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The "Big Apple," the "City That Never Sleeps"—New York is a city of superlatives: America's biggest; its most exciting; its business and cultural capitals; the nation's trendsetter. The city seems to pull in the best and the brightest from every corner of the country. The city's ethnic flavor has been nuanced by decades of immigrants whose first glimpse of America was the Statue of Liberty guarding New York Harbor and by large expatriate communities such as the United Nations headquartered there. Just minutes from the multimillion-dollar two-bedroom co-op apartments of Park Avenue, though, lies some of the most dire urban poverty in America. But the attendant crime that affects New Yorkers and visitors alike has seen a continued dramatic reduction from 1993 to 2004—NYC has a murder rate half that of cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago, in part as the result of a concerted effort by local agencies. But for all its eight million residents, New York remains a city of neighborhoods, whether it's avant-garde Greenwich Village, bustling Harlem, the ultra-sophisticated TriBeCa, or one of the ethnic enclaves such as Little Italy or Chinatown. And a cleaner, brighter, safer New York is attracting people from around the world who are coming to enjoy the city's renaissance.
The City in Brief
| 1613 (incorporated, 1898) | |
| Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (R) (since 2002) | |
| 7,071,639 | |
| 7,322,564 | |
| 8,008,278 | |
| 8,104,079 | |
| 9.36% | |
| 1st (State rank: 1st) | |
| 1st (State rank: 1st) | |
| 1st (State rank: 1st) | |
| 8,275,000 | |
| 8,546,846 | |
| 9,314,235 | |
| 8.98% | |
| 1st (CMSA) | |
| 1st (PMSA) | |
| 1st (PMSA) | |
| 303 square miles (2000) | |
| 50 to 800 feet above sea level | |
| 54.91° F | |
| 42.6 inches of total precipitation; 26.5 inches of snow | |
| Education and health services; trade, transportation and utilities; government; professional and business services; financial services; leisure and hospitality | |
| 4.5% (April 2005) | |
| $22,402 (1999) | |
| 250,630 | |
| City University of New York (several branches); CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice; Mt. Sinai School of Medicine; State University of New York's Downstate Medical Center and Maritime College; New York University; Columbia University; Juilliard School | |
| The New York Times; New York Daily News; The New York Post; Newsday |
Dictionary:
New York
or New York City A city of southern New York on New York Bay at the mouth of the Hudson River. Founded by the Dutch as New Amsterdam, it was renamed by the English in honor of the Duke of York. It is the largest city in the country and a financial, cultural, trade, shipping, and communications center. Originally consisting only of Manhattan Island, it was rechartered in 1898 to include the five present-day boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. Population: 8,210,000.
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:
New York City
(click to enlarge)
Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, New York City. (credit: Comstock)
Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, New York City. (credit: Comstock)
For more information on New York City, visit Britannica.com.
US History Encyclopedia:
New York City
While it shares characteristics with a thousand other cities, New York City is also unique. At the southern tip of New York State, the city covers 320.38 miles and is divided into five boroughs, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. By the twenty-first century New York City was well established as the preeminent financial and cultural center of American society and an increasingly globalized world economy. Its stature is anchored in part on one of the great, natural deep-water ports in the world; on its resultant concentration of financial services, commercial ventures, and media outlets; and on its long and colorful history as the "front door" to the United States for millions of immigrants.
Prior to European settlement in 1624, Native Americans, including the Rockaways, the Matinecooks, the Canarsies, and the Lenapes, populated the region. While northern European and Spanish explorers had contact with these groups before 1600, the establishment of a Dutch fort on Governor's Island began New York's modern history. The Dutch West India Company christened the settlement New Amsterdam, and it became the central entrepôt to the Dutch colony of New Netherland. Dutch officials had trouble attracting settlers from a prosperous Holland and eventually allowed in non-Dutch settlers from nearby English colonies and northern and western Europe. As a result, by the 1660s the Dutch were close to being a minority in New Amsterdam. Led by Colonel Richard Nicolls, the British seized New Amsterdam on 8 September 1664. Nicolls renamed the city "New York City" to honor the brother of King Charles II, the duke of York (later King James II).
For its first hundred years the city grew steadily in diversity, population, and importance as a critical economic bridge between Britain's southern, agricultural colonies and its northern mercantile possessions. The first Africans arrived in 1626, and by the eighteenth century African slaves comprised approximately one-fifth of the city's population. At times the city's ethnic and racial diversity led to social unrest. In 1712 and 1741 city authorities brutally crushed slave insurrections. By 1743 New York was the third largest American city, and by 1760 it surpassed Boston to become second only to Philadelphia.
New York City saw substantial anti-British sentiment during the early years of the American Revolutionary period as radical Whig leaders organized militant Sons of Liberty and their allies in anti-British violence. As the Revolution progressed, however, the city became a bastion of Loyalist sympathy, particularly following the defeat of George Washington's forces at Brooklyn Heights and Harlem Heights in 1776. The British occupied the city for the remainder of the war.
After the British departed in 1783, New York City grew in economic importance, particularly with the establishment of the stock exchange in 1792. As European powers battled in the Napoleonic Wars, New York City supplied all sides with meat, flour, leather, and cloth among other goods and by 1810 emerged as the nation's premier port and the single most lucrative market for British exports.
The Nineteenth Century
To a significant extent New York City's subsequent rise in the nineteenth century stemmed from the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. Originally advocated in 1810 by Mayor (and later governor) DeWitt Clinton, the canal allowed New York to overshadow New Orleans and St. Louis as an entry point to the western territories and provided cheap access to the "inland empire" of the Great Lakes region. As a result the city's population surged from 123,706 in 1820 to 202,589 by 1830, surpassing Philadelphia as the largest city in the hemisphere. While it prospered, New York City also became more ethnically diverse as German, French, and Irish arrivals joined older Dutch and English groups. By mid-century, a large influx of German and Irish Catholics into a city still strongly dominated by Protestant groups led to significant social conflict over jobs, temperance, municipal government, and what it meant to be an "American."
As the population and diversity increased, New York's political environment became more fractious. Ignited by desire for political patronage and inclusion and fueled by class and ethnic resentments toward the city's traditional elite, the Democratic Party developed the notorious political machine Tammany Hall. Originally formed in 1788 to challenge the city's exclusive political clubs, Tammany garnered political influence by helping immigrants find work, gain citizenship, and meet other needs. Tammany also developed a well-deserved reputation for graft, scandal, and infighting. Under the leadership of Fernando Wood in the 1850s, William Marcy "Boss" Tweed after the Civil War, and Richard Crocker and Charles Murphy, Tammany became entrenched in the city's political operations and was not routed out until the 1930s.
The American Civil War dramatically stimulated New York's industrial development and made the city the unquestioned center of American finance and capitalism. Buoyed by federal war contracts and protected by federal tariffs, New York manufactures of all types expanded rapidly. As a result many of New York's commercial elite made unprecedented fortunes. In 1860 the city had only a few dozen millionaires; by the end of the war the city had several hundred, forming the basis for a culture of conspicuous consumption that continued into the twenty-first century.
Between 1880 and 1919,17 million immigrants passed through New York City, among them growing numbers of Jewish, Hungarian, Italian, Chinese, and Russian arrivals. This surge in immigration placed significant pressure on the city's resources and led to the creation of a distinctive housing type, the tenement. As the tenant population grew, landlords subdivided single-family houses and constructed flimsy "rear lot" buildings, railroad flats, and from 1879 to 1901 the infamous "dumbbell" tenement, all noted for overcrowding, filth, and danger.
As a consequence New York City became a testing ground for regulatory reform, most notably in the areas of housing, public health, and occupational safety. Jacob Riis's landmark 1890 photo essay How the Other Half Lives detailed the overcrowding and unsanitary living conditions in the tenements and marked a major turning point in urban reform. Such efforts increased after the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory fire of 1911, which inspired a generation of local and national reformers, including Francis Perkins, Harry Hopkins, Robert F. Wagner, and Al Smith.
The Twentieth Century
Until the late nineteenth century "New York City" meant Manhattan. Two developments at that time, however, greatly expanded the city's boundaries. Led by Andrew Haswell Green, the consolidation of the city in 1898 unified the four outer boroughs with Manhattan, combining the country's largest city, New York, with the third biggest, Brooklyn, and raising the city's population from 2 million to 3.4 million overnight. In addition the subway system, which first began operation in 1904, eventually grew to over seven hundred miles of track in the city, the most extensive urban rail system in the world.
The city grew up as well. The construction of the Equitable Building in 1870 began the transformation of New York City's skyline. With the development of safety elevators, inexpensive steel, and skeleton-frame construction, office buildings leapt from six stories (or less) to twenty, forty, or sixty floors (or more). The construction of the Manhattan Life Building (1895), the Flatiron Building (1903), and the Woolworth Building (1913) among many others represented important architectural and engineering improvements. New York's love affair with the skyscraper culminated in 1930 with the race between H. Craig Severence's Bank of Manhattan on Wall Street and Walter Chrysler's eponymous Chrysler Building on Forty-second Street to claim the prize for the tallest building in the world. Both structures were quickly overshadowed in 1931 by the 102-story Empire State Building on Fifth Avenue and eventually by the twin towers of the 110-story World Trade Center in 1974. At the beginning of the twenty-first century New York had more skyscrapers than any other place on Earth, and as business and residential structures, hotels and public housing, they have come to articulate American economic vitality. Sadly this symbolism made these structures attractive targets for attack. The Trade Center was bombed in 1993 by a group of Muslim fundamentalists. On 11 September 2001 two commercial airliners were hijacked and flown into the towers, destroying the entire complex and killing almost three thousand people, making it the most lethal terrorist attack to that date.
From the 1930s to the 1960s the city's landscape was further transformed as Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, and other planners channeled state and federal money into massive highway and park projects, shifting the city from its nineteenth-century reliance on horses, trains, and streetcars to accommodation of the automobile. Public works projects such as the Triborough Bridge (1936), the Lincoln Tunnel (1937), the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel (1950), and the Cross-Bronx Expressway (1963) made it possible for white, middle-class New Yorkers to move to the suburbs, leaving many older, inner-city communities neglected and consequently vulnerable to economic decline.
Beginning in the early nineteenth century New York City became the cultural capital of the United States, serving as the focal point for American literature, publishing, music, theater, and in the twentieth century movies, television, advertising, fashion, and one of America's unique musical contributions, jazz. The interactive artistic, literary, intellectual, and commercial life of New York has evolved into one of the city's most distinctive features.
Immigration continued to flavor the city. After World War II and the passage of the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965, which ended discrimination based on national origin, New York City became even more ethnically diverse. Large numbers of Middle Eastern, Latino, Caribbean, Asian, African, and eastern European immigrants settled in neighborhoods such as the Lower East Side, Flushing, Bay Ridge, Fordham, and Jackson Heights in Queens. In 1980 immigrants made up about 24 percent of the city's population; of them 80 percent were from Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. With the city's still vigorous communities of Italians, Irish, African Americans, and Chinese, the city's diversity has proven a source of both ethnic and racial tensions on the one hand and cultural enrichment and the promise of a more tolerant social order on the other.
Bibliography
Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.
Kammen, Michael. Colonial New York: A History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Plunz, Richard. A History of Housing in New York City. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
Reimers, David M. Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
Stokes, I. N. Phelps. The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498– 1909. 6 vols. Reprint, Union, New Jersey: The Lawbook Exchange, 1998.
Columbia Encyclopedia:
New York,
city (1990 pop. 7,322,564), land area 309 sq mi (801 sq km), SE N.Y., largest city in the United States and one of the largest in the world, on New York Bay at the mouth of the Hudson River. It comprises five boroughs, each coextensive with a county: Manhattan (New York co.), the heart of the city, an island; the Bronx (Bronx co.), on the mainland, NE of Manhattan and separated from it by the Harlem River; Queens (Queens co.), on Long Island, E of Manhattan across the East River; Brooklyn (Kings co.), also on Long Island, on the East River adjoining Queens and on New York Bay; and Staten Island (Richmond co.), on Staten Island, SW of Manhattan and separated from it by the Upper Bay. The metropolitan area (1990 est. pop. 18,087,000) encompasses parts of SE New York state, NE New Jersey, and SW Connecticut. The port of New York (which is now centered on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River) remains one of the world's leading ports.
Economy
New York is a vibrant center for commerce and business and one of the three “world cities” (along with London and Toyko) that control world finance. Manufacturing—primarily of small but highly diverse types—accounts for a large but declining amount of employment. Clothing and other apparel, such as furs; chemicals; metal products; and processed foods are some of the principal manufactures. The city is also a major center of television broadcasting, book publishing, advertising, and other facets of mass communication. It became a major movie-making site in the 1990s, and it is a preeminent art center, with artists revitalizing many of its neighborhoods. The most celebrated newspapers are the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. New York attracts many conventions—including the national Democratic (1868, 1924, 1976, 1980, 1992) and Republican (2004) party conventions—and was the site of two World's Fairs (1939–40; 1964–65). It is served by three major airports: John F. Kennedy International Airport and LaGuardia Airport, both in Queens, and Newark International Airport, in New Jersey. Railroads converge upon New York from all points.
With its vast cultural and educational resources, famous shops and restaurants, places of entertainment (including the theater district and many off-Broadway theaters), striking and diversified architecture (including the Chrysler Building and Empire State Building), and parks and botanical gardens, New York draws millions of tourists every year. Some of its streets and neighborhoods have become symbols throughout the nation. Wall Street means finance; Broadway, the theater; Fifth Avenue, fine shopping; Madison Avenue, advertising; and SoHo, art.
Ethnic Diversity
New York City is also famous for its ethnic diversity, manifesting itself in scores of communities representing virtually every nation on earth, each preserving its identity. Little Italy and Chinatown date back to the mid-19th cent. African Americans from the South began to migrate to Harlem after 1910, and in the 1940s large numbers of Puerto Ricans and other Hispanic-Americans began to settle in what is now known as Spanish Harlem. Since the 1980s New York City has undergone substantial population growth, primarily due to new immigration from Latin America (especially the Dominican Republic), Asia, Jamaica, Haiti, the Soviet Union and Russia, and Africa.
Points of Interest and Educational and Cultural Facilities
The city's many bridges include the George Washington Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge, Henry Hudson Bridge, Triborough Bridge, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, the Throgs Neck Bridge, and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. The Holland Tunnel (the first vehicular tunnel under the Hudson) and the Lincoln Tunnel link Manhattan with New Jersey. The Queens-Midtown Tunnel and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, both under the East River, connect Manhattan with W Long Island. Islands in the East River include Roosevelt Island, Rikers Island (site of a city penitentiary), and Randalls Island (with Downing Stadium). In New York Bay are Liberty Island (with the Statue of Liberty); Governors Island; and Ellis Island. New York City is the seat of the United Nations. Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts is a complex of buildings housing the Metropolitan Opera Company, the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra, the New York City Ballet, the New York City Opera, and the Juilliard School. Also in the city are Carnegie Hall and New York City Center, featuring performances by musical and theatrical companies.
Among the best known of the city's many museums and scientific collections are the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright), the Frick Collection (housed in the Frick mansion), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Neue Galerie, the Museum of the City of New York, the Museum of Jewish Heritage–a Living Memorial to the Holocaust, the American Museum of Natural History (with the Hayden Planetarium), the museum and library of the New-York Historical Society, the Brooklyn Museum (see Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences), and the Paley Center for Media. The New York Public Library is the largest in the United States. Major educational institutions include the City Univ. of New York (see New York, City Univ. of), Columbia Univ., Cooper Union, Fordham Univ., General Theological Seminary, Jewish Theological Seminary, New School Univ., New York Univ., and Union Theological Seminary. A center for medical treatment and research, New York has more than 130 hospitals and several medical schools. Noted hospitals include Bellevue Hospital, Mt. Sinai Hospital (part of Mt. Sinai NYU Health), and New York–Presbyterian Hospital (encompassing Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center and New York Weill Cornell Medical Center). Among New York's noted houses of worship are Trinity Church, St. Paul's Chapel (dedicated 1776), Saint Patrick's Cathedral, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (see Saint John the Divine, Cathedral of), Riverside Church, and Temple Emanu-El.
New York's parks and recreation centers include parts of Gateway National Recreation Area (see National Parks and Monuments, table); Central Park, the Battery, Washington Square Park, Riverside Park, and Fort Tryon Park (with the Cloisters) in Manhattan; the New York Zoological Park (Bronx Zoo) and the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx; Coney Island (with a boardwalk, beaches, and an aquarium) and Prospect Park in Brooklyn; and Flushing Meadows–Corona Park (the site of two World's Fairs, two museums, a botanic garden, and a zoo). Sports events are held at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, home to the Knickerbockers (basketball) and Rangers (hockey); at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, home to the Yankees (baseball); and at Shea Stadium (home to baseball's Mets) and Arthur Ashe Stadium (home to the U.S. Open in tennis) in Queens. In the suburbs are the homes of the Islanders (hockey; in Uniondale, Long Island) and the Giants and the Jets (football; at the Meadowlands, in East Rutherford, N.J.).
Other places of interest are Rockefeller Center; Battery Park City; Greenwich Village, with its cafés and restaurants; and Times Square, with its lights and theaters. Of historic interest are Fraunces Tavern (built 1719), where Washington said farewell to his officers after the American Revolution; Gracie Mansion (built late 18th cent.), now the official mayoral residence; the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage; and Grant's Tomb.
History
The Colonial Period
Although Giovanni da Verrazano was probably the first European to explore the region and Henry Hudson certainly visited the area, it was with Dutch settlements on Manhattan and Long Island that the city truly began to emerge. In 1624 the colony of New Netherland was established, with the town of New Amsterdam on the lower tip of Manhattan as its capital. Peter Minuit of the Dutch West India Company supposedly bought the island from its Native inhabitants for 60 Dutch guilders worth of merchandise (the sale was completed in 1626). Under the Dutch, schools were opened and the Dutch Reformed Church was established. The indigenous population was forced out the area of European settlement in a series of bloody battles.
In 1664 the English, at war with the Netherlands (see Dutch Wars), seized the colony for the duke of York, for whom it was renamed. Peter Stuyvesant was replaced by Richard Nicolls as governor, and New York City became the capital of the new British province of New York. The Dutch returned to power briefly (1673–74) before the reestablishment of English rule. A liberal charter, which established the Common Council as the main governing body of the city, was granted under Thomas Dongan in 1686 and remained in effect for many years. English rule was not, however, without dissension, and the autocratic rule of British governors was one of the causes of an insurrection that broke out in 1689 under the leadership of Jacob Leisler. The insurrection ended in the execution of Leisler by his enemies in 1691. In 1741 there was further violence when an alleged plot by African-American slaves to burn New York was ruthlessly suppressed.
Throughout the 18th cent. New York was an expanding commercial and cultural center. The city's first newspaper, the New York Gazette, appeared in 1725. The trial in 1735 of John Peter Zenger, editor of a rival paper, was an important precedent for the principle of a free press. The city's first institution of higher learning, Kings College (now Columbia Univ.), was founded in 1754.
The Revolution through the Nineteenth Century
New York was active in the colonial opposition to British measures after trouble in 1765 over the Stamp Act. As revolutionary sentiments increased, the New York Sons of Liberty forced (1775) Gov. William Tryon and the British colonial government from the city. Although many New Yorkers were Loyalists, Continental forces commanded by George Washington tried to defend the city. After the patriot defeat in the battle of Long Island (see Long Island, battle of) and the succeeding actions at Harlem Heights and White Plains, Washington gave up New York, and the British occupied the city until the end of the war for independence. Under the British occupation two mysterious fires (1776 and 1778) destroyed a large part of the city. After the Revolution New York was briefly (1785–90) the first capital of the United States and was the state capital until 1797. President Washington was inaugurated (Apr. 30, 1789) at Federal Hall.
New development was marked by such events as the founding (1784) of the Bank of New York under Alexander Hamilton and the beginning of the stock exchange around 1790. By 1790 New York was the largest city in the United States, with over 33,000 inhabitants; by 1800 the number had risen to 60,515. In 1811 plans were adopted for the laying out of most of Manhattan on a grid pattern. The opening of the Erie Canal (1825), ardently supported by former Mayor De Witt Clinton, made New York City the seaboard gateway for the Great Lakes region, ushering in another era of commercial expansion. The New York and Harlem RR was built in 1832. In 1834 the mayor of New York became an elective office. In the next year a massive fire destroyed much of Lower Manhattan, but it brought about new building laws and the construction of the Croton water system.
By 1840 New York had become the leading port of the nation. A substantial Irish and German immigration after 1840 dramatically changed the character of urban life and politics in the city. The coming of the Civil War found New Yorkers unusually divided; many shared Mayor Fernando Wood's Southern sympathies, but under the leadership of Gov. Horatio Seymour most supported the Union. However, in 1863 the draft riots broke out in protest against the federal Conscription Act. The rioters—many of whom were Irish and other recent immigrants—directed most of their anger against African Americans. Extensive immigration had begun before the Civil War, and after 1865, with the acceleration of industrial development, another wave of immigration began and reached its height in the late 19th and early 20th cent. As a result of this immigration, which was predominantly from E and S Europe, the city's population reached 3,437,000 by 1900 and 7 million by 1930. New York's many distinct neighborhoods, divided along ethnic and class lines, included such notorious slums as Five Points, Hell's Kitchen, and the Lower East Side. They were often side by side with such exclusive neighborhoods as Gramercy Park or Brooklyn Heights.
Municipal politics were dominated by the Democratic party, which was dominated by Tammany Hall (see Tammany) and the Tweed Ring, led by William M. Tweed. The first of many scandalous disclosures about the city's political life came in 1871, leading to Tweed's downfall. Although not always victorious, Tammany was the center of New York City politics until 1945.
Until 1874, when portions of Westchester were annexed, the city's boundaries were those of present-day Manhattan. With the adoption of a new charter in 1898, New York became a city of five boroughs—New York City was split into the present Manhattan and Bronx boroughs, and the independent city of Brooklyn was annexed, as were the western portions of Queens co. and Staten Island. The opening of the first subway line (1903) and other means of mass transportation spurred the growth of the outer boroughs, and this trend has continued into the 1990s. The Flatiron Building (1902) foreshadowed the skyscrapers that today give Manhattan its famed skyline.
Later History
In the 20th cent., New York City was served by such mayors as Seth Low, William J. Gaynor, James J. Walker (whose resignation was brought about by the Seabury investigation), Fiorello H. LaGuardia, Robert F. Wagner, Jr. (see under Robert Ferdinand Wagner), Abraham Beame, John V. Lindsay, Edward I. Koch, David Dinkins (New York City's first African-American mayor), and Rudolph Giuliani. The need for regional planning resulted in the nation's first zoning legislation (1916) and the formation of such bodies as the Port of New York Authority (1921; now the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey), the Regional Plan Association (1929), the Municipal Housing Authority (1934), and the City Planning Commission (1938).
After World War II, New York began to experience the problems that became common to most large U.S. cities, including increased crime, racial and ethnic tensions, homelessness, a movement of residents and companies to the suburbs and the resulting diminished tax base, and a deteriorating infrastructure that hurt city services. These problems were highlighted in the city's near-bankruptcy in 1975. A brief but spectacular boom in the stock and real estate markets in the 1980s brought considerable wealth to some sectors. By the early 1990s, however, corporate downsizing, the outward movement of corporate and back office centers, a still shrinking industrial sector, and the transition to a service-oriented economy meant the city was hard hit by the national recession.
In the late 1990s the city capitalized on its strengths to face a changing economic environment. While the manufacturing base continued to dwindle, the survivors were flexible and, increasingly, specialized companies that custom-tailored products or focused on local customers. Foreign markets were targeted by the city's financial, legal, communications, and other service industries. The city also saw the birth of a strong high-technology sector. Budget cuts in the mid-1990s reduced basic services, but a strong national economy and, especially, a rising stock market had restored vigor and prosperity by the end of the 20th cent.
The destruction of the World Trade Center, formerly the city's tallest building, as a result of a terrorist attack (Sept., 2001) was the worst disaster in the city's history, killing more than 2,700 people. In addition to the wrenching horror of the attack and the blow to the city's pride, New York lost some 10% of its commercial office space and faced months of cleanup and years of reconstruction. The crisis brought national prominence and international renown to Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who provided the city with a forceful and calming focus in the weeks after the attack. Michael R. Bloomberg, a Republican, succeeded Giuliani as mayor in 2002.
Bibliography
See I. N. P. Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island (6 vol., 1915–28, repr. 1967); R. G. Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 1815–1860 (1939); J. A. Kouwenhoven, Columbia Historical Portrait of New York (1953, repr. 1972); N. Glazer and D. P. Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot (1963); E. R. Ellis, The Epic of New York City (1966); R. A. Caro, The Power Broker (1975); D. Hammack, Power and Society (1982); Federal Writers' Project, WPA Guide to New York City (repr. 1982); J. Kieran, A Natural History of New York (1982); J. Charyn, Metropolis: New York as Myth, Marketplace, and Magical Land (1987); R. A. M. Stern, T. Mellins, and D. Fishman, New York 1960 (1995); K. T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City (1995); E. G. Burrows and M. Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (1998); H. Adam, New York: Architecture & Design (2003); A. S. Dolkart and M. A. Postal, Guide to New York City Landmarks (3d ed. 2003); R. Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America (2004).
History 1450-1789:
New York
First settled by Dutch traders in 1624, New Amsterdam, called New York after its transfer in 1664 to the English, grew from about thirty families to a population of three thousand by 1680. By 1776, it boasted twenty-five thousand inhabitants, chiefly of Dutch, English, and African origin.
Unlike its colonial neighbors Boston and Philadelphia, New York was settled for commercial rather than religious purposes. Initially a trading center for furs, fish, and timber products (including shipbuilding materials such as pitch), New York's protected harbor was ideal for large ships, encouraging immigration and trade of all kinds. Ships that traveled the seas bearing slaves, rum, sugar, tobacco, and rice originated in New York harbor throughout the eighteenth century. New York also incubated the American colonies' burgeoning urban culture, embracing newspapers, coffeehouses, colleges, gentlemen's clubs, and political groups.
New Yorkers' trading relationships kept them closely tied to England during the tumultuous 1760s and 1770s. Although New York was host to the Stamp Act Congress in 1765, it was a reluctant rebel for the most part. The British took the city after winning the Battle of Long Island in 1776, and held it throughout the war.
In spite of its Tory sympathies, after the Revolution New York became the first capital of the new nation, hosting the inauguration of George Washington in 1789. When the capital moved to Philadelphia in 1790, the political center of the republic shifted, but the economic centrality of New York remained. The creation of the New York Stock Exchange in 1792 only underlined the city's status as the center of American trade and finance, a role it retains to this day.
Bibliography
Kammen, Michael. Colonial New York: A History. New York, 1975.
—FIONA DEANS HALLORAN
Geography:
New York City
City in New York state and largest city in the United States. (See Bowery, Broadway, Bronx, Brooklyn, Fifth Avenue, Greenwich Village, Harlem, Madison Avenue, Manhattan, Park Avenue, September 11 attacks, Times Square, and Wall Street.)
- One of the key financial, communications, and arts centers of the world.
Weather:
New York, NY
AccuWeather® Current Conditions for  M/SUNNY |
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Local Time:
New York, United States
Local Time: Aug 20, 2:49 PM
Maps:
New York
Wikipedia:
New York City
"New York, New York" and "NYC" redirect here. For other uses, see New York, New York (disambiguation) and NYC
(disambiguation).
| City of New York | |||
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| Nickname: The Big Apple, Gotham, The City that Never Sleeps | |||
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| Coordinates: | |||
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| Country | United States | ||
| State | New York | ||
| Boroughs | The Bronx Brooklyn Manhattan Queens Staten Island |
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| Settled | 1624 | ||
| Government | |||
| - Mayor | Michael Bloomberg (I)[1] | ||
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| Website: www.nyc.gov | |||
New York or New York City (officially The City of New York) is an alpha
world city in the state of New York. It is the
most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York metropolitan
area, which, with a population of nearly 19 million, ranks among the largest
urban areas in the world. For more than a century, it has been one of the world's leading business, financial and cultural
centers and its influence in politics, education,
entertainment,
New York City comprises five boroughs, each of which is coterminous with a county: The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island. With over 8.2 million residents within an area of 322 square miles (830 km²), New York City is the second most densely populated city in the United States, behind nearby Union City, New Jersey.[3] [4]
The city has many neighborhoods and landmarks known around the world. The Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at Ellis Island. Wall Street, in Lower Manhattan, has been a dominant global financial center since World War II and is home to the New York Stock Exchange. The city has been home to several of the tallest buildings in the world, including the Empire State Building and the former twin towers of the World Trade Center, which were destroyed in the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The city is the birthplace of many American cultural movements, including the Harlem Renaissance in literature and visual art, abstract expressionism (also known as the New York School) in painting, and hip hop[5], punk[6] and Tin Pan Alley in music. In 2005, nearly 170 languages were spoken in the city and 36 percent of its population was born outside the United States.[7][8] New York is often called the "Big Apple," since it's the largest "bite of the apple" that performers as well as professionals in the United States seek to claim ("bite of the apple" is colloquial American English for "opportunity"). New York is also known as "The City that Never Sleeps," not least because its subway system operates around the clock and because many neighborhoods are busy at all hours. This nickname was popularized by Frank Sinatra's song "New York, New York."
History
The region was inhabited by about 5,000 Lenape Native Americans at the time of its European discovery in 1524[citation needed] by Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian explorer in the service of the French crown, who called it "Nouvelle Angoulême" (New Angoulême).[9] European settlement began with the founding of a Dutch fur trading settlement, later called "Nieuw Amsterdam" (New Amsterdam), on the southern tip of Manhattan in 1614. Dutch colonial Director-General Peter Minuit purchased the island of Manhattan from the Lenape in 1626 (legend, now disproved, says that Manhattan was purchased for $24 worth of glass beads).[10] In 1664, the English conquered the city and renamed it "New York" after the English Duke of York and Albany.[11] At the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch War the Dutch gained control of Run (a much more valuable asset at the time) in exchange for the English controlling New Amsterdam (New York) in North America. By 1700, the Lenape population was diminished to 200.[12]
New York City grew in importance as a trading port while under British rule. In 1754, Columbia University was founded under charter by King George II as King's College in Lower Manhattan.[13] The city emerged as the theater for a series of major battles known as the New York Campaign during the American Revolutionary War. The Continental Congress met in New York City and in 1789 the first President of the United States, George Washington, was inaugurated at Federal Hall on Wall Street.[14] New York City was the capital of the United States until 1790.
In the 19th century, the city was transformed by immigration and development. A visionary development proposal, the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, expanded the city street grid to encompass all of Manhattan, and the 1819 opening of the Erie Canal connected the Atlantic port to the vast agricultural markets of the North American interior.[15] By 1835, New York City had surpassed Philadelphia as the largest city in the United States. Local politics fell under the domination of Tammany Hall, a political machine supported by Irish immigrants.[16] Public-minded members of the old merchant aristocracy lobbied for the establishment of Central Park, which became the first landscaped park in an American city in 1857. A significant free-black population also existed in Manhattan, as well as in Brooklyn. Slaves had been held in New York through 1827, but during the 1830s New York became the center of interracial abolitionist activism in the North.
Anger at military conscription during the American Civil War (1861–1865) led to the Draft Riots of 1863, one of the worst incidents of civil unrest in American history.[17] In 1898, the modern City of New York was formed with the consolidation of Brooklyn (until then an independent city), Manhattan and municipalities in the other boroughs.[18] The opening of the New York City Subway in 1904 helped bind the new city together. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the city became a world center for industry, commerce, and communication. However, this development did not come without a price. In 1904, the steamship General Slocum caught fire in the East River, killing 1,021 people on board. In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the city's worst industrial disaster, took the lives of 146 garment workers and spurred the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and major improvements in factory safety standards.[19]
In the 1920s, New York City was a major destination for African Americans during the Great Migration from the American South. By 1916, New York City was home to the largest urban African diaspora in North America. The Harlem Renaissance flourished during the era of Prohibition, coincident with a larger economic boom that saw the skyline develop with the construction of competing skyscrapers. New York City became the most populous city in the world in 1948, overtaking London, which had reigned for over a century. The difficult years of the Great Depression saw the election of reformer Fiorello LaGuardia as mayor and the fall of Tammany Hall after eighty years of political dominance.[20]
Returning World War II veterans and immigrants from Europe created a postwar economic boom and the development of huge housing tracts in eastern Queens. New York emerged from the war unscathed and the leading city of the world, with Wall Street leading America's ascendance as the world's dominant economic power, the United Nations headquarters (built in 1952) emphasizing New York's political influence, and the rise of abstract expressionism in the city precipitating New York's displacement of Paris as the center of the art world.[21] In the 1960s, New York suffered from economic problems, rising crime rates and racial tension, which reached a peak in the 1970s.
In the 1980s, a resurgence in the financial industry improved the city's fiscal health. By the 1990s, racial tensions had calmed, crime rates dropped dramatically, and waves of new immigrants arrived from Asia and Latin America. Important new sectors, such as Silicon Alley, emerged in the city's economy and New York's population reached an all-time high in the 2000 census.
The city was one of the sites of the September 11, 2001 attacks, when nearly 3,000 people died in the destruction of the World Trade Center. The Freedom Tower will be built on the site and is scheduled for completion in 2012.[22]
Geography
New York City is located in the Northeastern United States, in southeastern New York State, approximately halfway between Washington, D.C. and Boston.[23] The location at the mouth of the Hudson River, which feeds into a naturally sheltered harbor and then into the Atlantic Ocean, has helped the city grow in significance as a trading city. Much of New York is built on the three islands of Manhattan, Staten Island, and Long Island, making land scarce and encouraging a high population density.
The Hudson River flows through the Hudson Valley into New York Bay. Between New York City and Troy, New York, the river
is an estuary.[24] The
Hudson separates the city from New Jersey. The East
River, actually a tidal strait, flows from
The city's land has been altered considerably by human intervention, with substantial land reclamation along the waterfronts since Dutch colonial times. Reclamation is most notable in Lower Manhattan, with developments such as Battery Park City in the 1970s and 1980s.[25] Some of the natural variations in topography have been evened out, particularly in Manhattan.[26]
The city's land area is 322 sq mi (831.4 km²).[27] The highest point in the city is Todt Hill on Staten Island, which at 409.8 ft (124.9 m) above sea level is the highest point on the Eastern Seaboard south of Maine.[28] The summit of the ridge is largely covered in woodlands as part of the Staten Island Greenbelt.<