Where to Stay in New York With Family, Rated by Step-Free Access

A residential grid of pre-war apartment buildings, food shops and playgrounds between Central Park and Riverside Park, with the American Museum of Natural History and the Children's Museum of Manhattan both inside an eight-minute walk. It is the one part of Manhattan that reads as a neighbourhood where people live rather than a district people visit.

Good to know: The accessibility gap is worse than a map suggests: a family with a pushchair heading to the natural history museum by subway cannot use the station named after it, because the B and C line is step-free at zero stations. Use the 1, 2 or 3 on Broadway instead, where 66th, 72nd and 96th are all accessible.

The strongest area here for step-free access and the only one where the harbour is the neighbourhood rather than a day trip. Battery Park City is planned residential with a continuous riverside esplanade, playgrounds along it and no through traffic, which is rare in Manhattan. One World Observatory is a measured four minutes and the Staten Island Ferry, still free, is close enough to do on a whim.

Good to know: Everything uptown is genuinely far on foot: the natural history museum is a measured 116 minutes away and Central Park Zoo 100, so the whole Central Park half of a New York trip becomes a subway journey rather than a walk.

Quieter and more residential than people expect. Central Park is the local park, the zoo is a measured 25 minutes on foot and the carousel 28, and the Second Avenue Q line is step-free at every one of its stations, which is the single best accessibility fact in this research.

Good to know: There is genuinely nothing to do here in the evening, which cuts both ways with children. The Q is excellent and the 6 is crowded, slow and mostly inaccessible, so a hotel a block from the wrong line is a different holiday from one beside the right line.

Brownstone streets, the Promenade with the Manhattan skyline across the water, and Brooklyn Bridge Park running down to the river with the best public playgrounds in New York City in it. The Pier 6 playground is a measured ten minutes and Jane's Carousel seventeen. On paper it is the obvious family choice.

Good to know: The accessibility problem is the headline and it lands on precisely the families who pick this area. Only Borough Hall is step-free; Clark Street, High Street and York Street are not, so neither DUMBO station is usable with a pushchair. The walk down from Brooklyn Heights to DUMBO is steep and cobbled in places.

Quieter than the west side by a wide margin and reliably cheaper. Murray Hill is low-rise brownstone blocks and small restaurants that empty at the weekend when the office population goes home, which is exactly when a family is there. Grand Central is walkable and step-free on all three of its line groups.

Good to know: The step-free gap around Murray Hill itself is real, and the walk up to Grand Central with a tired child adds ten to fifteen minutes to every journey. Times Square is a measured 21 minutes on foot and Central Park Zoo 36.

New-build towers on the Queens waterfront one stop from Midtown, where rooms are bigger and cheaper than anything comparable in Manhattan. The accessible-station cluster is genuinely good, with Court Square, Queens Plaza, Queensboro Plaza and 21st Street-Queensbridge all step-free.

Good to know: There is very little to do on foot and the streets between the towers are wide, windy and dull with children. Every day starts and ends with a river crossing, and Central Park Zoo is a measured 56 minutes away.

The densest transit node in North America wrapped around a permanently crowded plaza. Nothing about it is restful and everything is close: the Intrepid is a measured 20 minutes on foot, the Central Park carousel 22, and Times Square-42nd Street is step-free on every line group that serves it.

Good to know: It is loud at every hour, the pavements around the plaza are genuinely hard to push a buggy through in the evening, and the costumed characters who work the plaza solicit money after a photograph, which is worth telling children before rather than after.