New York City ModificationsEssay Preview: New York City ModificationsReport this essayNew York City (also known by the initials NYC), officially the City of New York, is the most populous city in the United States and the most densely populated major city in North America. Located in the state of New York, New York City has a population of over 8.1 million [1] within an area of 321 square miles (approximately 830 kmІ). [2]
The city is a center for international finance, fashion, entertainment and culture, and is widely considered to be one of the worlds major global cities with an extraordinary collection of museums, galleries, performance venues, media outlets, international corporations and financial markets. It is also home to the headquarters of the United Nations.
The New York metropolitan area has a population of about 22 million, which makes it one of the largest urban areas in the world. [3] The city proper consists of five boroughs: The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. Each of these boroughs, except for Staten Island, is home to at least a million people and would each be among the nations largest cities if considered independently.
Nicknamed “the Big Apple”, the city attracts large numbers of immigrants, with over a third of its population foreign born. Moreover, it attracts people from all over the United States, who come for its culture, energy, cosmopolitanism, and economic opportunity. At present, the city has the lowest crime rate among the 25 largest American cities.
Contents[hide]* 1 History* 2 Geography and environmento 2.1 Climateo 2.2 Environmental Issues* 3 Boroughs and neighborhoods* 4 Government* 5 Economy* 6 Demographicso 6.1 Crime* 7 Cultureo 7.1 Artso 7.2 Mediao 7.3 Tourism and recreation* 8 Transportationo 8.1 Mass transito 8.2 Airports* 9 Buildings and architecture* 10 Education and researcho 10.1 Universitieso 10.2 Schoolso 10.3 Librarieso 10.4 Medical research* 11 Sportso 11.1 New York City Teams* 12 Triviao 12.1 Sister cities* 13 References* 14 Bibliography* 15 External linkso 15.1 Virtual Tours[edit]HistoryMain article: History of New York CityThe Castello Plan depicting New Amsterdam on the southern tip of Manhattan, 1660.EnlargeThe Castello Plan depicting New Amsterdam on the southern tip of Manhattan, 1660.The region was inhabited by the Lenape Native Americans at the time of its discovery by Italian Giovanni da Verrazano. Although Verrazano sailed into New York Harbor, his voyage did not continue upstream and instead he sailed back into the Atlantic. It was not until the voyage of Henry Hudson, an Englishman who was employed by the Dutch monarchy that the area was mapped. He discovered Manhattan on September 11, 1609, and continued up the river that bears his name, the Hudson River, until he arrived at the site where Albany now stands. The Dutch established New Amsterdam in 1613, which was granted self-government in 1652 under Peter Stuyvesant. The British conquered the city in September, 1664 and renamed it “New York” after the English Duke of York. The Dutch briefly regained it in August 1673, renaming the city “New Orange”, but ceded it permanently in November 1674.
Under British rule the City of New York continued to develop, and while there was growing sentiment in the city for greater political independence, the area was decidedly split in its loyalties during the New York Campaign, a series of major early battles during the American Revolutionary War. The city was under British occupation until the end of the war and was the last port British ships evacuated in 1783.
New York City was the capital of the newly-formed United States from 1788 to 1790. In the 19th century, the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 enabled New York to overtake Boston and Philadelphia in economic importance, and local politics became dominated by a Democratic Party political machine known as Tammany Hall that drew on the support of Irish immigrants. The New York Draft Riots during the American Civil War were suppressed by the Union Army. In later years known as the Gilded Age, the citys upper classes enjoyed great prosperity amid the further growth of a poor immigrant working class; it was also an era associated with economic and municipal consolidation of what would become the five boroughs in 1898.
Construction of the Empire State Building, 1930EnlargeConstruction of the Empire State Building, 1930A series of new transportation links, most notably the opening of the New York City Subway in 1904, helped bind together the newly-consolidated city. The height of European immigration brought social upheaval, and the anticapitalist labor union IWW was fiercely repressed. Later, in the 1920s, the city saw the influx of African-Americans as part of the Great Migration from the American South. The Harlem Renaissance blossomed during this period, part of a larger boom in the Prohibition era that saw the citys skyline transformed by construction of dueling skyscrapers. New York overtook London as the most populous city in the world in 1925, ending that citys century-old
A new economic boom in the 1930s followed. With the New York area’s population growing, the New York Rail and Transit Corporation started leasing new lines that brought them closer to Manhattan, a step that allowed the railways to take advantage of the greater proximity of the city. At the time, the Central Park subway system was a vital link between Manhattan and Central Park. But by 1940, when both were nearing completion, railroad officials feared they were in danger of closing their old lines. As a result, the company ran into financial and political troubles and was shut out of the city’s planned expansion into central Brooklyn, the neighborhood formerly known as Soho, by the time of the New York World’s Fair. In 1940, a group of union-affiliated leaders called the City Council passed a bill outlawing the city’s expansion of the Rail and Transit Corporation and closing the rail station. They claimed that the bill had allowed the government to deny the rail company federal government assistance to build a new line in the area. A New York Times article that year cited a recent court case from which the Council’s concerns were being vindicated, after the railroad workers who claimed they had received federal money to build a new rail line were finally able to take back the rail station in a vote of 9 to 22, the most successful defeat since 1929. In 1946, the City Council passed a measure that prohibited the Railroad Commission from granting any loans to rail companies that wanted to build a line across the East River from Manhattan to Central Park. A lawsuit was filed later, but by that time the MTA had decided to stop construction of the rail station at Harlem and start building four new stations, the Brooklyn Station, Brooklyn Bridge and the Midtown Line, that would connect with the New York City subway system (the latter was completed in 1955, just as the line was being finalized for operation). The City Council voted to block the company’s plan to expand the Central Park station, but ultimately agreed with the railway company. The line was eventually built and expanded, leaving only the Midtown Line as the only connection to Hudson’s Bay Park. The opening of New York City subway travel in 1939. This line was the primary link between the four East Coast U.S. cities, and the first to link Harlem and Central Park—and the new line’s predecessor, the Midtown Express, had been built shortly thereafter. The line was only five times expanded by the first three major subway lines from London to Cleveland and Washington, D.C. The next five tracks ran from London through Brooklyn, through Manhattan, across Greenwich Village and into Queens. Through all of these interregions, and because of the size of the subway system, the number of rail lines exceeded all previous years in the U.S., making the new line the longest. This proved to be difficult, as the lines were often long, costly and, perhaps even more important, unsafe. The trains and stations on these lines ran for only three weeks. This made them harder to run in large groups of people, who often began to wander after leaving the trains