Things to do in the Bronx, organized by the trains that get you there

The Bronx is the only borough attached to the North American mainland, and that single fact explains most of what makes it different to visit. It is hillier, the street grid gives up early, and there is a great deal more open ground. NYC Parks counts Pelham Bay Park at roughly 2,765 acres and Van Cortlandt Park at 1,146 — the first and third largest parks in the city, with Bronx Park at 718 acres seventh. Central Park, for scale, is 843 acres.

Because the borough is large and the attractions are spread thin, the useful organizing principle is the subway line rather than the neighborhood. Five spines cover almost everything. The 1 runs up the west side to Van Cortlandt Park–242nd Street, serving Riverdale, Wave Hill, and the park's northwest corner. The 4 runs up Jerome Avenue past Yankee Stadium to Woodlawn, near Woodlawn Cemetery and the park's southeast edge. The B and D run under the Grand Concourse, which is how you reach the Bronx Museum and the Poe Cottage. The 2 and 5 handle the east side, including the zoo and the botanical garden's East Gate. The 6 ends at Pelham Bay Park, the gateway to Orchard Beach and City Island.

Metro-North is frequently the better choice and most visitors never consider it. The Harlem Line stops at Botanical Garden, Fordham, and Woodlawn; the Hudson Line stops at Riverdale for Wave Hill. Botanical Garden station is about twenty minutes from Grand Central, faster than any subway route, and it lets you out across the street from a garden entrance.

The New York Botanical Garden and the Bronx Zoo sit on opposite sides of the same park, separated by the Bronx River. People routinely try to do both in one day. Do not. Each fills an afternoon, and both charge separately.

The Bronx Museum of the Arts is the real thing: admission to the museum and all of its exhibitions and events is free for everyone, with no reservation, no suggested donation, and no membership pitch at the door. It sits at 1040 Grand Concourse and opens Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. The B and D stop two blocks south at 167th Street. It closes between exhibition changeovers, the one thing that catches people out, so confirm before making the trip.

Wave Hill is free to everyone on Thursdays; the rest of the week it is $10 for adults, $6 for students and seniors, $4 for children six and up. Gardens on a bluff over the Hudson, open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. The practical detail: a free shuttle runs Thursday through Sunday from the 1 train's 242nd Street terminal and from Riverdale Metro-North on an hourly cycle. Thursday is the only day free admission and the shuttle overlap, and the walk up from Riverdale without it is fifteen minutes of real hill.

Woodlawn Cemetery is open seven days a week, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., at no charge; its conservancy's guided tours are ticketed separately. The Edgar Allan Poe Cottage asks a suggested donation of $5 for adults and $3 for children and seniors, and library cardholders can get in through Culture Pass. The Van Cortlandt House Museum charges $5 for adults but admits Bronx residents free for self-guided visits. And the parks themselves cost nothing at all, which is the honest answer to the question most people are actually asking.

Pelham Bay Park is the largest park in New York City and it is not close. It holds thirteen miles of saltwater shoreline and a trail network that people living twenty minutes away have never walked. The Kazimiroff Nature Trail loops 189-acre Hunter Island twice over, a 1.24-mile blue loop and a 0.94-mile red loop, through wetland edge, interior forest, and out onto the sand. The Siwanoy Trail covers more than three miles through the Meadow, the Central Woodlands, and the Bartow-Pell Woods. A four-mile bridle trail from 1931 gives the marshland views over the 375-acre Thomas Pell Wildlife Sanctuary.

Orchard Beach is a 1.1-mile crescent that opened in 1936 and still draws more than a million people a year. Transit is the part to get right. The 6 ends at Pelham Bay Park station, and the Bx29 runs year-round toward City Island, letting off at Orchard Beach Circle for a walk in along Park Drive. On summer weekends the Bx12 goes directly to the beach terminal — but only then.

Van Cortlandt Park, at 1,146 acres, is the flatter and more usable of the two giants: a vast parade ground, the Putnam Trail on an old rail bed, a lake, and the cross-country course that generations of New York high schoolers know by heart. The 1 train's last stop at 242nd Street lands you at the southwest corner; the 4 train's last stop at Woodlawn puts you at the southeast. Walking between them across the park is a legitimate afternoon.

The Poe Cottage at 2640 Grand Concourse is a small white farmhouse marooned in a park, and it is the most affecting historic site in the borough. Poe moved in during the spring of 1846 with his wife Virginia and her mother, paying $100 a year. Virginia died there in 1847. He wrote some of his best-known late work in those years. The Bronx County Historical Society has run it as a museum since 1975; it opens Saturdays 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sundays 1 to 5 p.m., weekends only. The D and the 4 both stop at Kingsbridge Road.

The Van Cortlandt House, built in 1748 and 1749 at the south end of the park, is a National Historic Landmark that Washington used in 1776 and again in 1783. The museum is straightforward about the rest: enslaved Africans lived and worked on the property from 1698 to 1823, and the roads they built are the trails people run on now.

Woodlawn Cemetery covers 400 acres, was founded in 1863, and became a National Historic Landmark in 2011. The National Park Service calls its funerary art the largest and finest collection in the country, and the roster of people buried there is startling: Miles Davis, Celia Cruz, Irving Berlin, Madam C.J. Walker, Nellie Bly, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Joseph Pulitzer, J.C. Penney, Alva Vanderbilt. It doubles as an arboretum with more than 140 tree varieties and five of the city's designated Great Trees. Take the 4 to Woodlawn, the 2 or 5 to 233rd Street, or the Harlem Line.

Two more, with caveats. The Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum sits at 895 Shore Road inside Pelham Bay Park; its opening days are limited and change, so check the museum's own site. And the Hall of Fame for Great Americans at Bronx Community College — 98 bronze busts in an open-air colonnade designed by Stanford White, the first hall of fame in the country — has been closed for construction, with a virtual tour offered instead. Confirm on the college's page rather than turning up.

The borough's two eating districts sit at opposite ends of it and should not be attempted the same day. Belmont, universally called Arthur Avenue, is the denser one: the core runs along Arthur Avenue and East 187th Street, a few walkable blocks of bakeries, salumerie, cheese counters, fresh pasta, pork stores, and fish, plus the enclosed Arthur Avenue Retail Market. Italian is the anchor and several businesses have been in the same family for a century, but the street is not a museum piece and not exclusively Italian anymore. Buy things to take home; the ratio of good shopping to good sitting is unusually high. Metro-North to Fordham is quickest; otherwise the B, D, or 4 to Fordham Road and the Bx12 east.

City Island is the opposite in every way: a sliver of former shipbuilding town in Long Island Sound, reached by the 6 to Pelham Bay Park and then the Bx29 across the bridge. City Island Avenue is the only real street, running the length of the island, and the seafood houses cluster toward the southern end near the point. It is fried fish on paper plates with a water view rather than fine dining, and the lines on a warm Saturday are long. The City Island Nautical Museum, at 190 Fordham Street in an old schoolhouse, opens weekends 1 to 4 p.m. from late April through late October, $10 for adults and free under twelve.

One last piece of the map: Yankee Stadium. The 4 stops at 161st Street–Yankee Stadium, and Metro-North runs to the Yankees–East 153rd Street station on game days. Tours cover Monument Park and the Yankees Museum in several lengths, including short versions before evening games; book through the Yankees' tours page, since availability tracks the schedule.