New York (city)

C

Staten Island

Staten Island is the third largest and least populous of the five boroughs. It is located at the juncture of Upper New York Bay and Lower New York Bay. The island is physically closer to New Jersey, to which it is connected by three bridges, than to the rest of New York City, to which it is connected only by the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and the world-famous Staten Island Ferry. Staten Island encompasses 151.5 sq km (58.5 sq mi). The southernmost of the five boroughs, Staten Island had 443,728 inhabitants in 2000, or about 5 percent of the population of the entire city.

Overwhelmingly white, Staten Island has dozens of distinct neighborhoods or towns, and it has the highest proportion of single-family housing and owner-occupied housing in the city. Staten Island has many homes dating from the 17th and 18th centuries. Of special interest are the Conference House (1680), where futile peace negotiations were held between the British and American representatives in 1776 during the American Revolution (1775-1783), and the Voorlezer’s House (1695), the nation’s oldest surviving elementary school building.

Other attractions include the Jacques Marchais Center of Tibetan Art and the Staten Island Zoo. A memorial to Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi, who lived on Staten Island in the 1850s, is located in the borough.

D

The Bronx

The Bronx is the fourth largest and the northernmost of the five boroughs, and the only one on the American mainland. Even so, it is surrounded by water on three sides: Long Island Sound on the east, the Harlem and East rivers on the south, and Hudson River on the west. Encompassing 109 sq km (42 sq mi), it had 1,332,650 inhabitants in 2000.

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Largely residential, the Bronx includes dozens of vibrant neighborhoods. Fieldston is particularly elegant, with great stone houses set among spacious lawns and privately-maintained streets, while Belmont has become the city’s most authentically Italian section. The areas along Pelham Parkway and the northern reaches of the Grand Concourse are particularly prized, because the apartment buildings are well kept and the public parks are easily accessible. City Island retains the charm of a small fishing village.

Parts of the Bronx, however, fell victim to decay and abandonment, especially between 1970 and 1980, when the population of the borough fell by 20 percent. The low point occurred in 1976, when future U.S. president Jimmy Carter compared the South Bronx to the bombed-out German city of Dresden after World War II (1939-1945). Since 1980 the process has again reversed and self-help groups have begun to rehabilitate most of the most devastated blocks.

The borough’s many attractions include the world-famous Bronx Zoo, Yankee Stadium, and the New York Botanical Garden. The Bronx also includes two of the largest middle-income housing projects in the United States. Parkchester, built between 1938 and 1942 for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, houses 40,000 people in apartment buildings arranged along well-planned circular drives. Co-op City is even larger, with 35 apartment towers, 236 townhouses, and more than 50,000 residents. Built between 1968 and 1970 on marshland near the Hutchinson River Parkway, it is the largest single housing complex in the nation.

E

Manhattan

Manhattan, or New York County, is the smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough consists principally of the island of Manhattan, but also includes Governors Island, Randalls Island, Wards Island, Roosevelt Island, U Thant Island, and Marble Hill, a small enclave on the edge of the Bronx mainland. Its land area is 59.5 sq km (23 sq mi). Manhattan’s population peaked in 1910 with 2.3 million people, after which it began a slow decline to 1.4 million in 1980. Since then, the population has again begun to increase, reaching 1,537,195 in 2000.

Manhattan is the glittering heart of the metropolis. It is the site of virtually all of the hundreds of skyscrapers that are the symbol of the city. Among the more famous of these are the Empire State Building (1931), the Chrysler Building (1930), and Citicorp Center (1977). (The 110-story twin towers of the World Trade Center were also among New York's famous skyscrapers until they were destroyed in a terrorist attack in 2001.) Manhattan is also the oldest, densest, and most built-up part of the entire urbanized region.

Other noteworthy buildings include City Hall (1802-1811), a Federal-style building with French Renaissance detail; the Seagram Building (1958), an office tower clad in bronze and bronze-colored glass; and Grant’s Tomb (1897), the tomb of President Ulysses S. Grant and his wife. Notable religious structures include Saint Patrick’s Cathedral (1879), the seat of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of New York and the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine (begun 1892), the largest Gothic-style cathedral in the world.

Manhattan is the center of New York’s cultural life. Numerous stage and motion picture theaters are located around Broadway in Midtown, which includes Times Square. The borough is the home of prominent music and dance organizations, such as the New York City Opera Company, the Metropolitan Opera Association, the Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York, American Ballet Theatre, and the New York City Ballet.

III

Population and Area

New York City has long been unusual because of its sheer size. Even before 1775, when its population was never more than 25,000, it ranked among the five leading cities in the colonies. It surpassed Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by 1810 to become the largest city in the United States, and in 1830 it passed Mexico City, Mexico, to become the largest in the western hemisphere. By 1930 it was the largest city in the world. In the 1980s the metro region was surpassed in total size by Tokyo, Japan; Mexico City; and São Paolo, Brazil. Yet with 21.2 million people, the New York City region remains an urban agglomeration of almost unimaginable size. For example, in 2006, when the population of the city itself was 8.2 million, each of its five boroughs was large enough to have been an important city in its own right, with populations exceeding those of many major U.S. cities.

The five boroughs of New York City together cover 786 sq km (303 sq mi). The urbanized area, however, includes 28 adjacent counties in New York state, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. Together, they make up the New York metropolitan region, which in 2000 housed about 8 percent of the national population on about 0.2 percent of the land area of the contiguous 48 states. Moreover, New York stands at the center of the urbanized northeastern seaboard, which contained about 60 million people in the late 1990s.

New York has been among the most ethnically diverse cities in the world since the 1640s, when fewer than 1,000 total residents spoke more than 15 languages. Between 1880 and 1919, more than 23 million Europeans immigrated to the United States. At least 17 million of them disembarked in New York. No one knows how many remained there, but as early as 1880, more than half the city’s working population was foreign-born, providing New York with the largest immigrant labor force on earth.

Half a century later, the city still contained 2 million foreign-born residents (including 517,000 Russians and 430,000 Italians) and an even larger number of persons of foreign parentage. And at the end of the 20th century, the pattern remained the same. In 1996 the U.S. Census Bureau reported that more than 11 out of every 20 New Yorkers were immigrants or the children of immigrants. Nearly half of all Bronx residents and one-third of Manhattan’s were Hispanic and nearly one-fifth of the population of Queens was Asian-American. Researchers estimated that immigrants would make up about 33 percent of the city’s population in 2000, approaching the 20th-century peak of about 40 percent, reached in 1910.

Meanwhile, the black proportion of the New York population, which reached 20 percent in the colonial period and declined to less than 2 percent in the 1870s, began a slow rise thereafter. According to the 2000 census, whites make up 44.7 percent of the city’s population; blacks, 26.6 percent; Asians, 9.8 percent; Native Americans, 0.5 percent; Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders, 0.1 percent; and people of mixed heritage or not reporting race, 18.3 percent. Hispanics, who may be of any race, are 27 percent of the population. By the late 1990s, more than 120 languages were spoken in the city’s schools, and there were dozens of ethnic churches, political organizations, cultural festivals, and parades, as well as scores of foreign-language newspapers, magazines, and television and radio stations. Although rivalries among the various groups could be intense, the very diversity of the city permitted immigrants to mingle more easily than in most other parts of the nation.

IV

Culture and Education

Because of its huge size, its concentrated wealth, and its mixture of people from around the world, New York City offers its residents and visitors a staggering array of cultural riches and educational opportunities. The city is the world’s leading center for performing arts and its museums contain a wide range of artistic and historical subjects. A mixture of cultures from around the world is reflected in the street festivals and ethnic celebrations that take place year-round. In addition, more than 100 institutions of higher education operate in New York City, including some of the nation’s more prestigious centers of learning.

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