Recommendations

Five floors of fantastic footwear for the family.

Guide: UES Mom (Abbe)
Location: UES

Strengths

• No matter how old you are, you regress to childhood when you walk into Niketown. It’s just fun, plain and simple.
• It’s shopping as entertainment, with music pumping, and five floors of clothes, sneakers, sandals, electronics, backpacks and more.
• They seem to have something for every lifestyle and sport – including hard-core athletic gear, crunchy-granola hiking equipment, and weekend warrior garb.

Shortcomings

• For me it’s all about the crowds. If the foot traffic is high, I’m outta there. If not I can browse for an hour and have a blast.

Insider tips

• Ride the escalators all the way up and check out the whole store first. Then shop on your way down.
• If it’s so jam-packed it feels like a Greyhound bus just opened its doors in front, leave and come back another time. Or check out NikeID on the www.nike.com website and design your own shoes (my kids are beyond obsessed).

Anecdotes

• When I walked in the door last week, I must admit I had my cynical New Yorker armor up. There were tourists everywhere, gazing up at the huge displays in awe. I stopped in with my troops because my Manolo’s were killing me and we were heading to the Zoo, which would make for a v. grumpy mommy. Soon we were in a shopping frenzy, and we all walked out with new kicks (the zoo was closed by the time we got there, but we didn’t mind).
• My husband loved the Steve Prefontaine exhibit. My kids were in sneaker heaven. And I must admit I was intrigued by the way the sneakers came up all the way from the basement to the fifth floor in clear plastic tubes that buzz like a microwave when the shoes arrive. Even the service was good.

Perfect for

• Trite but true – it’s fun for the whole family. I’d like to think I’d only come here to show out of towners, but secretly I love it myself.