New York City (USA)

 

 

Beyond the city, the metropolitan area of residential and industrial suburbs, and of satellite towns, extends eastwards on Long Island, northward into Westchester County, and westward across the Hudson into northern New Jersey, embracing millions of people within a 40-mile (65 km) radius of the Statue of Liberty. This mammoth urban region, with its intricate network of highways, railways, tunnels and bridges is focused on Manhattan — the business heart of the nation — and on the Port of New York, with its magnificent natural harbour.

 

 

Along its 750 miles (1,200 km) of waterfront, the Port of New York (which also embraces part of the New Jersey shore) handles more than 40 per cent (in value) of U.S. foreign trade; shipping routes link it with all the great ports of the world; and the Erie Canal (now known as the New York State Barge Canal) gives direct access to the St Lawrence and the Great Lakes.

 

 

Pre-eminent as a world hub of trade and banking, New York City also leads the nation as an industrial centre, producing about 10 per cent of all manufactured products, chiefly consumer goods. The clothing industry, for which the city is famous, is crowded into the most congested portion of Manhattan, as is the making of furs, hats, leather goods, jewellery and many clothing accessories. Most of the nation's publishers have their headquarters in Manhattan, and the advertising industry is closely identified with Madison Avenue. In recent years, `midtown' Manhattan has experienced a new wave of skyscraper construction, to house the head offices of an evergrowing list of leading corporations which have made this the management centre of the United States. The 'downtown' district, with its impressive skyline overlooking Battery Park, still houses the stock and commodity exchanges, banks, insurance companies and shipping firms.

 

 

New York has great museums and art galleries; varied educational centres; Central Park, beaches, zoos, and botanical gardens; opera and musical institutions; lavish places of entertainment on Times Square and along Broadway — including the best in theatre and musical comedy; fine shops along Fifth Avenue, and bustling department stores. It has striking contrasts in architecture and in wealth; colourful nationality neighbourhoods, which are beginning to lose their identity under the impact of slum clearance and the mass exodus to the suburbs; public housing projects, and forward-looking arterial highway construction programmes.

 

 

The site of New York may have been visited by Verrazano in 1524; it was certainly walked upon by Henry Hudson in 1609. Settlement dates from 1623, when Peter Minuit of the Dutch West India Company, having purchased Manhattan from the Indians for an alleged $24 in trinkets, chose the island's southern tip as his headquarters, naming it Nieuw Amsterdam. The English seized the growing Dutch colony in 1664, expanding it and renaming it after the Duke of York.

 

 

New York's strategic location for trade with the interior soon gave it a decided advantage over other coastal settlements. By 1789 (when for a few months it was the first capital of the United States, George Washington having been inaugurated at Federal Hall), it had become the largest city in the United States, with a population of more than 30,000. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 soon made New York the nation's leading port, a position it has maintained despite the competition of Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore.

 

 

Greater New York, with a new charter consolidating the five boroughs into one city, came into being in 1898. The Flatiron Building, erected in 1902, was the first of New York's skyscrapers, a form of building necessitated by the scarcity, and hence the fabulous cost, of land in Manhattan. New York's reputation as a cosmopolitan city is due in part to its primacy in international trade and finance, to its experience in absorbing successive waves of immigrants, and to its role as host to the United Nations.