More than 1,000 lights in hand-crafted lanterns have taken over the Queens Farm as a part of the NYC Winter Lantern Festival. About six acres of the historic farmland are now a field of illuminated farm animals, vegetables, flowers, holiday delights, and more. Tickets are $24.99 for adults and $16.99 for children 3-12. From Dec. 24 to Jan 2, adult tickets are $29.99.

Queens Botanical Garden
Step outside and take in an outdoor exhibit by artists from Kew Gardens called “Here, There, and Everywhere.” The exhibit was “was born of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic stress and political division it engendered,” and aims to remind visitors of the “beauty of the world, its strangeness and its transience, and employ the power of imagination.”

Staten Island

Winter Lanterns at Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden
As part of the NYC Winter Lantern Festival, seven acres of the Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden will be lit up with 27 LED holiday installations. Along with the lights display, a variety of holiday vendors will be on hand to create a festive experience. Admission is free.

Laura Auricchio, Ph.D.
Dean, Fordham College at Lincoln Center 

On a warm August night as the sun drooped down toward the New Jersey skyline, Auricchio walked her dog, Charley, in Riverside Park. Nearby, a jazz trio of drums, guitar, and flute was playing outside Grant’s Tomb. She snapped a shot and posted on her Instagram (@lauraauricchio), “I NY – impromptu concert at Grant’s tomb. #nyc #jazz #grantstomb #nytough.” The last hashtag encapsulated the born-and-bred New Yorker’s sentiment toward her hometown.

“I’ve lived through the Summer of Sam, the public-school strike, the transit strike, and the sanitation strike,” said Auricchio, who frequently posts photos of unique New York scenes to her account. “I sincerely believe that New York is at its finest when we are facing a challenge together.”

She said Riverside Park is a favorite spot to enjoy the outdoors while keeping social distance.

“If you’re a New Yorker you’re simply used to the fact that you have to be mindful of people’s needs—we’re never really in isolation, so that awareness makes respecting others’ space second nature to us,” she said.

Justin Rivers, FCRH ’01
Chief Experience Officer, Untapped New York

Shortly after Rivers graduated from Fordham in 2001, he started teaching social studies at a middle school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. On his fourth day of work, the World Trade Center was attacked. He said that he recalls hearing the same fatalist rhetoric about the city back then.

“When I read that now, I’ll throw the paper across the room. I’m so sick of reading ‘New York is never gonna recover,’ or ‘Crime is through the roof,’ or ‘New York is toast,’” said Rivers. “We may have a tough time, but we’re New York and we’ve been through a lot of tough times. We always bounce back. I’m not going anywhere.”

When Rivers taught middle school, he took students on neighborhood tours. Alongside his teaching duties he wrote a play about the infamous destruction of the New York’s Penn Station, which led to a gig with Untapped New York, a website celebrating unsung New York treasures. Today, he manages tours for the site, which offers virtual and socially distanced tours. He shared a few of his favorite spots:

• Prospect Park: Rivers suggests that friends meet at the less crowded Nethermead meadow in the park that that Central Park designer Fredrick Law Olmsted preferred over its more famous sibling.
• Green-Wood Cemetery: Take a stroll through one of the city’s most pastoral and architecturally significant landscapes. Rivers advises grabbing a bite to go at the Israeli eatery Batata
• Domino Park: The popular East River park made national press with its “ingenious circles” that define contained areas for small groups to gather while remaining socially distant.
• The Elevated Acre: Nestled between two towers in Manhattan’s Financial District, this one-acre park is a quiet respite from the action that’s bubbling up again downtown, he said. “It’s lower Manhattan’s High Line, but it’s hidden and with only one entrance on South Street.”

Edward Kull 
Interim Director of Athletics

Born in Brooklyn, raised in Queens, and now living in Long Island, Kull likes to take his 8- and 9-year-old boys cycling in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. With its mostly level surface, this Queens park, designed for the 1939 World’s Fair, is perfect for an easy weekend ride. Kull said he likes to show his boys memorable places from his childhood, particularly Citi Field (“Go Mets!). They also bike past the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, site of the U.S. Open, which is happening now, though only on TV.  On the way out of the park be sure to drop by the Queens Museum, Kull said, which is set to reopen on Sept. 16, and make the Lemon Ice King of Corona the last stop. Flavors range from the tropical (piña colada, coconut, mango) to the creative (spumoni) and the classic (lemon).

Maria Aponte
Assistant Director of Diversity and Inclusion
Career Services

An indefatigable champion of the Bronx, Aponte said she’s thrilled to hear that the Bronx Museum reopens this week and also suggests a walk through the New York Botanical Gardens. So far, she said she and her husband Bobby Gonzalez, a Bronx-based community organizer, have limited their ventures out to South of France, the South Bronx Puerto Rican restaurant and community hub. Owner Mirabel Gonzales spent the last six months delivering food to Bronx residents affected by the COVID-19 virus.

“Maribel has outdoor dining, very nice, with the bright red umbrellas and of course the food is excellent,” said Aponte. “We know the restaurant industry is really hurting now, and South of France is iconic for Orchard Beach groups, salsa and freestyle lovers, comedy lovers, and people who love fresh Latin food.”

Andrew Kent
Professor of Law

Kent grew up in Marblehead, a small town on the northern coast of Massachusetts, and started visiting New York City in the 1980s as a teenager. Back then he explored record stores and hung out at the infamous punk club CBGBs. While he still loves the noise, he also loves the serenity of Central Park.

“One of my favorite places is the Ramble in Central Park, a hilly wooded area in which you can forget for a moment that you are in the middle of 8.5 million people,” he said. “People say it’s a great spot for bird watching, but I go for the shady calm that the lovely trees there give us.”

Andrea Marais
Associate Dean of Strategic Marketing and Enrollment
School of Professional and Continuing Studies

Born in Poughkeepsie and raised in Stamford, Connecticut, Marais moved to New York “immediately” after college. She’s lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens, and Brooklyn Heights before moving to Bronxville in Westchester County, just north of Fordham’s Rose Hill campus. Though she misses the bustle of Brooklyn’s Montague Street and the view from the Promenade, she said she’s loved visiting Arthur Avenue since the street was closed to traffic on weekend nights as part of the Phase 2 reopening of the city.

“It’s lovely because they’ve opened the street and it has a very Old World feel to it,” Marais said of the new Piazza di Belmont. “Just about every single restaurant is open and it’s the most beautiful time of year. It’s like Paris meets the Bronx.”

Kirsten Swinth, Ph.D.
Professor of History 

Swinth grew up in Montana and came to the city in the 1990s. She lives on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. To escape the constant din of traffic, she said she walks a few blocks east and enters what feels like a world away on Randall’s Island, one of the city’s main recreation hubs, with 60 athletic fields for baseball, softball, and soccer; courts for tennis; greens for golf; an urban farm; event spaces; a salt marsh, and other city facilities.

“It’s fantastic, it’s everything there is in New York City, including a mental health facility and a jail,” said Swinth. “There are so many flowers and fields. Walking by the water, that’s my favorite thing to do.”

Swinth suggests crossing by way of the 103rd Street “flyover” and packing a lunch, as there are few venues for food on the island.

Bob Dineen
Director of Public Safety

Dineen lived in the Bronx until high school, when his family moved upstate to Orange County, where he still lives. He said he loves his daily commute to and from the city.

“I have been working in New York City since 1984. So that means I have been driving back and forth from Orange County to New York City for the last 36 years,” he said. “What I truly enjoy and what is very therapeutic for me is driving north on the Westside Highway after work and taking in the magnificent Hudson River, particularly as the sun sets at the end of the day.”

Dineen noted that Hudson River Park, a short walk from Lincoln Center, is at its peak during sunset.

“In the end, I love everything about New York City—the greatest city in the world—and don’t let me forget, the New York Yankees!”

The funding will allow the two schools to develop courses and workshops at the intersection of business and law—fields that are inextricably connected in the real world. It will also expand the Fordham Foundry—Fordham’s small business incubator—to the Lincoln Center campus.

“The world is multidisciplinary—education cannot happen in silos,” said Donna Rapaccioli, PhD, dean of the business school. “To be successful in just about any career, you have to be able to consider things from multiple angles. Our hope with this grant is that both business and law students can take advantage of these resources and networks.”

The Foundry’s new Manhattan location will generate internships, Rapaccioli said, and help students at both schools to understand the legal and entrepreneurial aspects of launching a business.

“We are delighted that the Nasdaq grant will support the collaborative efforts of the law school and Gabelli School,” said Matthew Diller, dean of the Fordham School of Law. “It will provide important, practical opportunities for law and business students to learn about entrepreneurship—and how the tools of entrepreneurship can advance social justice.”

The grant marks another milestone in an ongoing relationship between Nasdaq and the Gabelli School, Rapaccioli said. This spring, Nasdaq’s educational exchange program brought Fordham students to its entrepreneurship center in San Francisco for 10 days of workshops, Silicon Valley corporate site visits, and networking.

The business school received a second grant early this summer. Coordinated by Greer Jason-DiBartolo, PhD, senior assistant dean for undergraduate studies, and Carey Weiss, director of sustainability initiatives, the $480,000 grant from Verizon Corporate Resources Group funded an on-campus entrepreneurial experience for high school students from under-resourced neighborhoods around the United States.

In the three-week-long program, students lived in Rose Hill campus dorms and attended workshops with Gabelli School faculty and visiting professionals. They also traveled into Manhattan for on-site visits at companies.

“The program offers a window into not only what the business world is like, but also what college life is like,” Rapaccioli said. “Some of these high school students would be first-generation college graduates, and the idea of the program is to inspire them to want to go to college. It’s allows us at the Gabelli School to play a small role in potentially transforming these young people’s lives.”

In addition to commemorating each cohort, this year alumni from two of the graduate schools were celebrating a common milestone: 100 years since their founding.

As a nod to the occasion, Robert Grimes, SJ, dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center, opened the reunion with a special presentation about the history of Fordham’s presence in Manhattan.

Fordham—which began in 1841 as St. John’s College—had its start on the rural Rose Hill Manor property in the Village of Fordham, but plans for a city-based campus were in place from its earliest days, Father Grimes said. Shortly after the college opened, founder Archishop John Hughes invited a group of Kentucky-based Jesuits to run the school. The Jesuits agreed, provided that they could also open a downtown campus.

“We still have the original paperwork documenting the Jesuits’ discernment process about whether to stay in Kentucky or move to New York,” Father Grimes said. “The ‘pro’ for moving [to New York]was, ‘So vast and deeply populated, exercising immense and ever increasing influence over other cities and states in the union.’

“The best they could come up with staying in Kentucky was, ‘It is in the midst of a vast forest.’”

In the early 1950s, the school approached city planner Robert Moses about relocating to a structure he was building at Columbus Circle. Instead, Moses offered Fordham space a few blocks away as part of a new performing arts project.

Fordham broke ground in 1959 and was the first building completed on the property that would become Lincoln Center.

“It was pretty courageous for Fordham to move to the West Side of Manhattan at the time,” Father Grimes said. “I keep wondering what John Hughes would imagine today if he could think back to agreeing to let the Jesuits open a school in the city proper and see how much has changed over the years.”

A key part of Fordham’s Manhattan narrative was the establishment of its professional schools, two of which—the Graduate School of Social Service (GSS) and the Graduate School of Education (GSE)—celebrate their centennials this year.

GSS was founded in 1916 by Terence Shealy, SJ, a philosophy professor and faculty member at the Law School. Over the last 100 years, the school has grown to become one of the premier social work schools in the country.

“The school was started out of a recognized need for professional social workers at a very turbulent time in the city and the country,” said Debra M. McPhee, PhD, dean of GSS. “To be the school that is about building capacity in this city—that’s our legacy and it’s still our mission.”

GSE also began in 1916 on the seventh floor of the Woolworth Building. Known then as the Teachers College, its mission was to train future educators not only in the most current pedagogical methods, but also in Catholic and Jesuit educational philosophies.

“Because of the values we espouse and live through our school, we have been able to influence the field of education,” said Virginia Roach, EdD, dean of GSE. “What we bring is a deep respect for individual students, care for the whole child or adult whom we’re working with, and a deep humility about who we work with and how we work with them and for the innate value each student has.”

Overall, the legacy of Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus has been and continues to be the camaraderie among the students it brings together, several alumni said.

“I look back with a sense of fondness on my time at Fordham,” said Tanika Cumberbatch-Torres, FCLC ’05. “I met my husband here. And I hope our daughter will go here one day.”

Cumberbatch-Torres was representing an entire family of Fordham graduates—her mother-in-law Ana Torres graduated in 2010 and her husband Johnny Torres, an administrative staff member at GSS, is a current student. Their 8-month-old daughter Emely sported her own nametag with the designation FCLC ’??.

“Fordham was the best decision I made,” said former art history student Kit Byrne, FCLC ’07. “It lets you become who you are as an individual… I knew early on that I was in the right place.”\

On January 7, a team of students took a trip less than a half mile away from the Rose Hill campus.

For GO New York, which lasted from Jan. 7-17, a team of ten Fordham students stayed at Our Lady of Refuge Rectory in Kingsbridge, and spent their time doing service work and visiting cultural sites around New York City. Their primary focus was the Bronx, which nine of them already call home.

For service, the team pursued several projects, including volunteering at an after-school program at St. Ann’s Church in Morrisania, helping Habitat for Humanity rehabilitate a house in Yonkers, and going on a midnight run to distribute supplies to the homeless. The group also walked the length of Park Avenue from 189th Street in the Bronx to 106th Street, to see the South Bronx up close, and attended a conference on gentrification in the borough.

Collette Berg, a senior environmental science major at Fordham College at Rose Hill, led the trip after participating in a GO trip last year in Mexico. For her, the simple act of visiting different locations every day was moving for her. The group strove to embrace global outreach’s four pillars of spirituality, social justice, simple living and community, and Berg, who chose the service sites for the trip, plans to continue to do service work upon graduation, with the Jesuit Volunteer Corp.

She said she hoped that working with a variety of service organizations would showcase the variety of opportunities for students who might not be sure what kind of volunteering they want to do in the future.

For instance, Food Bank NYC is a very structured, almost corporate operation, and they’re not religiously affiliated. Part of the Solution (POTS) soup kitchen is a lot more of a holistic, kind of community organization, and kind of religious, she said. On the other end of the spectrum, Catholic Worker is extremely social justice oriented and a lot less structured.

“There are so many ways of serving the community, and we wanted to discuss what speaks to us the most, and what we feel is lost when you do something in some particular way,” she said.

Jeff Coltin, FCRH ’15, the group’s chaperone, organized cultural visits to landmarks such as P.S. 1 in Long Island City, Edgar Allen Poe’s house in Kingsbridge, and The Point, a community center in Hunt’s Point that is also home to the graffiti group Tats Cru.

Coltin had traveled abroad before, to Alaska in 2013. The immersive nature of the trip made the biggest impact on him, as the group turned off their phones and limited their engagements to each other and their destinations for the day.

“I was riding the same subways that I ride every day to go to work, out to eat, and visit my friends, but even something as basic as riding the subway was totally different when I was on this trip,” he said.

“I didn’t have any work on my mind; it was a time to talk with people, or sit quietly and reflect and look at the other people on the subway. That’s something I never do. It helped me see different perspectives.

For Connor Mannion, a communications major from Philadelphia who was the lone team member from Fordham College at Lincoln Center, the trip was a way to learn more about the history and culture of city that he hopes to stay in upon graduation.

“All the time I’ve been at Fordham, I’ve had this vague feeling that I’m a tourist, and I’m not engaging with New York the way I should be if I’m living here,” he said.

Photos by Connor Mannion