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New York City lost one of its most influential voices this week. Gloria Steinem, the pioneering journalist, activist and co-founder of Ms. magazine who helped bring the women’s liberation movement into the American mainstream, died at her Manhattan home yesterday, September 2. She was 92 years old.
Steinem traveled the world as an organizer, lecturer and writer, but New York was home for more than six decades. For anyone wishing to remember her by taking a walk through the city she loved, an Apple Maps guide offers a ready-made itinerary: 10 destinations chosen by Steinem herself, complete with her personal notes on what made each one special. If you want to pay tribute to an American hero, here are landmarks and local spots loved by the late feminist icon.
Gloria Steinem’s favorite spots in NYC:
Empire State Building
The tour could begin at the Empire State Building. Steinem admired the skyscraper's observatory because it is “high enough to see the living map of Manhattan, but not so high that the people below are lost.”
Madison Square Park
From there, head to Madison Square Park, which she considered “large enough for peace, small enough for safety” or wander through Theodore Roosevelt Park beside the American Museum of Natural History for some first-rate tree and people watching.
The Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument
Central Park supplies two particularly meaningful stops. First up, the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument honors Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. (Steinem noted that a public campaign was needed to ensure the monument included Truth rather than representing women with two white suffragists alone.)
The Gloria Steinem Bench
Elsewhere in the park, the Gloria Steinem Bench was given to her for her 80th birthday in honor of Truth, before the activist received a sculpture of her own. Set high on a hill with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the distance, it makes an especially fitting place to pause and pay tribute.
The Apollo Theater
Steinem’s map also celebrates the city’s appetite for a show. She loved the “long tradition of stage and talent shows” at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, the enduring buzz of marquees and theatergoers in the West 40s and Little Island’s riverside amphitheater, which she praised for feeling intimate enough for community but large enough for musicals and plays.
The Palm Court
The final two selections stretch from classic New York indulgence to a much longer view of its history. Steinem recommended tea at the Palm Court in the Plaza Hotel, where “it seems that nothing bad could happen,” and the National Museum of the American Indian at Bowling Green, a reminder of the culture that flourished on Mannahatta long before Europeans arrived.
It is a highly Steinem-esque New York itinerary: observant, curious, politically aware and never too busy looking at monuments to lose sight of the people below.