Sunday, January 10, 2010
NEW YORK (AP) — Forty-one percent of New Yorkers incorrectly think that Top of the Rock is on top of the Empire State building, and only 28 percent know that the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History are on opposite sides of Central Park, according to a survey.
Fifty-eight percent of those who got the museum geography question wrong identified themselves as lifelong New Yorkers. The Metropolitan is on the east side of Central Park, at 82nd Street and Fifth Avenue, and the Natural History museum is on the west side, at 79th Street and Central Park West.
Only 16 percent of those surveyed knew the correct location of Top of the Rock, in the GE Building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, which is also home to NBC.
The location of the New York Transit Museum is better-known: 44 percent said correctly that it is in Brooklyn.
But only 18 percent of New Yorkers knew that the seven points on the Statue of Liberty’s crown represent the Seven Seas and Seven Continents.
Asked to pick two attractions from a list of 13 as the top spots they’d recommend to out-of-towners, 39 percent said they’d send visitors to the Statue of Liberty, 24 percent said the Empire State Building, 19 percent said the American Museum of Natural History. The Bronx Zoo and Rockefeller Center were each chosen by 18 percent.
The findings were from New York Pass or Fail Survey, a poll of New Yorkers about their hometown and its attractions.
The poll was sponsored by The New York Pass, an attraction discount card.
The survey was conducted by telephone in December among 300 adult residents of New York City, with a margin of error of plus or minus 5.7 percentage points.