4/5Good
If you're a nearby resident like me, then you think of Broadway as the place where you go to the bank to make a routine deposit, or the place where you pop in to Muji to buy some socks or a canvas handbag. You definitely don't think of Broadway as more than a functional street you cross to get somewhere else--namely SoHo or NoLita--where the truly sexy shops can be found. You mostly steer clear of Broadway altogether on weekends, to avoid the infuriating glut of sidewalk traffic, since everybody and their mother comes out to mega-shop. Okay, so if do happen to be everybody and their mother, and you're hoping to do some quality shopping on the weekend, you'll appreciate Victoria's Secret, and Bloomingdale's, and Prada, and a lot of affordable shops like Muji and Mango. I truly love the wacky exotics--plastic eyeballs, woven mats, fuchsia busts of Mao-Tse-Tung--which you can pick up on the lower level of Pearl River Mart, but maybe that's just me. You most certainly can spend an afternoon going in and out of the shops on this bit of Broadway—sigh, so many people do, in fact, exactly this on weekends. Just do yourself a favor and go to one of the side streets for eats, there's nothing you'd want to ingest on Broadway proper.