I promised my children I’d show them the Statue of Liberty after two years of lockdowns

Casting my mind back to what feels like an age ago, before we were parents, I recall that when travelling in the US my husband and I were never the greatest planners. We would pitch up somewhere at random with nothing booked, then struggle to find a room. A particularly grim night was spent in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in a motel so bleak that the cigarette burns were the least worrying adornment of the sheets.

Now, with two children in tow, military-grade planning is essential. I knew this as soon as I’d decided that my daughter, six, and son, eight, were ready for a long-haul city break. In New York. For almost a week.

Overambitious, you say? I was convinced it would work as long as I prepared our itinerary in advance, down to every last lox and cream cheese bagel.

It had started as a lockdown fantasy. I’d rashly promised that “when all this is over” we would visit the Statue of Liberty. I could say they held me to my word, but I held myself to it, really: I was desperate to return to America, a country I’ll never tire of exploring.

Touching down in the early hours at the start of October half term, we were in equal parts shattered and thrilled. Excitement laced with jet-lag meant the children were up by 5am the next day, raring to be let loose on the buttermilk pancakes in the airport hotel buffet.

First stop, a beautiful brownstone Airbnb apartment in the enchantingly serene and stately neighbourhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn. The eye-popping Halloween decorations alone would have entertained us here for days, but I’d made another promise to the children: of old-fashioned seaside amusement park pleasures. I suspected some rides at Coney Island would help keep the six-year-old on side.

So, after glugging back a strong espresso (us) and some pastries (the children) at the stylishly sparse Blue Bottle Coffee on 7th Avenue, we took the subway to Brooklyn’s coastline.

Luna Park (lunaparknyc.com), which first opened in 1903, was as brash and lively as we’d hoped, with the famous Cyclone wooden rollercoaster looming over it. My husband rode it so the rest of us didn’t have to. Under a searing autumn sun, the children dashed from ride to ride, breaking off midway for the requisite hot dog at Nathan’s on the boardwalk, where we met a busker’s parrot whose party trick was sitting on the heads of spectators.

The following morning, we were again out of bed before dawn, taking too literally New York’s reputation as the city that never sleeps. It afforded us plenty of time to explore Prospect Park, a superior slice of urban green space, designed by the same team behind Central Park. It turned out to be dog o’clock. “Dogs are allowed off their leashes until 9am,” explained the first owner we encountered, and my son spent a joyous time scampering among them, hurling balls and sticks, while my husband and I did some leaf peeping (good for the soul), before heading for the park’s tiny café, which mercifully served hot chocolate as well as good coffee.

Another rule I’d set for the trip was not to cram too much into each day. This one I quickly broke, and paid the price where my daughter was concerned. Leaving Park Slope, we headed to Brooklyn Heights Promenade for what is incontestably the finest view of Manhattan across the East River. It took my son’s breath away – though he quickly regained it to point out landmarks he recognised from his picture books. My daughter insisted she be carried for much of what would have been a pleasant stroll to Brooklyn Bridge.

We crossed on foot because, well, you have to for the effect, then took the subway uptown to the sumptuous yet family-friendly Loews Regency hotel on Park Avenue. Once inside our comfortable 12th-floor room, with its vertiginous views into the skyscraper windows of East 61st Street, it became hard to convince the children we should leave at all. But we had a city to explore.

Given the six-year-old’s distaste for walking, I had taken the precaution of booking transport that would enable us to sightsee without incurring objections. We covered a lot of ground on a Big Bus tour (bigbustours.com), theoretically a hop-on, hop-off service, but from which we only disembarked to change from the uptown to the downtown loop, taking in the Empire State Building and Times Square among other sights.

My son was entranced, sitting on the open-top deck despite the drizzle, his eyes glued to a streetscape on a scale greater than anything he’d seen. My daughter fell asleep.

Next day we took to the water, setting off on a fantastic 90-minute Circle Line cruise from Pier 83 Midtown (circleline.com). We glided down the Hudson River at a clip, the edge of Manhattan on one side, New Jersey on the other, then everyone rushed to the railings to photograph the Statue of Liberty: always smaller in reality than in your mind’s eye, yet somehow impossibly affecting, like a film character brought to life. Even my daughter broke off from her magazine to look.

More to her liking was Central Park Zoo (“It’s the one in Madagascar, Mummy!”), where the children craned their necks eagerly for peeks at the grizzly bears and snow leopards. We rounded off the day with a trip to one of Central Park’s multiple playgrounds.

For the remainder of our stay, we decamped downtown to the Four Seasons Hotel, where the views of the city from our roomy 12th-floor suite were so utterly breathtaking we could hardly drag ourselves away from the floor-to-ceiling windows. With children permitted in the pool at all times, and an impressively varied kids’ menu available from room service, we worried less than usual about introducing noisy little ones into a sacred space.

We even managed to coax them out to the historic district of Seaport (home of the lovely South Street Seaport Museum); to Chinatown for steaming bowls of noodles; and for a walk on the High Line, a disused elevated railroad turned into a linear park. By which point we were all, admittedly, exhausted.

“When can we go home?” asked my daughter, whose legs had had enough.

“When can we come back to New York?” asked my son. “I want to do it all again.”

Essentials

Rosa Silverman and her family were guests at the Loews Regency New York Hotel (loewshotels.com) and the Four Seasons Hotel New York Downtown (fourseasons.com). British Airways, Virgin Atlantic and American Airlines fly direct to New York from the UK.