The Map: New York state of mind

Take an island crammed with nightclubs. Add a multi-storey, multi- cultural population. Mix in poverty, danger and hedonism but also big business, the media and a proud love of the arts. What you get is an unrivalled concentration of music, from the soul of Harlem to the folk of Greenwich Village, from the Tin Pan Alley pop of the Brill Building to the streetwise punk of CBGB. Each genre is distinct, but they're all united by the urban style and know-how that identifies them as products of the world's most rock'n'roll city.

1 Apollo Theatre 253 Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard, West 125th Street. The Apollo, which first opened 80 years ago, is famed as much for the mercilessness of the audience on its weekly Amateur Night - the Jackson Five won in 1966 - as for James Brown's seminal Live at the Apollo album. Smokey Robinson wrote "My Girl," backstage.

2 Lexington Avenue at East 125th Street In the Velvet Underground's "Waiting For The Man", the narrator goes to Harlem to meet his drug dealer. "Up to Lexington, 125/Feel sick and dirty, more dead than alive." In the Velvets', "Run Run Run", he favours Union Square: "You never know what you're gonna find there." Just the first references to New York that still punctuate Lou Reed albums.

3 Central Park Three acres of the Park were landscaped by Yoko Ono, and named Strawberry Fields, after John Lennon was murdered on the doorstep of his nearby home, the Dakota Building (1 West 72nd St). Also in the Park is the Alice in Wonderland statue on which the Jimi Hendrix Experience sat to be photographed by Linda Eastman (later McCartney) in 1968.

4 Studio 54 254 West 54th Street. Debauched, glamorous, packed with celebs, Studio 54 was the disco to end all discos, and it has just been commemorated in its own movie, 54. It's now a vacant lot.

5 Ed Sullivan Theatre 1697 Broadway at West 53rd Street. This was the TV studio in which Elvis Presley was filmed from the waist up, the Beatles performed to a record-breaking 73 million viewers, and Jim Morrison disobeyed the producer to sing the taboo word "higher" in "Light My Fire". (Mick Jagger capitulated, and changed "Let's Spend the Night Together" to "Lets Spend Some Time Together".)

6 Brill Building 1619 Broadway. In the early Sixties, before the Beatles set the trend for self-penned material, songwriters would troop into the cramped offices of the Brill Building to knock out pop classics for the likes of the Shirelles and Ben E King. Among the drones were Leiber and Stroller, Neil Sedaka, Doc Pomus and Carole King - whose tenure was fictionalised in 1995's Grace of My Heart.

7 Chelsea Hotel 222 West 23rd Street, between 7th and 8th Avenues. The bohemians' hotel of choice for decades before the rock crowd moved in. Among those who have mythologised their visits are Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. But their stories have been overshadowed by the occurrence in room 100 on 12 October 1978, when Sid Vicious murdered Nancy Spungen.

8 Limelight Club 6th Avenue at West 20th Street. Huey and Fast of the Fun Lovin' Criminals were working at the Limelight as a bartender and a receptionist respectively when they asked the manager if their band could play there. He granted them a 10-minute slot at midnight. Six performances later, the chairman of EMI North America handed them his business card.

9 Max's Kansas City 213 Park Avenue South. Where the New York Dolls slouched, Debbie Harry waitressed and where a famous Velvet Underground gig was bootlegged. Johnny Rotten's contempt of this scene inspired one of his roughest-ever rhymes in the Sex Pistols' "New York": "You think you're swell playing Max's Kansas/Looking bad and acting flash." It's now a deli.

10 Bob Dylan's apartment 161 West 4th Street. Dylan lived here from 1961 to 1965. The road outside is the one to walk down if you want to recreate the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan or to hum 1965's single "Positively 4th Street".

11 Cafe Wha? 115 MacDougal Street. The Greenwich Village club where Bob Dylan played on his arrival in New York, and where Chas Chandler, then the bass player with The Animals, discovered Jimi Hendrix.

12 CBGB 315 Bowery at Bleeker Street. The name stands for Country, BIuegrass and Blues, which is what Hilly Cristal had planned for his club when he opened it in 1973. Instead, it became the birthplace of American punk, a home from home for Television, Blondie, the Ramones and Talking Heads - who namechecked it in "Life During Wartime". Today, it's as atmospheric and unhygienic as ever