New York (city)

D

Growth of the City

New York City was the capital of the United States from 1785 to 1790 and capital of the State of New York until 1797. It was host to the First Congress of the United States in 1789. In April of that year, on the steps of Federal Hall, George Washington was sworn in as president of the United States.

During its early years, New York was not the most important city in British America. It was outdistanced in population between 1630 and 1750 by Boston and between 1690 and 1810 by Philadelphia. Following the American Revolution, however, New York swept past its rivals in size and economic importance. By 1789 it was the leading city in the coastal trade. It exceeded Philadelphia in total tonnage in 1794, in the value of imports in 1796, and in exports in 1797. By 1830 New York City surpassed Mexico City to become the largest metropolis in the Americas.

The city grew for several reasons. The open, cosmopolitan attitude of New Yorkers, dating back to the early days of Dutch settlement, placed less importance on family connections and class, while encouraging the kind of risk-taking and innovation that led to rapid commercial growth. The city’s economy received a major boost following the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain. The British chose New York as the site to auction off large quantities of goods that had accumulated on British docks during the war. The city also benefited from an excellent port centrally located between the heavily populated regions of New England and Chesapeake Bay. It possessed an easily navigable inland water route via the Hudson River. After 1825 the Erie Canal connected the Hudson with the Great Lakes, providing easy access to Midwestern markets and increasing the city’s importance as a center of commerce.

The city’s major advantages reinforced each other, and by the early part of the 19th century New York was the pre-eminent port of entry for immigrants to the United States. Europeans arrived in such numbers during the 1840s and 1850s that by 1860 nearly half of the city’s residents were foreign-born. The Irish were the most numerous, followed by the Germans.

---

---

These immigrants helped support a growing political organization known as the Tammany Society (better known as Tammany Hall, after the name of the building in which its members met). Originally founded in 1789 as a social and charitable club, Tammany Hall soon acquired a new, political character. It gained control of the city’s Democratic Party as the champion of the working class and later of the immigrant. The society had a number of vote-getting techniques. It illegally granted citizenship to immigrants, gave city jobs to its followers, and provided services to the newcomers and the poor. Tammany was also accused of election fraud, bribery, and extortion.

These methods of getting votes were used most intensively in the 1860s when “Boss” William M. Tweed was the Tammany leader. In 1871 it became known that Tweed and his associates had misappropriated massive amounts of public funds. Tammany’s influence was reduced, but only temporarily. Tammany revived during the 1880s, and it controlled the city into the early 20th century, although, on occasion, reform candidates, working with Republican voters, gained control of the city government.

By 1860 New York City and the adjacent community of Brooklyn had 1 million residents. The area was the unchallenged center of American enterprise. New York City ranked first in the nation in population, industrial production, bank deposits, and wholesale trade. But unlike London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Vienna, and other world cities that had grown to substantial size, New York was not the capital of a nation, a region, or even a single state.

Throughout the first three centuries of the city’s history, the cornerstone of its growth was commerce and the backbone of its economy remained at the bustling wharves along the water’s edge. For more than a century the port of New York ranked as the world’s busiest. Between 1830 and 1906 the harbor annually handled between 37 percent and 71 percent by value of the nation’s foreign trade.

E

The Transformation of the Metropolis

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, a number of major changes in technology and infrastructure transformed the city. Gas illumination was available by 1825 and electric lighting by the 1880s. The Croton Aqueduct, completed in 1842, provided the city with the best and largest municipal water supply on earth. The Brooklyn Bridge, a major feat of engineering that connected Manhattan with Brooklyn across the East River, was the longest suspension bridge in the world when it was completed in 1883.

Urban mass transit also improved with the introduction of horse-drawn streetcars by the 1850s, elevated trains by the 1870s, electric trolleys by the 1890s, and the first subway in 1904. These changes helped relieve the residential congestion of the lower and central city. The demand for space was eased when the modern apartment building was introduced in about 1870. Within a few decades, New Yorkers were building skyscrapers, high rise buildings constructed with new engineering techniques. In 1902 New York’s first skyscraper, the 21-story Flatiron Building, was erected around a steel framework that supported the structural load of the building. This new engineering technique allowed architects to design taller buildings that made more efficient use of limited urban space. Within a few decades this new type of building would dramatically change the skyline of the city.

An increase in cultural and recreational facilities also added greatly to New York's appeal. Central Park was opened in 1859. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was organized in 1870. The collections of several libraries combined to form the New York Public Library in 1895. By the late 1860s, 20 theaters offered a broad choice of entertainment nightly. Opera, available as early as 1825, was performed more frequently after the opening of the Academy of Music in 1854 and the Metropolitan Opera House in 1883.

As the city grew, many of the adjacent communities became more closely integrated into an expanding urban area. Public sentiment grew for a merger of the surrounding cities and towns into a single city. In 1898, following the passage of a referendum, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the Bronx were incorporated into the city. By 1900 the population of the recently expanded city was 3,437,202.

The years between the consolidation of the five boroughs in 1898 and the end of World War II represented a kind of golden age for New York. It contained the largest concentrations of architects, bankers lawyers, engineers, designers, and corporate officials on the continent. By the beginning of the 20th century, Wall Street had become a national institution and investment bankers like J. P. Morgan and August Belmont had become legendary figures. As national corporations took shape, wealthy entrepreneurs such as oil company executive John D. Rockefeller, steel manufacturer Andrew Carnegie, and retailer F. W. Woolworth, who had started their empires elsewhere, moved their business offices to New York City.

The poor, of course, came in much greater numbers, and overcrowding, a problem ever since the original Dutch settlers huddled together below Wall Street for protection against Native Americans, reached frightening proportions between 1870 and 1920. For the middle class, the preferred dwelling type was the single-family brownstone, a large row house with a front facade faced in the plentiful local stone that gave the structure its name. But the poor immigrants of the Lower East Side and elsewhere in the city were packed into tenements that offered little light and minimal sanitation.

Because the center of the city was so congested, the New York metropolitan region began to decentralize as early as the 1870s. By 1920 tens of thousands of families were moving out of the city every year. This outward movement proceeded more quickly in New York than in most other world cities because the city rapidly adopted every new development in transportation technology. A system of bridges and underground tunnels facilitated travel between the city and outlying areas. A wonder of modern engineering, the Brooklyn Bridge was later eclipsed, at least in terms of size, by the Triborough Bridge, which linked Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx in 1936; by the George Washington Bridge, which became the world’s largest suspension structure when it opened in 1931; and by the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which assumed that title in 1964. All pointed out an important difference between New York and other world cities-the waterways around Manhattan were broad and the structures that spanned them were huge, unlike the human-scale bridges of Paris, London, Rome, and Berlin.

F

New York City Since the 1930s

In the 1930s the collapse of the world economy, known as the Great Depression, led to the election of reform candidate Fiorello H. La Guardia in 1933. La Guardia, one of the most popular mayors in the city’s history, was elected as a fusion candidate (a candidate who receives the support of disaffected Democrats and members of other political parties) after disclosures of improper financial conduct on the part of his Tammany predecessor, James J. Walker. LaGuardia’s administration marked the end of Tammany control over New York City politics. Funds made available by new federal relief programs initiated by U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt displaced the patronage system that had kept Tammany Hall in power, as federal programs provided jobs and financial assistance to individuals who had once relied on political patronage.

Federal funds also allowed the city to improve municipal services and public facilities. The La Guardia administration administered projects that gave New York City more schools, parks, and playgrounds. These funds also helped build a modern sewage disposal system; clear slums and construct public housing; provide more efficient relief; significantly improve health care; as well as build piers, airports, bridges, parkways, and express highways.

Robert Moses, park commissioner and head of the city planning commission, oversaw major public works projects and emerged as one of the most powerful unelected public officials in the United States. Between 1924 and 1968, Moses conceived and executed public works costing $27 billion. He was responsible for building virtually every parkway, expressway, and public housing project in the region, as well as Lincoln Center, Shea Stadium, and two world’s fairs. Meanwhile, he built hundreds of new city playgrounds and ordered the planting of 2 million trees.

World War II brought prosperity to the metropolitan region. The Brooklyn Navy Yard operated around the clock, as its 70,000 workers produced dozens of warships and merchant vessels. The Bush Terminal Complex, also in Brooklyn, functioned as the major transshipment point for most of the troops and military hardware headed for the invasion of Europe. Satellite cities like Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Newark, New Jersey, were centers of munitions manufacture, and Long Island factories contributed thousands of warplanes to the Allied cause. Moreover, World War II helped make Wall Street the most important financial market in the world. The war so devastated the economies of most other countries that their financial institutions could not compete with those of New York.

In many respects, however, New York has reinvented itself since 1945, replacing blue-collar jobs with better-paying opportunities in law, insurance, and financial services. Meanwhile, the city has absorbed hundreds of thousands of new immigrants from the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and Russia. During the 1950s and 1960s, a construction boom dotted the city skyline with many new skyscrapers and produced in new civic institutions, such as Rockefeller Center and Lincoln Center.

Mayor John V. Lindsay was elected with Republican and Liberal Party support in 1965 and was reelected in 1969 as an independent and Liberal candidate. Lindsay consolidated administrative agencies and attempted to decentralize authority by creating neighborhood councils and encouraging local decision-making. Under Lindsay's leadership, the city weathered racial crises during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s and made some gains in the provision of public housing.

Beginning in the late 1960s, New York City was confronted with serious fiscal problems. Its tax base narrowed as many middle-class people moved out of the city. The city lost more than 600,000 jobs, particularly during the national economic slumps of the 1970s. Meanwhile, the cost of social services, especially welfare, rose sharply, partly as a result of widespread unemployment. In the face of these fiscal problems, New York City borrowed heavily. The city accumulated a deficit totaling $3.3 billion by 1975. To avoid bankruptcy, the city sought help from the federal government, which provided loan guarantees. Newly created financial entities, such as the Municipal Assistance Corporation, kept the city from defaulting on its loans.

During the next three years, the city reduced its government work force by 87,000 and cut city services across the board. The poor were hardest hit, but cutbacks in education, law enforcement, and transportation lowered the quality of life of all New Yorkers. However, by 1981 the city budget was back in balance and by the end of the 1990s the city was generating budget surpluses in the billions of dollars.

The transformation of the economy has been matched by substantial changes in government. In March 1989 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the powerful Board of Estimate, which controlled the city’s budget, was unconstitutional because it gave disproportionate weight to the less populous boroughs. Each borough had equal weight on the Board of Estimate, even though some had much smaller populations. Staten Island, for example, had only a fraction of the residents of Brooklyn and Queens. In November 1989 voters approved a revised charter, eliminating the Board of Estimate and reassigning its powers to the mayor, the city planning commission, and an expanded city council. In 1990 the new government system took effect.

Edward I. Koch became mayor in 1977. After 12 years in office, he was defeated in his quest for a fourth term by David N. Dinkins, a former Manhattan Borough president who became the city’s first black mayor. Dinkins was defeated in 1993 by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the first Republican to occupy the city’s top office since 1965. Giuliani was easily re-elected in 1997, in large part because his administration had reduced the crime rate, cleaned the streets, and restored a sense of order to the metropolis. Giuliani was prohibited from running for a third term because of the city's term limits. In 2001 another Republican, Michael Bloomberg, was elected mayor.

New York was remarkably free of terrorism over its centuries-long history until 1993. In February of that year, a car bomb exploded in an underground garage below the 110-story World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. Six people were killed, and more than 1,000 people were injured in the blast, which caused about $600 million worth of damage to the building. In 1994 ten individuals opposed to U.S. support for Israel were convicted of conspiracy in connection with the bombing and were sentenced to long prison terms.

On September 11, 2001, a clear and cloudless day, a coordinated terrorist attack struck at the heart of New York City (see September 11 Attacks). At 8:46 am a hijacked Boeing 767 carrying thousands of gallons of explosive jet fuel slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. A second Boeing 767, traveling at an even greater speed, struck the south tower 16 minutes later. As the towers burned, tens of thousands of men and women ran for their lives, flooding the surrounding streets. On a typical day, more than 50,000 people worked in the World Trade Center complex itself, while another 50,000 people could be found in the adjacent skyscrapers. At 9:59 am, the south tower suddenly collapsed in a huge roar, and at 10:28 am the north tower did the same. The largest office complex on earth was reduced to smoldering steel, broken concrete, and a whitish dust that coated lower Manhattan.

The human toll, about 2,800 victims in New York, made the September 11 attack easily the worst terrorist incident in all of U.S. history. But tales of heroism and sacrifice eased the pain for a sorrowing nation. In particular, public attention focused on the bravery of New York’s uniformed emergency personnel—especially New York firefighters, more than 300 of whom died in the line of duty at the World Trade Center. The city’s hardship and courage inspired Americans across the country and led to unprecedented outpourings of charitable donations and assistance.

	More from Encarta
	•  Presidential Myths Quiz •  Coffee break: Recharge your brain