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New York City sprawls across five boroughs: Manhattan, Queens,
Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Over 7 million residents live in
this area (which covers a little more than 300 square mi), and additional
millions flood in and out of the city each day as commuters.
An endless variety of sights can be found along New York City's busy
streets---world-class museums and unusual galleries, breathtaking
skyscrapers, historic town houses, vibrant neighborhoods, parks, gardens,
and much, much more. Because the city can only grow up, not out, the new
simply piles on top of the old; the juxtapositions are endless and
amusing---quaint town houses stand shoulder to shoulder with sleek glass
towers, gleaming gourmet supermarkets sit around the corner from dusty
thrift shops, and chic bistros inhabit the storefronts of soot-smudged
warehouses.
New York City is, perhaps above all, a city of immigrants, a "global"
town made up of an amazing collection of peoples, gathered from virtually
every nation on the planet. Indeed, by the year 1650, barely 25 years after
it was settled and when the population was only 4,500, there were already 18
languages spoken in Manhattan. Today, in what sociologists call a
"conurbation" of 19.7 million people---encompassing the entire metropolitan
New York area, which includes parts of upstate New York, New Jersey, Long
Island, and Connecticut---over 90 languages are spoken, and newspapers
appear in two dozen of them. No other place on Earth boasts such an amazing
polyglot amalgam of people.
It has been less than 400 years since Manhattan grew from a windswept
Algonquian oystering station into the most densely populated place in
America. The original inhabitants of the area were members of several of the
hundreds of autonomous Algonquian bands that hunted and fished in the area.
Brooklyn was the territory of the coastal Canarsee tribe, while Staten
Island was under the control of roving bands of Lenape tribes.
Giovanni da Verrazano, the official European discoverer of New York,
spied the island of Manhattan in 1524, and, a year after Verrazano's visit,
Esteban Gomez, a Portuguese Moor sailing for Spain, also sighted the island
and the magnificent bay. But it wasn't until Henry Hudson arrived in 1609
that the area was systematically explored by European eyes, when he sailed
in search of India up the waterway that would one day bear his name.
Hudson's expedition opened the door for Dutch settlement of the area. The
Dutch West India company set up the first trading post here in 1615, and in
1624 Peter Minuit is alleged to have purchased Manhattan island from Native
Americans for a pittance in beads and trinkets. Conflicts with indigenous
peoples and a succession of incompetent or corrupt Dutch governors followed.
Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of New Amsterdam (as the island
was called), inherited a miserable, struggling town in 1647, made
considerable headway in improving conditions, and ultimately handed over a
thriving city to the British in 1664. The island was promptly renamed in
honor of the Duke of York.
From 1776 until 1783, the period of the Revolutionary War, the city
was occupied by the British. Manhattan was a haven for British sympathizers,
mostly wealthy merchants and shippers who prospered as suppliers to the
British army. Insurrectionists who were unable or unwilling to flee suffered
the indignities of occupation, including the forced quartering of British
troops in their homes. Despite local support, the British occupiers torched
Manhattan in 1776, burning a quarter of it, including Trinity Church (home
to the first Episcopal congregation in America and today one of the city's
best-known landmarks). By the time the Loyalists and British surrendered New
York to the Americans on November 25, 1783---eight months after the end of
the war---the city was ravaged, it's population decimated (at half its
prewar level of 25,000), and its economy in ruins. From Trinity Church to
the Battery, the city was a charred swath.
Two years after the surrender, New York City had recovered enough of
its grandeur to become the capital of the United States, which it would be
for the next five years, from 1785 to 1790. New York continued to rebuild
and to grow at an astonishing rate. From 1789 to roughly 1800, the city's
population doubled to almost 70,000 people, and Manhattan's devotion to
trade was becoming more and more apparent.
By the middle of the 19th century, many of the developments that were
to make New York a world-class city were already in place. In 1801,
Alexander Hamilton founded the New York Post---not the city's first
newspaper, but the oldest one still publishing. The New York Stock Exchange
began in 1792 with traders gathering under a buttonwood tree near its
present-day site of business. In the first decade of the next century,
Robert Fulton successfully harnessed steam power, and, with the opening of
the Erie Canal in 1825, New York became the nation's busiest seaport,
eventually surpassing Philadelphia as a center of business.
European immigrants continued to pour in; an average of 4,000 a year
arrived during the 1820s, and 14,000 arrived in 1830 alone. The German
revolutions of the 1840s, the Irish Potato Famine of 1846--51, and other
political upheavals on the Continent served to spur emigration to America.
From 1840 to 1856, 3 million immigrants arrived, representing a
never-again-equaled ratio of newcomers to the existing population. All
through this period, while some were building fortunes, others were living
in filth and squalor, particularly in the Five Points area (the intersection
of Baxter, Worth, and Mulberry streets, near present-day Foley Square).
Cholera and yellow fever epidemics plagued the city.
For the upper classes, the last decade of the century was indeed the
"Gay Nineties," a period of fancy dress balls and social snobbery. However,
vast socioeconomic changes were underway that would forever impact the
politics of New York. In the first two decades of the new century, a third
of Eastern Europe's Jews emigrated (over 1 1/2 million people in all), most
to New York City and environs. They joined peasants and laborers from the
south of Italy, and continuing influxes from Ireland, Germany, and Russia.
In Ellis Island's peak year as an immigrant-receiving station, 1,285,349
people passed through it, sometimes at the astonishing rate of 5,000 a day.
By sheer weight of numbers, the new European immigrants tipped the political
scales of New York to the left. Many of them, indeed, were socialists and
communists fleeing from the oppressive regimes of Europe and, in America,
they began to agitate for social and workplace reforms.
In the 1920s, speakeasies and hard partying were the order of the day
until it all came crashing down in 1929. Fiorello La Guardia took the city's
mayoral reins and repeatedly championed the city in Washington, receiving
aid in the form of New Deal public works programs that employed thousands of
people. The Triborough Bridge, the Henry Hudson Bridge, the Battery Park
Tunnel, and numerous other projects were completed during his terms.
In the two decades following World War II, over 1 million families
left New York. Corporate headquarters, which used to be in Manhattan as a
matter of course, now decamped to exurban ring cities, lured by lower taxes.
As in many American cities, everyone prosperous enough to leave New York
seemed to be doing so, until Manhattan was left with a brutally segregated,
two-tiered society: the rich, who could afford the high cost of living and
the higher taxes, and the poor, who drained the coffers of social welfare
funds. Only a government bailout in 1978 protected the city from bankruptcy,
and slowly people began to move back to the city during the boom decade of
the 1980s.
Today, the city's population---unlike the dwindling population of
other major urban centers across America---remains stable and the mood in
town is generally confident and optimistic. Like the rest of the country,
New York has benefited from the technology and stock market upswing of the
1990s, and gentrification has occurred in much of Manhattan and is now
spreading its golden tentacles into other boroughs.
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