The short answer
Pick Midtown if your trip is built around things that happen in Midtown: a Broadway show most nights, Rockefeller Center in December, the top of the park. Pick the Financial District if you want more room per dollar, streets that go quiet after about 7pm on a weekday, and a short ride to everything else. Both are on the same island and the same subway system. The real difference is what's outside the door when you walk out at 9am and when you come back at 11pm.
We're at 17 John Street, so we're not neutral. We'll tell you where Midtown genuinely wins anyway, because sending you to the wrong end of Manhattan helps nobody.
What Midtown gets you
Midtown gets you walking distance to the things most first-time itineraries are made of. The Broadway houses sit in the blocks around Times Square, which means you can eat at 6, walk to an 8 o'clock curtain, and be back in bed twenty minutes after it ends without thinking about a train. Rockefeller Center, Bryant Park, MoMA and Grand Central are all within the same rough square, and the southern edge of Central Park is at the top of it. If you have three days, a tight list, and no interest in transit, that adds up.
The trade is noise and space. Midtown doesn't empty out at night, which is the point of it and also the problem with it, and hotel rooms there are priced by the square foot in the most expensive square footage in the country. You are usually buying a room, not an apartment.
What the Financial District gets you
Down here you get space and quiet, and a subway hub that makes the rest of the city a short ride. The Financial District is an office neighborhood with a residential population layered into it, so the rhythm is backwards from Midtown: busy at 8am, calm by dinner, and genuinely quiet on a Saturday morning when the offices are shut. Guests tell us that took a night to get used to and then became the reason they rebooked.
What's actually on our doorstep is worth naming, and it's not filler. One World Trade Center and the 9/11 Memorial are a walk of a few blocks west, and the Oculus sits between them and us as a subway station you'd visit even if you weren't catching a train. Trinity Church and its churchyard are at Broadway and Wall Street, about five minutes on foot, and Alexander Hamilton is buried in it. Stone Street is a cobbled block of restaurant tables a few minutes south, and it's where we send people who want dinner without a plan. South Street Seaport is east to the river, and the Brooklyn Bridge walkway starts north of us, so a morning walk over to Brooklyn and back is a real option instead of a day trip. Battery Park is at the bottom of the island for the harbour, the Staten Island Ferry and the boats to the Statue of Liberty.
From Fulton Street you've got the A, C, J, Z, 2, 3, 4 and 5 in one station. The 2 and 3 run up the west side to Times Square, the 4 and 5 run up the east side toward Grand Central, and both are under half an hour door to door. That's the whole argument: you are not far from Midtown, you just don't have to sleep in it.
Space is the part people underestimate
Our studios run from 340 sq ft up to 485 sq ft and every one has a fully equipped kitchen. Our one, two and three bedroom suites go up to 1,200 sq ft and sleep up to eight, several with a washer and dryer in the unit, and two of them have their own private terrace on the third floor. For a family of five that is the difference between two hotel rooms with a connecting door and one place where the kids have a bedroom and you have a sofa. We don't have connecting rooms, for what it's worth, because the suites do that job instead.
The kitchen matters more than it sounds. Breakfast for four in Midtown is a real line item on a week's trip. Space to live in the city.
How to decide in one minute
If you're here for four nights and three of them end at a theater, Midtown is the right answer and we'll say so. If you're here for a week, travelling with kids or a group, working part of the time, or you've done the Midtown thing already and found it loud, come downtown. If you're a light sleeper, the block you pick matters more than the building, and downtown blocks are the quieter ones after dark.
Know before you book
Weekends downtown are the thing people either love or find eerie. Plenty is open, particularly around the Seaport and the Oculus, but the sandwich place that had a queue on Wednesday may well be shut on Sunday. If you like a neighbourhood that feels like it belongs to residents on a Saturday, that's the upside of the same coin.