Exploration and colonization

First Time

Amerindians

Before the arrival of the Europeans, the territory of the present city of New York was populated by Lenapes.

Discovery of the site by Verrazzano on behalf of the King of France François ^I

On April 17, 1524, the navigator Giovanni da Verrazzano, who was tasked by the King of France François I, discovered the bay of New York, which he named the bay of Sainte-Marguerite in reference to the sister of François I, and named the land, which was located in the bay and on the edge of the river "New Angoulême". Nowadays, the Verrazzano-Narrows bridge recalls this discovery. The explorer intended to recommend the site to the king but, in August 1524, François ^I canceled the planned interview with Verrazzano to engage in a campaign in Italy which ended in February 1525 with the disastrous battle of Pavia.

Dutch Arrival

New Amsterdam in 1664 by Johannes Vingboons.

In 1609, the Dutch East India Company hired the English explorer Henry Hudson to try to discover a new maritime route to the East Indies. He enters New York Bay and goes up the river that bears his name today, naming it at the time Mauritius in honor of Maurice de Nassau. In 1624, the region officially became a Dutch possession under the auspices of the East India Company. Thirty Protestant families, including French Huguenot and Walloons Protestants, settled south of Manhattan forming the colony of "New Amsterdam".

In 1626, the director of the Pierre Minuit colony acquired the island from the Lenapes. In 1646, the village of Breuckelen was founded according to the town of Breukelen, as the first municipality in New Netherland, now Brooklyn. The following year, Pieter Stuyvesant was appointed general manager of the colony to replace Willem Kieft, whose administration had drawn the ire of the settlers since relations with the Amerindians had degenerated into violent clashes during the 1640s.

English New York (1664-1783)

The great fire of 1776.

In 1664, the English conquered New Amsterdam, renamed "New York" in honor of Jacques, Duke of York and brother of King Charles II. Anglicanism became the official religion of the colony in 1698. The city, with its names of Anglicized neighborhoods, is rapidly developing: in 1700, it had nearly 5,000 inhabitants. The first cultural institutions were founded as King's College in 1754. The trade diversified and developed, notably through the development of the Great Dock on the East River in 1676.

In 1765 the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act. This law imposing a stamp duty on British newspapers and official documents led to the Stamp Act Congress meeting in New York in October. Delegates of the Thirteen British Colonies of America protested against the tax, which was repealed the following year. New York saw the birth of the movement of the Sons of Liberty who challenged the English colonial presence. Incidents multiplied and New York became a strategic place in the American War of Independence (1775-1783). American General George Washington had the city strengthened and personally took control of the Continental Army in 1776. But American insurgents were beaten at the Battle of Long Island, and a quarter of the city was burned to the ground. The city remained in British hands until 1783, when the war of independence ended.

In 1785, the Continental Congress moved to New York, which was then the United States' provisional capital. But, under pressure from Thomas Jefferson, Congress moved to Philadelphia five years later. In 1789, the first president of the United States, George Washington, took an oath on the Bible at the balcony of the Federal Hall National Memorial in southern Manhattan.

Growth of the city (1783-1900)

The port of New York in 1848.

By the 1790s, New York City had a large population growth and became the most populous city in the United States in 1820. In 1811, the Commissioners' Plan imposed the Hippochian plan for the development of the city.

Following cholera outbreaks, the municipality decided to focus on water supply and sewers: a sewer service was established in 1849 and public baths were opened in the 1850s. An aqueduct was built in 1842 to bring water from the Croton River. In the middle of the century, the Central Park was built in the heart of Manhattan. Several neoclassical-style public buildings emerged from the ground. In 1898, New York City is divided into five boroughs (Boroughs): Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens and Staten Island.

With the development of public transport and industry, the New York agglomeration rapidly expanded in the second half of the ^nineteenth century. The poorest New Yorkers crowded into narrow, unsanitary apartments called tenements: in 1890, a million people lived in 37,316 of these dwellings. The middle class settled in the suburbs. In July 1834, debates over the issue of slavery escalated into riots. For two days, abolitionist activists' houses were attacked and looted, as well as a burned-down black church. An unknown number of black men are also beaten to death.

Clashes between rioters and the military during the Draft Riots (1863).

By the mid-^nineteenth century, more than half of New Yorkers were foreign-born; between 1820 and 1890, more than ten million immigrants, mostly irish, german, and italian, settled in the metropolis, fleeing the economic crisis and persecution in Europe. "Ethnic" neighborhoods were established in Manhattan, and each community developed their self-help networks, associations, and newspapers. The Germans settled in the neighborhood called "Little Germany", in the southeast of Manhattan; in the middle of the ^nineteenth century, New York is, after Berlin and Vienna, the world's third largest German-speaking city with 600,000 German immigrants. Tensions between these communities sometimes escalate into riots: those of 1871 between catholics and orangists resulted in 65 deaths. But the most serious riots in New York's history were related to the Civil War: the Draft Riots of 1863 killed a hundred people.

New York's economic development was facilitated by the modernization and expansion of transportation networks: the Champlain Canal (1823) and the Erie Canal (1825) connected New York with its hinterland and the Great Lakes. Railway links increased from the 1830s and Grand Central became New York's main railway station in the 1870s. On the sea, the transatlantic lines connected New York to Europe by cruise ships. As a federalist presidential candidate in 1812, Governor DeWitt Clinton secured New York government bonds to finance the Erie Canal, a boost to Wall Street.

Statue of Liberty.

The port becomes the first in the country; facilities were expanded in the 1850s and 1860s, notably in Brooklyn and New Jersey. The first masonry jetties (the Piers) appeared in the 1870s. In 1900, the port of New York was the first in the world.

With the Industrial Revolution, there were more and more factories, factories, and workshops. There was a rapid shortage of space on the island, and many industries settled in the outlying areas. The main activities of the agglomeration were then linked to the agri-food sector, the textile sector (spinning mills, garment factories), the shipbuilding industry and the printing industry. By 1900, New York was the largest industrial city in the United States. In 1874, a protest of thousands of unemployed, officially authorized, was brutally dispersed by the police.

It was also in the ^nineteenth century that New York positioned itself as the country's first business center: the financial vocation of the metropolis developed with the creation of the Bank of New York in 1784 and the opening of the stock exchange in 1792. Later, specialized scholarships were established (grain exchange in 1850, cotton in 1868). The Dow Jones stock exchange index was created in 1896. Big brands like Macy's and Bloomingdale's were born in the second half of the ^19th century. Broadway became the city's shopping street.

In July 1863, the city suffered severe riots as a result of the introduction of conscription. About 3,000 people are killed.

New York, the world metropolis (1900-1945)

South of Manhattan in 1931.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the city became an international center. Urban growth required ever more investment in transport. The Interborough Rapid Transit, the first subway company, was established in 1904. In 1913, the main station, Grand Central Terminal, was rebuilt. The increased traffic led the city to think of a new urban plan and connect Manhattan with new infrastructure: bridges, tunnels (Holland Tunnel) and fast tracks (parkways).

In 1910, frustrated by the victory of black boxer Jack Johnson at the Heavy World Championship, racist groups attacked random black men, killing dozens.

With the proliferation of corporate headquarters and the lack of space, skyscrapers multiplied in two neighborhoods: South of Manhattan and Midtown. By 1929, New York already had 188 buildings with more than 20 floors. The Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building became symbols of modernity in New York in the interwar period.

The housing problem remained in New York: 40,000 settlements ("housing buildings") were destroyed in the 1920s, and social housing was built. The Great Depression of the 1930's brought thousands of New Yorkers to the streets. The Wagner-Steagall Act of 1937 allowed the construction of large units.

Crowds rush to the stock market on the day of the 1929 crash, marking the start of the Great Depression.

New York, particularly Ellis Island, where 16 million people passed through, remained for several decades the main gateway for immigrants to the United States. In the first half of the ^twentieth century, the latter came from Eastern and Mediterranean Europe. African-Americans also flocked from the south of the country and concentrated in neighborhoods like Harlem. After World War II, immigration changed again from Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

New York became a cultural center of global importance. This role grew in the late 1930's with the influx of European refugees, which included many intellectuals, musicians, and artists. The districts of Greenwich Village and Harlem became the main places of artistic and literary creation. With the Armory Show (1913) and the opening of the Museum of Modern Art (1929), the Whitney Museum of American Art (1931) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim (1937), New York became one of the world capitals of modern art. Despite the competition from Los Angeles, New York remained a major film center until 1945: she had financial control of the 7^th art industry, produced films in her studios and had a large number of screening rooms. New media developed in the city: tabloids, radio channels (CBS and NBC).

In 1919, New York was rocked by massive strikes. On September 16, 1920, a bomb blast blew through the offices of the J.P. headquarters. Morgan on Wall Street, killing 38 and wounding 200. The 1920s were also marked by prohibition, with the opening of the speakeasies. The "big apple" did not escape the Great Depression of the 1930's. Indeed, the Wall Street crash of 1929, the most violent in the history of the world's stock market, triggered a global crisis. Unemployment and misery grew rapidly, and slums grew.

In the 1940's, much of New York's political and judicial institutions fell under Mafia Chief Frank Costello. His apartment became the meeting place for the city's most prominent magistrates and politicians, including William O'Dwyer, who became mayor of New York in 1945. Frank Costello distributes bribes based on hierarchies: $2 for a basic police officer conducting a round at $6,500 for a chief inspector. In 1949, the president of the Manhattan District Council recognized that if Costello called him, he would immediately go to the meeting.

Difficulties and Outreach (1945-2010)

The Unisphere, one of the symbols of the New York International Fair 1964-1965.

After World War II, however, New York experienced a relative decline, lost its inhabitants, and its industrial fabric began to age. The crisis of the 1960s and 1970s led to brownfields in the Bronx and Queens. The Navy Yard shipyard closed in 1966. Between 1953 and 1992, New York lost some 700,000 industrial jobs. New York Harbor Square is down. By contrast, the city strengthened its global position with the installation of the permanent UN institutions. The 1964-1965 World Fair in New York attracted millions of visitors.

New York asserted itself as the capital of abstract expressionism, competing with London in the art market. Counterculture flourishes in New York in the arts and literature. Off-off Broadway offered an alternative to commercial theater. Pop art denounced the consumer society. Frank Stella experimented with minimalism and Christo offered New Yorkers ephemeral works. The wall frescoes multiplied on the walls of the city. The street culture (graffiti, hip-hop) took off in the 1980s. However, New York is increasingly being challenged by other poles in the country, particularly those of Sun Belt (Los Angeles, San Francisco).

The 1960's were also marked by racial tensions, and New York quickly emerged as a key location for the African-American civil rights movement. Among the most significant events of the movement were the riots of July 1964 and the various social events (transport strikes in 1966, demonstrations against the Vietnam War). The municipality entrusted Robert Moses with the task of destroying slums, renovating certain blocks and building social housing. In 1968, Harlem experienced further riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King

Between 1940 and 1990, Manhattan lost 500,000 inhabitants, Brooklyn lost 400,000, and the Bronx lost 300,000. However, the residential suburbs continued to expand thanks to the highway system and the construction of new bridges such as the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in 1964.

The new face of the Financial District neighborhood in southern Manhattan, where the September 11, 2001, attacks took place, with the One World Trade Center, the country's tallest skyscraper, at 541 meters (including the antenna), at the center of the photo.

The 1970s were often considered the low point in New York's history, owing to high crime rates and various social unrest that began in the 1960s, particularly with the Stonewall riots in 1969. In a context of stagflation in the US and the parallel maintenance of high social spending in New York, municipal spending soared, leading the federal government to disengage. Finally, in 1975, President Gerald Ford authorized the US Treasury to inject $2.3 billion a year into the municipal budget to save the city from bankruptcy. Later, deindustrialization and demographic decline pushed the city to the brink of bankruptcy. Many urban infrastructure were abandoned because of a lack of subsidies. At the same time, the huge World Trade Center was inaugurated during a grandiose ceremony in 1973. Several neighborhoods plunged into crime and drugs, such as Harlem or South Bronx. The phenomenon was even accompanied by a sharp drop in the population.

The Wall Street rebound of the 1980's, despite the crash of 1987, enabled New York to regain its leadership role in the global economic and financial sphere, and the city's fiscal balance was restored in 1981. In the early 1990's, New York overtook London for financial and banking activities.

The 1990s were marked in New York by a first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center (1993). Within a few years, Mayor Rudy Giuliani managed to make the Big Apple a safe and attractive city for investors. He fought crime (zero tolerance policy, police reforms), family mafias in sensitive neighborhoods, and insider trading on Wall Street. The gentrification of certain neighborhoods (Harlem, East Village, and Williamsburg, for example) and the introduction of advanced industries in Silicon Alley mark the revival of the metropolis.

New York was struck by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that killed nearly three thousand people, injured hundreds, and caused considerable damage in the Financial District. The World Trade Center site is still being rebuilt in 2020. From 2007, the financial capital of the world was hit by the sub-prime crisis. Two events in the third quarter of 2008 symbolize the impact of the financial storm on the city: the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the Madoff scandal.

Symbols and nicknames

The New York flag bears the same colors (on bars of equal size) as the United Provinces flag as used in 1625, the year Manhattan was colonized. In its center is reproduced, in blue, the seal of the city. The latter includes several symbolic elements: the eagle represents the state of New York. The Amerindian evokes the first inhabitants of the region, while the sailor evokes the settlers: their joint evocation suggests the idea of a union between the two peoples. The beaver refers to the Dutch Western Indies Company. Barrel and flower refer to the early days of the New York industry. The windmill is a reminder of the Dutch history of New York. As for Eboracum, it was the name of the city of York in Roman times.

In a report for New Orleans, John J. Fitz Gerald heard the stables call the New York racing fields "the Big Apple" (in the sense of the big apple = the big bet = the biggest bet). He liked the phrase and gave its title to his column Around the Big Apple. Ten years later, many jazz musicians began to use the expression Big Apple to refer to New York, particularly the Harlem district (in Manhattan), which is considered the world's jazz capital. They said there were a lot of apples on the trees of success, but when you chose New York City, you chose THE Big Apple. In 1971, the term gained momentum with Charles Gillett (President of the NY Convention and Visitors Bureau), who launched an advertising campaign on the Big Apple theme. This one was relayed by the BBH London agency which launched this expression in England. Since then, this expression has become common. 35% of the English even claim that it is typically English and not of American origin.

Panoramic view of Lower Manhattan, from Liberty Island, the island on which the Statue of Liberty is located south of Manhattan.

"New York is a city standing, under the sign of new times. It is a catastrophe, but a beautiful and dignified catastrophe. "

- Le Corbusier, 1937.

Location and size

New York from space.

New York is located on the east coast of the United States, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The metropolis opens onto the Atlantic Ocean and is halfway between Washington and Boston. The city is located at about the same latitude as Madrid or Rome (40°43' N) and at a longitude close to Bogota (74°04' W). New York is located 334 miles south of Montreal, Canada's largest city, 1,146 km east of Chicago, 2,281 km northeast of Houston, Texas, 3,361 km northeast of Mexico City, and 3,806 km east of Mexico City East-northeast of Los Angeles and 3, 200 miles west-southwest of Paris.

The total area of New York City is 1,214 km², including 785 km² of land and 429 km² of water. The maximum altitude is 124.9 m above sea level, on Todt Hill at Staten Island.

The Greater New York or New York Metropolitan Area is the most populated urban area in the United States and the second largest in the world by the total number of inhabitants, based on the simplest and most common demographic criteria. This region is centered around New York City and comprises a total of 30 counties and 725 municipalities spread over four states (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania) and some 17,400 km².

According to the Office of Management and Budget, New York is also part of a CMSA. Finally, New York is part of the BosWash megalopolis stretching from Boston to Washington, D.C. It is also part of the Northeastern United States and Manufacturing Belt geographic ranges. The metropolis is located on a crossroads of communication routes, both maritime, river (Hudson) and land (railways, motorways, pipes, etc.). It is also connected to the rest of the world by its airports (New York International Airport - John F. Kennedy for example).

According to the 2019 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), New York could face an increased risk of flooding with an average sea-level rise of 1.3 millimeters per year. The city could be exposed to floods of 2.25 meters every 5 years from 2030 to 2045. Before the industrial age, such flooding occurred every 500 years on average.

Islands

One of the many islands of New York: Liberty Island.

With the exception of the Bronx, which is located on the mainland, in the south of a peninsula, the city extends over several islands: the most populated is Manhattan, where the economic and cultural heart of the city is located. Governors Island, Liberty Island and Ellis Island are small islands south of Manhattan whose historic sites are visited by tourists. Staten Island is the southernmost island of New York. The boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens occupy the western part of Long Island.

This island configuration requires the presence of numerous bridges and tunnels that connect the different parts of the built-up area. A ferry service also allows New Yorkers to get around easily. Several straits such as the Long Island Sound or The Narrows separate the islands. The deep waters of New York Bay and the very indented coasts provide many other small sheltered bays.

The New York site appears both as an asset (maritime opening, natural defense) but also as a risk (floods, sea rise, tidal wave) for the metropolis.

Boundary communes

Hydrography

New York City has a large hydrographic network. The Hudson River flows into New York Bay by forming an estuary. The bay consists of two parts: the Upper New York Bay (the "upper bay") south of Manhattan and the Lower New York Bay (the "lower bay") south of Staten Island and Long Island, separated by a strait, The Narrows, which forms the main access channel to the city's port.

Despite their name, the East River and the Harlem River are not streams but sea bays or straits.

The Erie Canal, a major artificial waterway that was built in the early 19th century, communicates the river, thus New York, with the Great Lakes region.

Geology and relief

The sandy beach of Coney Island, in the far south of Brooklyn.

Brooklyn and Queens, located on Long Island, are part of the Atlantic Coastal Plain, a geophysical ensemble stretching from New York Bay to Florida. This is a region of low altitudes). Long Island is a barrier island consisting of a base of Cretaceous sedimentary rocks. Sediment layers were deposited during the Wisconsin Glaciation between 85,000 and 9,000 years ago. At that time, sea levels were lower than today, and Laurentian ice sheets covered much of the northeastern United States. The New York area was on the edge of this huge ice cover. The glacier left several frontal moraines. Between 1700 and 13000 BC, when glaciers melted, the frontal moraine acted as a dike and the valleys dug by the glaciation (Hudson East and Harlem River) filled with water.

Climbing on metamorphic rock outcrops
in Central Park (Rat Rock)

The Bronx and Manhattan belong to a section of the New England geological province. The highest point on Manhattan Island (80 meters) is in the north of the island, in Fort Tryon Park. Metamorphic rocks, providing a solid support for its numerous skyscrapers. This rocky substrate corresponds to a very old mountain chain that is eroded and flourishes at Central Park and various locations in North Manhattan. The geology of Staten Island is more complex: the rocky base consists of sedimentary Cretaceous rocks in the southeast and Triassic rocks in the northwest. Serpentinite is also available. Morainic sedimentary layers were deposited during the last glaciation.

The territory of New York was considerably developed by the men who changed the topography and the layout of the coastline, particularly in the south of Manhattan, in the south of the island.

Climate

Cumulonimbus in the New York skies after torrential rain.

New York is not very far from the sea, but it is to the east, while the dominant moderating winds are from the west; as a result, the ocean has no influence on the climate of New York. That is why the climate in New York is very hot and humid in the summer and sometimes very cold in the winter, although temperatures of 24 °C have already been observed in the middle of the winter. New York is located in the temperate north on the eastern side of the American continent. Its climate depends on this geographical position, the meridian circulation of the air masses and the proximity of a cold sea current.

According to the Köppen classification with the weather station of Belvedere Castle / Central Park: the temperature of the coldest month is between 0 °C and 18°C (January with 0.5°C) and the temperature of the hottest month is above 10°C (July with 24.9 °C) so it is a temperate climate. The rainfall is stable, there is no dry season. So it's a warm temperate climate without a dry season. The summer is hot because the average temperature of the warmest month is above 22 °C (July with 24.9 °C).

With this station, the climate of New York is classified as Cfa in the Köppen classification, a subtropical humid climate.

But New York's climate can also be considered humid continental. Indeed, with the JFK station and according to the Köppen classification: the average temperature of the coldest month is less than 0 °C (January with -0.4°C) and that of the hottest month is more than 10 °C (July with 24.2°C) so it is a continental climate. The precipitation is stable, so it is a cold continental climate without a dry season. Summer is hot because the average temperature of the hottest month is above 22 °C (July with 24.2 °C).

With this station, the climate of New York is classified as Dfa in the Köppen classification, a continental humid climate with hot summer.

Winters are generally cold and humid, sometimes with snowy precipitation (from 55.6 cm to 67.8 cm depending on the weather stations) and several days of freezing. Ice can form on the Hudson River. However, the Appalachian Mountains protect the city from the freezing air flowing from Canada, so the minimum temperatures are less cold than in Midwest cities like Chicago. Summers are hot and wet.

Spring and autumn are short and changing. Before winter, New York can experience a few days of heat called "Indian Summer". The annual total precipitation is relatively high (about 1200 mm) and the rains are distributed approximately equally over the year and fall in the form of short hot showers in summer.

A street in the Bronx arrondissement, after a blizzard.

The main climatic risks are floods, storms and blizzards. The Great blizzard of 1888 that affected the northeastern United States was one of the most important in the history of the city. More recently, the February 2010 snowstorm paralyzed the city for several days. Manhattan has already been hit by low F0 to F1 tornadoes in 2010, but this is rare. In 1973, a Category 3 tornado passed some 25 miles from the city center. However, by its geographical location, New York is not immune from hurricanes rising up the east coast. Hurricane Sandy, in October 2012, was the worst natural disaster in the history of the metropolis, flooding southern Manhattan with more than 4 meters of water, wreaking havoc in several parts of the city, killing dozens. With a cost of $75 billion, it is also the second most expensive hurricane in American history. Sandy was not the only hurricane to hit New York, a year earlier there had been the passage of Irene in August 2011, Agnès in 1972, or the Long Island Express in 1938. Other extreme weather events in New York include the heat waves that return almost every summer when the tropical air masses come from the south. The one in 1911 killed 146 people. The heat waves are amplified by the urban heat island phenomenon. Heat waves can raise the temperature above 38 °C with a high humidity rate that can lead to heat indices of more than 45 °C.

New York City has already recorded 42 °C at New York City's LaGuardia Airport on July 3, 1966 and a temperature of -26.1 °C on February 9, 1934 in Central Park, the highest known temperature in New York. At the Central Park weather station, the heat record was 41.1 °C on July 9, 1936.

On July 22, 2011, a temperature of 42.2 °C was recorded at Newark's Liberty International Airport.

New York enjoys high sunshine: An average of 2,535 hours per year.

Weather surveys

Environment

Important biodiversity

Manhattan's main green area: Central Park.

New York City has an important biodiversity in parks, the Hudson River and the various wetlands of the bay. The megacity has more than 350 bird species, 170 fish species, 30 mammals, 32 reptiles and amphibians. 3,000 plant species have been listed in New York by teams in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. The urban environment is home to common species such as sparrows, starlings, pigeons, squirrels, but also wilder animals such as snow goose and various species of ducks spend the winter in the New York region. The uninhabited islands of the port of New York are the refuge of egrets, herons and ibis. Several pairs of peregrine falcon were observed: they regulate the populations of pigeons, starlings and sparrows. The most common trees are oak, Virginia tulip and elm.

Despite its reputation as an "urban jungle", New York is full of parks and natural spaces: 27% of the city's total area is occupied by public parks, playgrounds, nature reserves, beaches and golf courses, as well as stadiums, cemeteries, and amusement parks. New York City has over 70 miles of parks and 14 miles of public beaches. With its 341 hectares of greenery, Central Park is Manhattan's largest green space. It houses a total of 250,000 trees and bushes. The urban park is home to 270 bird species and 14 mammal species (rabbits, marmots, squirrels, raccoons, etc.). It is located on the Atlantic route of migratory birds that stop there. In the morning, in Turtle Pond, you can see silver herons and about 80,000 fish live in Harlem Meer. Outside Manhattan are the city's largest parks, such as Pelham Bay Park, which, with its 7.5 square miles (about 1,120 hectares), is the city's largest park, being about three times larger than Central Park.

Environmental Policy

In recent years, the city has initiated an environmental policy whose main actor is the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, a New York City department responsible for environmental protection in the municipality. It has committed to exceeding the GHG reduction targets set by the Kyoto Protocol. Environmental groups are also lobbying to improve the quality of the urban environment. Several lobby groups are based in New York: the Natural Resources Defense Council or the Environmental Defense Fund, for example.

A market in Union Square.

Like other major US cities, such as Portland and San Francisco, some middle-class people are sensitive to environmental issues. The latter attend the farmers' markets that sell local products.

Air pollution is responsible for the development of respiratory diseases among New Yorkers. Acid rains are a problem that can be found throughout the northeastern part of the country.

However, a New Yorker produces an average of 7.1 tons of greenhouse gases per year, far below the national average (24.5 tons per year per capita). New York accounts for 1% of the U.S.'s GHG emissions, compared to 2.7% of the U.S. population. Indeed, New Yorkers use public transportation far more than the rest of the US population. According to the 2000 census, New York is the only city in the United States where more than half of the population does not own cars. The municipality's efforts have focused on clean public transport equipment.

On average, a New Yorker consumes half as much electricity as a San Francisco resident. The municipality replaced thousands of traffic lights and lamps for public lighting, which is now much less energizing. Electric current used by some twenty public buildings, including the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, is produced by wind turbines. The municipality spends an increasing share of its budget on energy efficiency. This involves the development of plans for the renovation or construction of buildings that meet LEED standards. Private groups also participate in GHG reduction: the Hearst Tower and the 7 World Trade Center are examples of green buildings.

New York needs a lot of water every day: 1.4 billion gallons or 5.3 billion liters. New York's water system is based on 19 reservoirs in the inland mountains, including the Catskill Mountains. This water was transported from the 1840s by the Croton aqueduct and after 1890 by the new Croton aqueduct (en). In the ^20th century, the Catskill aqueduct was built, and above all, the Delaware aqueduct, which now provides the bulk of the city's drinking water supply. Despite New York's population growth, the city uses 28% less water in the mid-2000s than it did in 1979, thanks to repairing leaks on the distribution system. The waters of the Hudson and New York Bay are heavily polluted by urban pollution. Newtown Creek has been polluted for decades by oil spills. Mercury and PCBs in water have an impact on wildlife and human health.

Subdivisions of the city

The five boroughs that make up the city of New York (New York City):

• (1) Manhattan
• (2) Brooklyn
• (3) Queens
• (4) Bronx
• (5) Staten Island


• JFK and LaGuardia airports in New York

New York City consists of five boroughs (in English: Boroughs) known as Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx and Staten Island. These coincide with five counties in New York (county) that are New York, Kings, Queens, Bronx, and Richmond, respectively, but they do not work like other counties in the United States. They do not have a county government and are in place of counties, subject directly to municipal administration.

• Manhattan (or New York County), 1,546,856 inhabitants. The island of Manhattan is the richest borough of New York City, and the most densely populated, but the most famous, since most of the world's most famous buildings are in Manhattan. The borough also includes the island of Roosevelt Island, served by a cable car. Manhattan also presents itself as a major global financial center, with the Dow Jones Index (NYSE) and the Nasdaq. But Manhattan is also a major decision-making center: It is the headquarters of the United Nations, with many corporate headquarters, making it one of the most powerful places on the planet. At the university level, Manhattan is home to New York University, the prestigious Columbia University (owned by the Ivy League) or Fordham University. Manhattan is a bit considered the center of New York.
• Brooklyn (or County of Kings), 2,488,194 inhabitants. Brooklyn is a residential area, which explains why it is the city's most populous district. Brooklyn was long an independent city, before becoming part of New York City in 1898. Brooklyn also has one of the rare beaches in New York.
• Queens (or Queens County), 2,237,815 inhabitants. Queens is both a residential and industrial area; It is also the largest in New York City. Queens is very open to the outside, as the city's two main airports, JFK and LaGuardia are in its constituency. Queens is also home to one of the season's major tennis tournaments, the US Open at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The Unisphere, located in the same park, is considered a symbol of Queens, with an idea of openness to the world and universality. The New York Mets team plays its games at Citi Field, also located in Flushing.
• The Bronx (or County of Bronx), 1,354,068 inhabitants. The Bronx has long been considered the poor borough of New York City, but in recent years the city's politics has made the Bronx much more attractive. The area is also considered the cradle of hip-hop culture, which has now spread widely around the world, and as a neighborhood that welcomes Hispanic and black minorities, contributing to the image of the city's melting pot. The Bronx is also home to the new Fulton Fish Market, which is one of the main markets for East Coast seafood. The New York Yankees team plays its matches at Yankee Stadium, located on the Manhattan-Bronx border.
• Staten Island (or County Richmond), with a population of 491,730, is the least integrated district in New York City, if only because of its geographical remoteness. Staten Island is connected to Brooklyn by the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, one of the longest hanging bridges in the world. Staten Island is a residential neighborhood, far from Manhattan's frenzy, with countless rivers, parks, and green spaces.

Demographics

Evolution and distribution

New York City is the most populous city in the United States, with a population twice that of the second largest city in the country, Los Angeles (3,743,995). In 2010, there were 8,175,133 inhabitants, representing nearly 40 per cent of the population of New York State.

centered around New York City, the Greater New York or New York Metropolitan area is the most populated urban area in the United States and the third in the world behind Tokyo and Mexico City. The region covers four states (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania) and some 17,400 km². Its population is 18.8 million in 2010. The CMSA in New York brought together about 22.2 million people in 2009.

The average density is 10,194 inhabitants/km²: New York is the most densely populated metropolis in the United States, far ahead of San Francisco.

In the mid-^18th century, New York was less populated than Philadelphia, and hardly more than Boston. But the rise of trade, industry, and the arrival of millions of European migrants caused a sharp demographic increase in the next century. In 1830, New York became the largest city in the United States, with about 200,000 inhabitants. New York's population surpassed that of Paris in the late 1880s, but remains behind London.

After the Second World War, the urban population was shrinking due to exurbanization and social difficulties. The phenomenon, which affects most American cities, is particularly strong in New York, which loses 821,000 inhabitants between 1950 and 1980, a decline of about 10%. But in the last decades of the twentieth century, the population grew again. For example, between 1990 and 2000, the city gained 685,714 inhabitants thanks to immigration. Some studies estimate that New York could reach between 9.2 and 9.5 million by 2030.

The city's population shrank by 100,000 between July 2018 and July 2019. Every day, 277 people leave New York City, driven out by rising rents, gentrification, or the deteriorating state of public transportation.

Demographic characteristics

According to the 2000 census, the average life expectancy of New Yorkers is higher than that of Americans as a whole (80.2 years for women; 74.5 years for men).

The age structure shows a relatively young population (11.9% are 65 years of age or older) and a significant proportion of working-age people (75.8%). In 2005, the median age in New York was 35.8 years, slightly below the national average (36.4 years). Women are overrepresented compared to the U.S. average (52.6% of women and 47.4% of men).

Socio-economic disparities

In 2015, 80.3% of New Yorkers over the age of 25 had a bachelor's or higher degree, compared to 86.7% at the national level.

In July 2007, the unemployment rate in New York was 4.7 per cent, a similar figure at the national level (4.3 per cent).

In 2015, average per capita income in New York was $28,930, a decrease of $4,148 from the national average. 20.6% of the population lives below the poverty line, 5.1 percentage points above the US average; The categories most affected are young people.

The city is marked by a large disparity in income by neighborhood. In Manhattan, there are large differences between the Upper East Side, where average annual per capita income is $90,000, and Harlem, where nearly 37% of the population lives below the poverty line. The other boroughs (Boroughs), especially those of Queens and Staten Island, are populated by the middle classes.

Cosmopolitan population

Population composition
% (2014)

Group	New York	United States
White	43.6	73.8
Black	24.7	12.6
Asian	13.2	5.0
Others	14.7	4.9
Métis	3.2	2.9
Amerindians	0.4	0.8
Total	100	100
Hispanics and Latin Americans	28.8	16.7

According to the rankings of the real-estate group Knight Frank and Citi Private Bank, New York is the third most expensive city in the world (behind London and Monte-Carlo) in terms of real-estate prices (25,600 euros per square meter in the most chic neighborhoods). New York is one of the most cosmopolitan metropolises in the world: in 2005, 36% of New Yorkers were born abroad, nearly 170 different languages are spoken in the city, and 47.7% of New Yorkers speak a language other than English at home.

Little Italy, Manhattan, 1900.

Distribution of ethnic groups in 2010, with each point representing 25 people: Non-Hispanic whites, blacks, Asians and Latinos.

In some ways, New York City is more international than American. It welcomes almost as many immigrants as Los Angeles. You can hear about hundreds of different languages in New York. The trend is towards community reunification, and entire neighborhoods have been formed according to geographical or cultural origins: Italians in Little Italy, Chinese in Chinatown, Koreans in Koreatown, Puerto Ricans in East Harlem, Senegalese in Le Petit Senegal, Poles in Greenpoint, Russians and Ukrainians in Brighton Beach, Spaniards in Little Spain, Syrians and Lebanese in Little Syria, Vietnamese in Bowery, occupy each of the enclaves in the city.

Chinatown neighborhood.

Since the ^19th century, New York has been one of the main gateways of immigration to the United States: between 1820 and 1890, ten million Europeans arrived in New York, mostly Irish and German. Between 1880 and 1920, migrants came from southern Europe (Italy, Greece, Spain...) and Eastern Europe (Poland, Russia, Romania...) after crossing the Atlantic Ocean to Ellis Island. During this period, the Jews fled the pogroms: By 1915, there were 1.5 million in New York. After Johnson-Reed's (1924) immigration quota laws, the number of arrivals drops considerably.

At the beginning of the ^twentieth century, more than 20,000 African-Americans settled in Harlem. Between 1940 and 1960, Puerto Ricans arrived in New York en masse and their number increased from 60,000 to 600,000. After the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, immigration resumed at a significant rate, but the origin of migrants changed: they now come from Latin America (Mexico, Guyana, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela...), the Caribbean (Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica...), Asia (India, China, Pakistan, Philippines...) and the USSR (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus...). In the 1970s and 1990s, these migrants moved not only to Manhattan but also to the outlying districts (Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island) and suburbs. Between 1990 and 2000 the city welcomed 1,224,524 immigrants; however, the cities of Los Angeles and Miami are competing in New York for first place in immigration.

Languages

According to the American Community Survey, in 2017, 51.14% of the population over 5 years of age reported that they spoke only English at home, 24.26% reported that they spoke Spanish, 6.59% spoke Chinese, 2.31% Russian, 1.54% Bengali, 1.18% Bengali haitian Creole, 1.10% Yiddish, 1.04% French, 0.91% Nigerian-Congolese, 0.85% Korean, 0.84% Italian, 0.84% Arabic, 0.61% Urdu, 0.61% Tagalog, 0.58% Hebrew breu, 0.55% Polish and 4.99% another language.

Francophonie

New York is the seat of a permanent representation of the International Organization of la Francophonie.

The first trends in a survey conducted by the French Consulate General in New York in December 2011 among 16,000 French citizens living in the states of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Bermuda, to which 4,733 people responded are as follows. There are as many men as women and the age group most represented is 36-45 (31%), followed closely by 26-35 (27%). Of the 4,733 French respondents to the survey, 1,516 also have American nationality, one-third of them. In addition, it is noted that 52% of respondents are master graduates and 13% are doctoral graduates. In total, nearly 90% have at least a Bac + 2 degree, only 1% have no diploma. The proportion of working people is very high, with 80% reporting that they are working.

There are 50% of French people who have been living in the United States for less than 10 years, and one-fifth of respondents came less than three years ago. The main reason cited by the respondents was to follow their spouse after their career progression. 49% say they speak English at home compared to 48% for french and the level of proficiency in English is very good since 46% of respondents say they are bilingual^{[ref. necessary]}.

Cultural events and festivities

Mode

• New York Fashion Week
• Fashion Window Walking Tour

Health

• Bellevue Hospital
• Columbia University Medical Center
• Mount Sinai School of Medicine

Cults

Christianity (59%), and more specifically Catholicism (33%), was the most practiced religion in New York in 2014, followed by Judaism (with more than a million Jews, half of whom reside in Brooklyn). Islam is the third most popular, with nearly a million followers, followed by Hinduism and Buddhism and a variety of other religions.

Catholicism

Most Catholics belong to the Archdiocese of New York whose cathedral is Saint Patrick. In contrast, Brooklyn and Queens are under the jurisdiction of the Brooklyn diocese.

Protestantism

• More than half of New York Protestants are actually evangelical.
• It also houses the Episcopal Church, a "descendant" of the Anglican Church, which it separated from during the War of Independence, as well as the primal seats and the seat of the local diocese, although the Primat is the official one in the National Cathedral of Washington. The General Theological Seminar of the Episcopal Church is located in Chelsea.

Orthodoxy

Many Orthodox churches were built in New York by people from the Eastern Bloc who fled Soviet persecution. Often new seats have been created by their exiled patriarchs (either voluntary or forced):

• Orthodox Churches in America
• Belarusian Orthodox Church

New York also hosts the local and/or episcopal seats of churches that are attached to a great patriarchy:

• Russian Orthodox Church Outside Borders
• Greek Orthodox archbishops of America
• Roman Orthodox Roman Catholic Archdiocese of North America
• Bulgarian Orthodox Diocese of the United States, Canada and Australia

Judaism

The first Jewish presence in New York dates back to September 1654 when a group of Dutch settlers arrived in New Amsterdam, having had to leave Recife after the Portuguese took over the city. The first local synagogue Shearith Israel, then Sephardic, was established there in 1682. In 1720, the number of Ashkenazes surpassed that of the Sephardics, and the second synagogue, B'nai Jeshurun, was founded in 1825. Both are located in the Upper West Side. In 1902, the first Romanian-American synagogue opened.

Islam

The three main mosques in New York are those of the Islamic Cultural Center (en) , then Hazrati Abu Bakr Siddic (en) and Masjid Malcolm Shabazz (en).

In September 2015, the city's mayor's office opened a day off in schools for Muslim holidays.

The Empire State Building, and the Chrysler Building in the background.

Skyscraper

New York City is hard to dissociate itself from its numerous skyscrapers, which help to make Manhattan's urban panorama recognizable to all. Thus, although the first skyscraper in the history of architecture was built in Chicago in the 1880s, New York City has always been world-famous with its huge buildings, and sometimes universal in notoriety. The Empire State Building is one of the most famous buildings in the world. The name comes from the fact that Empire State is the nickname of New York State. The construction of the Empire State Building began in 1930 and was completed in 1931. The Art Deco style of this building gives it a sober and sturdy appearance, and its 381 meters have made it the tallest building in the world for several decades.

New York City's favorite skyscraper is the Chrysler Building, a contemporary building of the Empire State Building, which was completed in 1930 and registered on the protection register of the New York City Monument Conservation Commission in 1978. Built to the glory of Walter Chrysler under the direction of William Van Alen, the 320-meter Chrysler Building was the tallest building in the world in a few months, before being overtaken by the Empire State Building. The Chrysler Building, however, remains the second tallest building in New York City, until the construction of the One World Trade Center on the site of the World Trade Center.

The city also has many other buildings that would be hard to list, however, there is the Flatiron Building, considered one of the first skyscrapers, the Comcast Building, the highest skyscraper of the Rockefeller Center with 259 meters, the Trump World Tower, the highest tower in the world with 262 meters, the Met Life Building, at 246 meters, the Woolworth Building, located in the financial district, which culminates at 241 meters, or the Solow Building, very close to Central Park, at 210 meters.

For the city's tallest skyscrapers there is a total: 5,937 skyscrapers, including 550 completed structures at least 100 meters high - second in the world after Hong Kong - 50 buildings of at least 200 meters and six buildings equal to or greater than 300 meters. By comparison, there are twenty skyscrapers in Europe equal to or greater than 200 meters and only one exceeding 300 meters.

Panorama of Midtown from the north facade of the Empire State Building in Manhattan.

Residential architecture

Brownstones are typical houses in the Brooklyn borough.

The city experienced rapid population growth between 1870 and 1930, which included significant development of residential neighborhoods, populated by newly built brownstones, townhouses, and townhouses, which express a very different character than skyscrapers. By 1870, stone and brick had become prime building materials, as the construction of wood-frame houses was severely limited in the wake of the Great Fire of New York in 1835.

Unlike Paris, which for centuries was built from its own limestone base, New York has always built its building block from a quarry network, sometimes very far away, which is evident in the variety of textures and shades of stone seen in the buildings of the city. During the construction of the first railway lines, stones were floated on the Hudson River or along the Atlantic coast from wells in New England.

New York City Hall, the seat of the city's government.

Although dependent on New York State, New York City enjoys broad legislative and executive autonomy and more centralized administration than most other American cities. This status is defined by a charter, amended and promulgated by the New York State Legislative Assembly, and sometimes by referendum.

The municipality is responsible for education, libraries, safety, hygiene, water supply, social welfare services, prisons and recreational facilities. The authority of the New York City Police (NYPD) to arrest individuals is valid throughout New York State.

New Yorkers are mostly democrats and liberals: In the 2004 presidential election, Democratic candidate John Kerry won more than 74% of the city's votes, while losing the national election. 66% of registered voters are Democrats. In 2012, Barack Obama won more than 81% of the vote.

Five of the counties in New York State coincide with the five boroughs (boroughs) of New York City: New York County (Manhattan), Kings County (Brooklyn), Bronx County (Bronx), Richmond County (Staten Island), and Queens County (Queens). But these do not function as counties per se, since the consolidation of New York City within its current limits in 1898 (merging the five boroughs to give the municipality), county governments have been abolished and have no power or status. Since then, they have been directly dependent on the municipal authority and serve as the basis for statistical and demographic data from the United States Census Bureau.

The New York administration is divided into three branches: executive, legislative and judicial.

Executive

The Manhattan Municipal Building is home to many municipal agencies.

The mayor embodies the executive power of the New York City government. The mayor's office administers all the city's departments (Departments): public property, sanitation, road maintenance, police and fire service, park maintenance, environmental protection, as well as most public bodies, and enforces all New York State ordinances and laws in the city. The mayor's office is located at New York City Hall (New York City Hall) and exercises jurisdiction over all five boroughs of New York City.

He is elected by direct suffrage by all the inhabitants of the city for a four-year term. The voting process takes place, like the two-stage presidential election: in the first, the two main parties, the democratic party and the republican, nominate their candidates, who are then subjected to universal suffrage by the people of the city. Since 2014, the mayor has been the Democrat Bill de Blasio.

The mayor heads five administrative sections of the city and other institutions. These five sections (actually run by deputies of the mayor: Deputy Mayors) are:

• Operations (Operations Directorate);
• Economic Development and Rebuilding;
• Policy (General Policy);
• Administration;
• Legal Affairs (legal cases).

It also has exceptional powers in the event of an emergency (climate threat, natural disaster, riots, civil unrest, invasion).

Each of the five boroughs (Boroughs) districts of New York City is headed by a Borough President. It is a representative post with very limited power, which consists mainly of advising the mayor on problems relating to a particular district, and on the budget.

Legislative

New York City's local laws and regulations are decided by a City Council, composed of 51 members, each representing an area of the city of about 157,000 people. They are elected every four years by the inhabitants of the five boroughs, and the leader of the majority is called speaker. In 2007, the Speaker is the Democrat Christine Quinn. This municipal council is divided into specialized committees by areas of intervention. When a proposal is passed by a simple majority (50%), it is passed to the mayor who can enact it as a local law. If the latter veto, the city council has 30 days to override, by a second two-thirds majority vote. In 2007, the council was overwhelmingly dominated by Democrats, who held 47 seats, compared to three Republicans (one in Queens and two in Staten Island) and one to the left-wing Working Families Party.

Judicial

Unlike the rest of the state, not all five counties in New York City have courts. In fact, there is a single civil court (with annexes in the various districts). A criminal court, for each district, deals with minor offenses and domestic violence, in conjunction with the family court.

Criminal cases are referred to the New York Supreme Court (New York Supreme Court), the New York State Court of First Instance and Appeals, which also deals with the most important civil cases. Thus, unlike other supreme courts of states or the Federal Supreme Court, this Supreme Court is not the highest body in the New York judicial system, contrary to what its name suggests. Appeals are dealt with by a specialized division of the Supreme Court, and the final court of appeal is the New York Court of Appeals.

Times Square is always bustling.

In December 1975, New York City went bankrupt. Two days before she was defaulted, then President Gerald Ford authorized the US Treasury to lend $2.3 billion a year to the city until 1978.

Today, the economic weight of New York is considerable: in 2014, the city created an estimated $1,403 billion in wealth, meaning that its gross product is higher than that of a country like Belgium. Only 17 countries have a higher GDP than New York City alone.

Historical Frame

New York's economic expansion was made possible by its exceptional geographic location: established on a natural port at the Hudson's outlet, port activities have led to the industrial development of the metropolis. The textile industry developed throughout the ^nineteenth century with the arrival of migrants from Central and Eastern Europe. Around 1900, the New York metropolitan area was the most populated in the United States, but also the largest industrial and financial center in the country. New York's economic preeminence, though less absolute today, is still largely true in various strategic sectors. From the 1960s and 1970s, the secondary sector was in crisis in New York as in other major cities in the northeastern United States. Services and finance, by contrast, were booming again in the late 1970's. New York remains the US economy's main command center.

Powerful secondary sector

The Flatiron Building.

The crisis of the 1960s and 1970s created brownfields in the Bronx and Queens boroughs. During this period, factories close because of international competition, move or relocate abroad. The Navy Yard shipyard closed in 1966. Between 1953 and 1992, New York lost some 700,000 industrial jobs. By the mid-1970s, deindustrialization and demographic decline pushed the city to the brink of bankruptcy.

Since the 1990s, several rehabilitation operations have been carried out in several neighborhoods of the Big Apple. In Brooklyn, several of the industrial port areas are converted into lofts and artist workshops.

New York's industrial sector is highly diversified, from traditional industries to luxury industries (diamond district) to high technology. It's well established in Queens, but also across the Hudson, in New Jersey. The city's main industrial activities are printing and publishing, the food industry, chemistry and petrochemicals, electricity, mechanics, electronics, and textile making (Adore Me for example), notably in the Garment Center (Manhattan). As a result of multiple economic and technological changes, New York's industry has changed. It is based on a dense network of SMEs.

Global Tertiary Pole

Finance and Corporate Management

Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange, in the Financial District.

New York's economy is now essentially focused on tertiary activity, with a high over-representation of what is sometimes called the "higher tertiary", that is, high-value-added activities involving highly skilled workers. Financial activities are central to this.

Many multinational companies are based in New York. At the end of 2007, twenty of the world's top five hundred companies by turnover had their headquarters in New York. This is less than in Tokyo and Paris, but three times more than in Houston, the second largest city in the United States. In addition to many financial institutions, these twenty companies include the Verizon telecommunications group, the Pfizer pharmaceutical company and the WarnerMedia media conglomerate. Other major companies, General Electric and IBM, are located in the suburbs of the city. On the other hand, most large professional services companies, such as the PricewaterhouseCoopers audit firm or the Skadden law firm, have large offices in the city.

Finance plays a special role in New York. Along with London, it is one of the world's major centers in this sector. There are two of the world's top stock exchanges, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and NASDAQ, the first of which far outperforms all other stock markets in the world by the market capitalization of listed companies. Another institution, the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), specializes in raw materials. At the same time, many financial groups are based in New York. These include Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, AIG, and MetLife. In total, the financial sector employs 328,000 people in New York. The Financial District, located south of Manhattan, is emblematic of this area.

Political and diplomatic activities

While political and diplomatic activities in New York are less important than economic or financial activities, their role is not negligible. On the diplomatic front , the city owes its rank to the United Nations , whose headquarters have been in Manhattan since 1952. On the other hand, many countries, including France, have consular representation there.

Tourism

New York also benefits from significant tourism resources: The Big Apple attracted some eleven million international tourists in 2012. The first visitors are the British (1.05 million tourists per year), followed by Canadians (1.03 million visitors per year) and Brazilians (718,000). French tourists favor the big American cities: of the 20 top tourist destinations of the French, five are American, the first being New York.

Media

The headquarters of the New York Times, in Midtown.

New York was also the cradle of American cinema (Paramount Studios in Queens), before production moved to Hollywood. New York is, however, second in the national category in terms of television and film. This sector is currently growing. New York is home to the headquarters and central editorial offices of highly influential international media outlets, including the Associated Press, Bloomberg LP and Dow Jones Newswires, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and the NBC, ABC and CBS news channels. Around all of these great names in the world press, New York City is also home to many other publications, daily, weekly or even bimonthly, published in various formats, such as tabloids. The free Metro daily is also published daily in New York. So it's a diverse, varied, but also multilingual press, since there are local editions for majority communities. New York's press is also impressive because of its desire not to sell only its own newspapers, as some Manhattan newsstands specialize in international newspapers.

Port of New York

Port of Newark, New Jersey.

Originally the city's economic development, the port of New York benefited from a natural site that protected it from storms. After 1819, the opening of the Erie Canal gave it a decisive advantage over Boston and Philadelphia. In the second half of the ^nineteenth century, passenger transport by cruise liners developed: between June 1927 and June 1928, about one million people pass through New York. The port of New York became around 1910 the largest in the world.

The port declined relatively after the Second World War due to the rise of the Pacific Trade Front and the competition for air travel for travelers. In the early 1960s, it lost its rank as the world's leading port to Rotterdam.

Historically, the port facilities were located south of Manhattan on South Street Seaport. Today, there is only one residual activity left in Brooklyn (Red Hook neighborhood) and the Howland Hook Marine Terminal on Staten Island. Since the 1950s, transit of goods (including containers) has moved to Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal at Newark, New Jersey, north of Staten Island (15^th world ranking).

Public transport

An MTA bus.

Unlike people in other American cities, New Yorkers use public transportation: one in four New Yorkers uses them to go to work. The parking lot prices are very high, the tolls for bridges, tunnels and traffic jams discourage the use of the car. The efficient and fast New York subway system uses a 250-mile network of tracks. Buses and taxis are also widely used, as are ferries (especially to New Jersey and Staten Island).

People living in the suburbs (Long Island, New Jersey, Connecticut) or faraway suburbs (Pennsylvania or further north in New York) usually use their personal vehicles to reach the urban network. In the spring of 2007, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg promised a 30% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions in his city by 2030. It decided to implement a policy of energy renovation of skyscrapers, planting of one million trees and introducing a toll for vehicles entering Manhattan.

Metro

A New York subway train in a Brooklyn station.

Among the world's most important public transport networks, it has 422 stations for 468 stop points, making it the world's largest number of stations served. The network includes 337 km of lines with four lanes (two lanes for express trains and two lanes for omnibuses). It is also one of five 24-hour public transit systems, 7 days a week in the United States, alongside the Staten Island Railway and PATH, also located in New York, PATCO trains and the Chicago subway.

The metro is the busiest public transport in the New York megalopolis. With 5.4 million users per day in 2012, it accounted for nearly 63% of the total passenger traffic that transited the MTA network over the year, far ahead of the bus networks, the Staten Island Railway, the Long Island Railroad and the Metro-North Railroad, which are also managed by MTA. Based on the same figures, the New York subway network ranks seventh in the world and first in the country.

Although the New York subway is called a subway, which translates the idea of underground, 40% of the lines follow an air route that relies on steel or sometimes cast iron structures, concrete viaducts, built embankments, railway bridges and, occasionally, surface tracks. The lines are almost exclusively underground in Manhattan, while they are mostly overhead in the rest of the city. All of these lines, regardless of the base of their route, are located at levels different from those of road infrastructure and pedestrian areas, and most of the crossings between two subway lines or between a subway line and a suburban train line are secured by the presence of railway exchangers of type grade separation.

Taxis

The famous yellow taxis of New York.

It is very difficult to imagine the streets of New York City, and more particularly those of Manhattan without the famous yellow taxis, which are featured in films and television series, especially in Martin Scorsese's film, Taxi Driver, with Robert De Niro, who then imposed a true archetype of the nocturnal metropolis of its inhabitants and his taxis.

The origin of this color dates back to 1915, when the entrepreneur John Daniel Hertz founded the Yellow Cab Company in Chicago, which he established in major American cities, including New York.

Taxis are operated by private companies, licensed by the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission. There are two kinds. At first, we recognize the "medallion" taxis, or yellow cabs with the famous yellow color. These taxis are constantly traveling along the city's roads, and it is possible to take them directly on the street. They serve, according to the driver's wishes, the five boroughs of New York and part of New Jersey. In 2011, the minimum price of a race is $3.5. It is also advisable to give a tip to the driver in the amount of 10 to 15% of the price displayed for the race. The yellow cabs can be anywhere in Manhattan. In fact, these taxis represent most of the vehicles that are found on the streets of New York; there are over 12,000 of them.

The second category of taxis consists of "car services", which must be called by telephone, and whose distribution is managed by a computerized center. These service coaches are therefore more expensive than yellow cabs, but ensure that you have a vehicle when you need it.

There are also independent taxis, which do not have the labels required for yellow cabs, and which are often of a different color than yellow. They do not belong to any network and do not enjoy any license.

Rail transport

NJ Transit commuter train to the western suburbs of New York in New Jersey.

The New York metropolitan area network is the largest in the United States. It depends on several public and private companies.

The Amtrak is the American company that manages the major railway lines. The historic and majestic Grand Central Station is now dedicated to local traffic, while the modern Pennsylvania Station terminal offers connections including:

• with the Acela (French construction TGV) for Washington DC, Boston and the states of New England.
• by major modern express trains, such as Lakeshore Limited or Cardinal traveling to Chicago, with connections to the Midwest and the Rocky Mountains, Los Angeles and San Francisco;
• Silver Star and Silver Meteor which join Miami and Tampa.
• Crescent serving the Old South, Atlanta and New Orleans.
• international to Montreal and Toronto via Niagara Falls.

The traffic of the near and the big suburbs is carried out by various companies:

• New Jersey Transit (NJ Transit): manages a dozen suburban train lines and bus lines connecting Manhattan and the western suburbs of New Jersey.
• Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA): The government agency of the State of New York whose mission is the management of public transport in the City of New York and its suburbs through several sub-agencies:
  • MTA New York City Transit: manages the 24 metro lines and 230 bus lines in New York. All of the infrastructure of the New York subway system and the fleet are owned by the City of New York, but are entrusted to MTA for operation. The New York subway is one of the largest in the world, with 24 lines totaling 1,160 km and 468 stations. In 2002, approximately 3.3 million users borrowed from the system daily. The tracks are essentially underground in Manhattan and are often raised in other neighborhoods. It does not serve Staten Island. The basic price is currently $2.50.
  • MTA Metro-North Railroad: manages commuter trains from Grand Central Terminal to the north suburbs (Westchester counties, Rockland, Putnam, Orange, Dutchess and the southwest end of Connecticut).
  • MTA Long Island Railroad: manages commuter trains to the East suburbs (Nassau and Suffolk counties) on Long Island.
  • MTA Staten Island Railway: manages a subway line that is not connected to the rest of the network, which crosses the Staten Island borough from north to south. The infrastructure of this line belongs to the MTA.
• Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ): manages another subway line between Manhattan and New Jersey, and two lines to Newark Liberty Airport (AirTrain Newark, Monorail) and John F. Kennedy (AirTrain JFK, fast tram subway).
  • Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH): subway and commuter train services that connect Manhattan to several New Jersey cities in the New York suburbs. The PATH is operated and belongs to PANYNJ.

Air Transport

The 3 airports of New York:
1 - JFK International Airport
2 - LaGuardia Airport
3 - Newark International Airport

New York City has three major airports. They are the country's largest and busiest air access route, with more than 100 million travelers per year and 132 million travelers in 2017, making New York the world's busiest air hub after London.

• John F. Kennedy International Airport (John F. Kennedy International Airport) is located in Jamaica neighborhood in Queens. It opened in 1948 and was renamed in honor of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, assassinated in 1963. It has four tracks, 2,560 to 4,441 meters long. In 2002, traffic was on the order of 29,900,000 passengers, compared to about 59.3 million passengers in 2017. The JFK Airport has undergone numerous renovations from 1999 to 2001. In 2003, he inaugurated the "Air Train", a direct air train to Queens and soon to Manhattan. Most aircraft from Europe land at JFK, which hosted Concorde aircraft until 2003. Today, with an annual transit of 35 million people, the JFK airport offers a multitude of transportation to Manhattan: the airtrain, the taxi, the shuttle, the metro or the helicopter.
• The Liberty International Airport (Newark Liberty International Airport) is located in the city of Newark, New Jersey. Opened in 1928, it is the oldest New York airport, and is 15 miles from Manhattan (16 miles). However, it has recently been renovated, making it one of the most modern airports on the east coast. It provides domestic and international connections; in 2017, 43.2 million passengers passed through the airport. It is the only one of the three airports in the metropolitan area not to be located in New York City.
• LaGuardia International Airport (LaGuardia Airport) is located in the Flushing area of Queens. It opened in 1939 and is mainly reserved for U.S. domestic flights. Its traffic was on the order of 29.5 million passengers in 2017.

New York has a heliport (E 34th St Heliport, AITA code: TSS).

Including tourist airports, New York is the city that has the most airports in the world. Indeed, 7 airports are called New York airports.

Maritime transport

• by liner: In addition to the Manhattan Terminal, the explosion of the cruise market forced the construction of a new marine terminal, the Brooklyn Terminal. It is now the place of arrival and departure for the Queen Mary 2 which provides regular European-US service.
• by ferry: these vessels are mainly managed by the private company NY Waterway, which operates several lines on the Hudson River. There is also the New York Water Taxi, between Manhattan and Brooklyn, and the Staten Island ferry line operated by the New York City Department of Transportation, which links Battery Park (south of Lower Manhattan) to St. George (north of Staten Island). Ferries also serve to Liberty Island (on which stands the Statue of Liberty) and Ellis Island, where there is a museum on the arrival of Europeans. Finally, ferry services, most of which are governed by Port Authority, connect the opposite shores of Manhattan (Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens and New Jersey) by sea.

Relaxation areas

A water body in the heart of Central Park.

New York has 70 miles of green space and about 14 miles of public beaches. Big Apple also has major public parks, the most famous of which is Central Park, the lung of the city that is the most visited park in the country. There are eight state parks in New York City: Riverbank State Park, Roberto Clemente State Park, Bayswater Point State Park (en) , Clay Pit Ponds State Park Preserve (en) , East River State Park, Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park (en) , Gantry Plaza State Park (en) and Hudson River Park (en). Other major parks in the city include Riverside Park, Battery Park, Pelham Bay Park, Staten Island Greenbelt, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Prospect Park, and High Line, a former ^19th-century railroad.

Times Square.

Tourism plays an important role in New York City, where there are hundreds of places to visit and places to entertain. 40 million tourists visit the city every year. Among the city's most popular tourist attractions are Times Square, Wall Street, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, Fifth Avenue, and Central Park. The World Trade Center and its twin towers were also a favorite destination before September 11, 2001, although Ground zero has attracted many people ever since. Another popular but somewhat more original place is the FAO Schwarz toy shop in Manhattan: sometimes you can see long lines on the sidewalks.

The morning of Thanksgiving, celebrated every year on the fourth Thursday of November, is the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, organized by Macy's department store, which attracts thousands of viewers and millions of viewers via television channels.

Carnegie Hall.

Along Broadway, and more specifically at Times Square, there is a large concentration of theaters, shops and entertainment venues. Times Square is also very famous for its bright billboards that give a perpetual sense of movement.

The most famous venues include Radio City Music Hall, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and Madison Square Garden.

Several legendary venues recall the place New York occupied in the history of jazz. The most famous of them, The Blue Note, has hosted the greatest jazz legends and continues to offer two daily concerts to an increasingly tourist-filled clientele. Harlem, located north of Manhattan, also owes its success to its fundamental role in the history of jazz.

The city also has several zoos, including Central Park Zoo and Bronx Zoo. As for amusement parks, Coney Island, located south of Brooklyn, includes the New York Aquarium, arcade games and fairground attractions: big wheel, old wooden roller coaster, or even self-buffering...

Sports

New York City is one of the largest sports teams in all professional leagues in the United States, with two American football teams in NFL, two baseball teams in MLB, two Ice Hockey teams in NHL and two basketball teams in NBA and football teams in MLS. This reflects the influence of the city, which extends into the sports field. If you include the suburbs, the New York metropolitan area has nine major franchises, being the only American metropolis to have at least two franchises in each league. The city also has an ancient sports tradition.

Baseball is the most popular sport among its inhabitants. There have been fourteen World Series disputed between local teams, often called Metro Series. New York is one of the five metropolitan areas of the United States (the others are Chicago, Washington-Baltimore, Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay) with two baseball teams. The two teams currently in the Major League Baseball are the Yankees of New York and the Mets of New York, which have a rivalry perhaps comparable to that between the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. The Yankees won 27 titles, while the Mets won only two. The city was also home to the New York Giants (now the San Francisco Giants) and the Brooklyn Dodgers (now known as Los Angeles Dodgers). Both teams moved to California in 1958. There are also two teams in the minor leagues, the Staten Island Yankees and the Brooklyn Cyclones.

The city is represented in the National Football League by New York Jets and New York Giants, but today the two local teams play at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. There is an impressive rivalry between the fans of both teams, although the Giants with their four Super Bowl wins easily beat the Jets, who won their only title in the famous Super Bowl Final in 1969.

The city's NBA teams are the New York Knicks and the Brooklyn Nets. Although the last titles of the Knicks and Nets were won in 1973 (by the Knicks) and 1974 (by the Nets), the two teams still have many fans in the city.

The New York Rangers and the New York Islanders represent the city in the National Hockey League.

In football, the New York City FC and the New York Red Bulls are the two teams that represent the city in Major League Soccer. The Red Bulls play at home at the Red Bull Arena in New Jersey, while New York City plays at home at Yankee Stadium. Moreover, New York had other legendary football teams that are now gone, such as the MetroStars and the New York Cosmos, a team in which world stars such as Pelé, Beckenbauer, Giorgio Chinaglia, Carlos Alberto and Johan Neeskens played.

Here are the main professional teams:

• Yankee Stadium.

• Madison Square Garden.

• Barclays Center, at a Brooklyn Nets game.

• Red Bull Arena.

New York City is also home to one of the major tournaments of the tennis season, with the US Open held in late August in the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park (male and female tournaments). In addition, one of the major sporting events of the track season is also taking place in the Big Apple with the popular New York Marathon held since 1970, attracting an average of more than 30,000 participants. In response to the many requests for participation, the world's largest marathon had to establish a lottery system. This race, which takes place every year on the 1^th Sunday of November, crosses the five boroughs of the city. She starts at Staten Island and finishes at Central Park. The New York Yacht Club is the organization that has hosted the America's Cup for 132 years, the longest sequence of victories in the history of sport.

Police

NYPD police in Manhattan.

The city of New York has the largest number of police services in the United States, this is due to the interconnection of municipal law enforcement agencies in this metropolis. The most famous and by far the most important is the New York City Police Department (NYPD), the New York City police force. The municipality has a large police presence (in the 1990s the number of police officers increased from 30,000 to 40,000). The city's largest prison is located on Rikers Island.

As in the rest of the United States, crime and delinquency have declined since the early 1990s in New York. This success is due in part to the actions of the city's mayor, Rudy Giuliani (between 1993 and 1998) and his zero tolerance policy. During this period, the number of murders per year was divided by more than three, from 2,245 to 633, for a population of 7.5 million. The year 1990 was the deadliest, with 2,248 murders recorded. In 2014, 333 homicides were reported, the lowest number recorded in half a century, but in 2015, the number of murders and rapes increased despite an overall decline in crime. In 2017, the number of reported homicides was 292, the lowest in 2019, with half as many major crimes as in 2019.

The crime index fell by 22.1% between 2001 and 2006. Of the 25 largest cities in the United States, New York is the safest in the total crime index per 100,000 population. At the same time, there is a media coverage of the blasts, the most famous of which is surely the assassination of Amadou Diallo in 1999. These results are the result of several factors, the most important of which are the policy of "zero tolerance", the decline in unemployment, the rehabilitation of the northern neighborhoods of Manhattan (e.g. Harlem), the integration of ethnic minorities into the forces of law and order, and the concerted work of various municipal institutions, in particular schools.

NYPD patrol vehicle.

The feeling of insecurity has decreased and it is quite possible to walk without fear in all areas of Manhattan and Staten Island, most of Queens and Brooklyn. Tourists are only advised to be more vigilant at night and avoid places like Central Park, as well as certain areas of Brooklyn and Bronx.

The New York mafia, although less powerful today, is dominated by the Five Families: Genovese, Gambino, Lucchese, Colombo and Bonanno. They live, among other things, in drug trafficking, racketeering, the construction industry and the ports.

According to NYPD statistics for 2007, the homicide rate per million inhabitants was 81.1 for African-Americans and 6.3 for whites. Of the 244 murders recorded between 1 January and 30 June 2008, 64.8 per cent of the victims were black, Latin Americans accounted for 23.4 per cent of the victims, whites 7.4 per cent and Asians 4.5 per cent.

In 2007, black people accounted for 64.9% of arrests for murder, Latin Americans 27.2%, whites 7.3%, and Asian-Americans less than 1%.

Firefighters

FDNY Intervention Truck in relation to hazardous materials.

The New York City Fire Department (FDNY) is New York City's professional fire department. It has a fleet of 2,000 vehicles including 198 engine companies (pump van), 143 ladder companies (ladders), seven squads companies, five rescue companies and 11,400 firefighters in 221 barracks. With nearly a million interventions, including 450,000 fires and 1.1 million person-to-person rescue operations, it is the world's largest firefighter force. The FDNY was mourned by the death of 343 firefighters in the collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The FDNY School is located on Randall's Island on a 24 acre site. The New York firefighters have been dubbed "The Bravest" since the sacrifice of 343 of them on September 11, 2001. The FDNY has firefighters investigators, they are armed and are investigating in cooperation with the municipal police (NYPD) suspected fires of criminal origin.

General

In the ^twentieth century, New York played a leading role in American culture. It was during the interwar period that the Harlem neighborhood became the center of the renewal of African-American culture, called the Harlem Renaissance, which touched all fields of artistic and literary creation. In the second half of the ^20th century new artistic genres (abstract expressionism) and musical genres (punk rock and hip-hop in the 1970s) emerged. A street culture (street culture) develops around rap, graffiti, deejaying, break dance and Streetwear and is spread around the world from New York.

Today, New York remains one of the world's leading cultural hotspots. The city hosts about 2,000 cultural and artistic organizations and more than 500 art galleries. New York City's Department of Cultural Affairs operates on an annual budget of $131 million, representing the first public cultural budget in the United States, ahead of the National Endowment for the Arts, the "federal" cultural agency. It finances several dozen cultural institutions in the city (museums, conservatories, theaters). New York culture is cosmopolitan and plural: As an elitist in its avant-garde operas and theaters, artistic creation is also popular with Broadway musicals or simply on the street.

This artistic involvement goes beyond the services directly concerned, as demonstrated by the reception of Mierle Laderman Ukeles by the cleaning services of the city, the artist developing her work in the field of maintenance and maintenance.

The New York City Department of Education is the largest school district in the United States.

Higher education

The Low Memorial Library, on the Columbia campus.

Like other major American metropolises, New York City has a large number of institutions of higher education.

The city's most famous and prestigious university is Columbia University, founded in 1754 and part of the highly prestigious and selective Ivy League. But the city's other private universities are also renowned and valued by students from around the world. For example, New York University, which has several campuses scattered throughout the city, is the country's largest private university with more than 40,000 students, while Fordham University is one of the most famous Jesuit universities on the east coast. But New York does not rely solely on its private institutions to ensure its academic reputation; Indeed, New York City University is the largest urban university in the United States, while the City College of New York, located in Harlem, is famous for having trained many Nobel laureates. Moreover, in the arts, the Cooper Union, founded in 1859, is one of the most selective institutions in the world.

Founded in 1955, Rochester's Red Wings is a higher education institution that was the cradle of 3D graphics technology. Moreover, the founder of the New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab, Edwin Catmull, later founded the Pixar animation studios. The lab is now recognized as one of the flagships of the computer graphics industry and is one of the world's leading research and development groups in this field.

Museums

Facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Solomon R Museum. Guggenheim on Fifth Avenue.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the most famous in Manhattan. With its two million works, 130,000 square meters and 4.5 million annual visitors, the "MET" is one of the world's largest museums. Other museums, scattered throughout the city, also offer general art collections (The Frick Collection, the Brooklyn Museum, the Queens Art Museum) or specialized art collections (The Cloisters for the Middle Ages; the American Folk Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art for American Art). Contemporary art is represented by numerous institutions such as the Solomon R Museum. Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art or the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Science and technology include the New York Hall of Science, the Skyscraper Museum and the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences; but the most prestigious is the american museum of natural history with its 32 million specimens and objects, as well as its planetarium.

Finally, numerous museums illustrate the history and ethnic diversity of New York: north of Manhattan are the Studio Museum in Harlem, the New York City Museum, the Hispanic Society of America, and the Barrio Museum, the Jewish Museum. The New York City Fire Museum and the New York City Police Museum pay tribute to the city's firefighters and policemen.

List of museums in New York:

Painting

Fith Avenue in winter, Childe Hassam (1919).

The New York School inaugurated abstract expressionism during the Second World War, which was divided into two main trends: Action painting and Color Field painting. The first representatives of this artistic trend are Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko or Ad Reinhardt.

These artists are followed by a generation of women like Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner. Then there are New York artists, pop art like Andy Warhol, Keith Haring or Jean-Michel Basquiat, and conceptual art like Robert Morris, who show the vitality of New York in the field of contemporary art.

Cinema

Poster of the film King Kong in 1933.

New York City is home to many films and numerous TV series: It is the second largest film production center in the United States, behind Hollywood. This is because the Big Apple setting is ideal for filming, with its skyscrapers and its multitude of small neighborhoods that make up picturesque or worrying communities and correspond to different lifestyles. The characters of the films that take place in New York can be of all origins, have all kinds of jobs, which reinforces the image of melting-pot that sometimes it is to be shown in the same films or series.

The famous films that take place in New York are legion, and the city serves as the backdrop for all kinds of cinematographic works. Of course, we can mention New York, New York or Gangs of New York by the director Martin Scorsese who will become, throughout his filmography, a true painter of the city, Diamonds on a sofa by Blake Edwards, Manhattan by Woody Allen and the musicals Un day in New York, West Side Story and Fame. In a different genre, the three versions of King Kong are all based in New York, as well as The Godfather, Once in America and The Affiliates, which deal with the mafia, or even in a more comical register A prince in New York, with Eddie Murphy, Madagascar Dreamworks studios, Le Diable dresses in Prada or The Constable in New York with Louis de Funès. Post-apocalyptic science fiction films, too, target the metropolis as: New York no longer answers. The seven film adaptations of the comics Spider-man also greatly enhance New York architecture, especially in the sequences where the spider-man moves from building to building in the city.

The massive presence of New York as a film set makes the city a strangely familiar place for people from all over the world, as noted by director and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière: "My first impression, which will never disappear and which many visitors have shared, is to cross a city where I have already lived. I know her, like everyone else, by cinema. I know her and I recognize her. Even police sirens are familiar to me. The cinema has made New York a city of steps, a spectral city where we all traveled, one day or the other. "

The attacks of September 11, 2001, also inspired several filmmakers, who put together images of either the terrorist attacks themselves or the impact they had on the city and its inhabitants. For example, Spike Lee's 25th Hour credits show light beams from several angles, before a larger map reveals that it is those rising up to the sky to replace the towers of the now-extinct World Trade Center. The Guys with Sigourney Weaver released in 2002 dealt with the difficulty of forgetting these events and overcoming the absence of those who died that day. In the same year, 11'09"01 - September 11 (Eleven minutes, nine seconds, an image) brought together eleven directors of various backgrounds, each showing a different perspective on the attacks. In 2004, Michael Moore included in his documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 many sequences of the attacks. The World Trade Center film by Oliver Stone depicts the chronology of the day through the eyes of two policemen, one of them being interpreted by Nicolas Cage. This is the first major Hollywood production to deal directly with these attacks.

In 2007, in I'm a legend of Francis Lawrence, you can see New York City without all its inhabitants. The scene of the flashback during the evacuation and the explosion of the Brooklyn Bridge is the most expensive ever seen in New York: six days of shooting for $ 6 million. In 2008, the economic crisis inspired Oliver Stone for his film Wall Street: Money never sleeps.

On TV

The Empire State Building, in Midtown, is a symbol of the city and regularly appears on television.

Among the best known sitcoms that take place in New York are Friends (who included New York City in the series for ten years, with the city maps that are seen in all episodes, visits to famous places...), but also Jessie, Spin City, How I Met Your Mother, The Witches of Waverly Place, Will and Grace, Shadowhunters or Gossip Girl for example. The sitcom Seinfeld also helped to showcase New York City with its characters and adventures for nine years.

However, the most recent series that has showcased Big Apple is undoubtedly Sex and the city because, on-site, in the heart of the megacity, it has put the city at the forefront. New York was thus considered by the creators not as a mere decoration, but as the "fifth lady" of the series, in addition to the four heroines. The city is absolutely inseparable from the series, and writers have always tried to anchor the episodes in New York reality, for example by having the characters dinner in real and trendy restaurants at the time of filming. Finally, they changed the characters along with the city, moving the Samantha character into a loft in the Meatpacking District, south of Manhattan, just as it was emerging as a trendy residential (not industrial) neighborhood. Miranda's character is being forced to move to Brooklyn to find a home to accommodate his new extended family, a revealing example of rising property prices in Manhattan, which has forced many — even wealthy — to live in the city's other districts.

New York also inspires many authors of police series. There are all sorts of series that deal with criminal cases in New York City, including Experts: Manhattan, Castle, FBI: Missing Portees, New York, Judicial Police, New York, Criminal Section, New York, Special Unit, New York Police Blues, Blue Bloods, New York 911, which deals more with the role of firefighters and rescue services in New York or Unforgettable.

In video games

Manhattan, one of New York City's five boroughs, has inspired many video games.

New York City is also used as the setting for several video games. Thus, the series of Grand Theft Auto, in its opus III and above all IV, takes place in a metropolis called "Liberty City", but among them the architecture, the railway network, the monuments (Statue of the Hilarity for the Statue of Liberty, the Rotterdam Tower for the exact copy of the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the One Court Square, the Flatiron Building, the Getalife for the copy of the MetLife Building, the One, Two, Three and Four World Financial Center, the Hearst Tower, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Unisphere, the Saint-Patrick Cathedral, the Masjid Malcolm Shabazz (en), the Wonder Wheel, the Middle Park for Central Park and the metro), the boroughs (Brookings) e/Brooklyn, Dukes/Queens, Algonquin/Manhattan, Bohan/Bronx, ATG IV) and urban organization are doing more than inspiring New York City. GTA III does not have all these similarities by staying on a more timid inspiration.

A more relevant example is Max Payne, whose two shutters take place in a snow-covered and rainy New York City respectively. Max Payne reproduces the themes of the black film. The first installment, released in 2001, is the subject of a film adaptation under the banner of 20th Century Fox, released in late 2008.

The introduction cinematic of Grand Theft Auto 2 is visibly touring New York City neighborhoods. The towers of the World Trade Center appear there.

In Mafia II, the action takes place in the fictional city of Empire Bay, largely inspired by New York in the mid-1940s and early 1950s with famous monuments such as the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, Brooklyn Bridge, Little Italy and Chinatown.

The Parasite Eve action, released in 1998 on PlayStation, is located in New York and more specifically in Manhattan. Throughout the adventure, you can visit places like Carnegie Hall, Central Park, the Museum of Natural History, the New York subway, Chinatown, or even the Chrysler Building (when you finish the game a second time). As the action is in winter, the scenery is snowy.

The last mission of the Battlefield 3 solo campaign, called "Mass Destruction," took place in New York, where hero Henry Blackburn saved himself from an attack by defusing a nuclear warhead in Times Square.

Times Square is one of the neighborhoods most often represented in video games.

The second installment of the True Crime series, True Crime: New York City is located in the Manhattan district: The player plays a policeman named Marcus Reed who, after the death of his colleague and friend, looks for a mole in the anti-mafia unit. In this opus you can see many buildings in New York.

The Crysis 2 game takes place in a New York devastated by an alien invasion, and you can visit emblematic places of New York like Times Square or even like the Brooklyn Bridge

All of the Spiderman series also take place in Manhattan and in the last two (Spiderman 2 and Spiderman 3 of the movie of the same name) the entire neighborhood is visited.

Alone in the Dark is a series of Survival Horror, the latest released on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 is a game that takes place almost exclusively in Central Park. The Darkness is an open-universe Horror-FPS with two subway stations (City Hall, new and abandoned and Fulton) as its base. Some parts of Manhattan are accessible including the Lower East Side and Chinatown.

The Prototype game is also inspired by New York City, but only Manhattan Island.

Deus Ex is a role-playing/FPS game whose plot is mainly in New York.

Tycoon City: New York is a management game where the player embodies an entrepreneur who must make a fortune by building a commercial and residential empire in New York. The game, however, only features Manhattan and Liberty Island.

The fifth generation Pokémon game region on Nintendo portable consoles (Unys in English, Unova in French) is based on the New York area. In particular, the main city is inspired by the skyscrapers of Manhattan.

Many other games and mini-games refer to New York or simply refer to the city's name.

New York also appears in the video game Assassin's Creed III. As the game unfolded during the American Revolution, the city was reproduced as it was at the end of the ^eighteenth century. However, a mission, taking place in 2012, allows to climb a building in Manhattan. Assassin's Creed Rogue also takes place in part in New York, this time during the Seven Years War.

In the game The Crew, New York is reproduced almost identically, as are the main cities of the country.

In Tom Clancy's The Division, the player moves into a chaotic New York City.

One of the most famous video games of his generation Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty has as an indirect frame both at the beginning and at the end, the city of New York and more specifically the George-Washington Bridge and the Hudson River, in fact the introduction cinematic takes place on this bridge before Solid Snake, the main hero, jumps on a tanker that crosses the river. The final scene is on Wall Street.

In literature

As is the case with television, New York City is a source of inspiration for many writers, some of them from the city, who have either dedicated their book to New York or taken Big Apple as their setting for history.

In music

The cultural center of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

The city places a high place in concert venues, including jazz clubs, but the music industry has also been very inspired by New York, its different neighborhoods, its population, and its particular atmosphere. The first music festival (Make Music New York) was organized in 2007, led by Aaron Friedman. The 2009 edition includes some 900 registered groups that occur in several districts of the Big Apple.

Probably the most famous song is New York, New York, composed by John Kander and written by Fred Ebb for Liza Minnelli, then taken over by Frank Sinatra. This standard glorifies New York as a city of all possibilities, magnifying its attraction to the rest of the world.

Radio City Music Hall.

If some declare their love to the whole city (I Love New York of Madonna; New York City Serenade by Bruce Springsteen; New York by Bryan Adams; NYC of the local Interpol group; An Open Letter To NYC and To the 5 Boroughs of the Beastie Boys; Jay-Z and Alicia Keys in their title Empire State of Mind or New York state of mind by Billy Joel, others choose to mention only certain neighborhoods (Chelsea Morning, by Joni Mitchell; Coney Island Baby, by Lou Reed; Harlem, by Duke Ellington; Central Park West, by John Coltrane; Tribeca, from Kenny G), or even some streets (Seventh Avenue, from Rosanne Cash; Positively 4th Street, by Bob Dylan; Union Square, by Tom Waits; Avenue B, Iggy Pop; Ludlow Street, by Julian Casablancas) or some elements of New York architecture (Queensboro Bridge, by David Mead; Times Square, by Marianne Faithfull; Empire State Building, by Randy Newman). Others refer to the city's transport, whether its taxis (Cabbies on Crack, Ramones) or its metro (My Metrocard, Le Tigre; Subway Train, The New York Dolls; Take the A Train, a piece written by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn; Take the L Train (To 8 Ave.), by Brooklyn Funk Essentials). There are also English artists like Sting who celebrated Big Apple with his song Englishman in New York, or the glam-rock band T. Rex with the song simply titled New York City or Sex Pistols with New York. The Irish Pogues also paid their tribute to the city, with Fairytale of New York, as did the French Serge Gainsbourg (New York - USA), Michel Sardou (Broadway Java - Jazz singer) and Claude Nougaro (Nougayork).

Also, the New York trend of the 1970s and 1980s saw the "move" of two famous British to New York, both on the banks of Central Park: Mick Jagger and John Lennon. For example, mention of New York can be found in the Shattered song of the Rolling Stones, on the album Some Girls in 1978. More recently in the 2000s, The Strokes, an American group, also talks about their city in New York City Cops or the French anti-folk group Herman Dune with Take Him Back to New York City.

In the field of classical music, after 1945 the city became an important place in the world both in terms of the quality of the great orchestras that live there such as the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, concert halls such as the Lincoln Center (hosting the famous Metropolitan Opera) or Carnegie Hall, music schools known as the Juilliard School, and composers who have lived and worked. Among the most iconic are Leonard Bernstein, who composed West Side Story in 1957 in homage to his city, and more recently the two founders of the minimalist music movement, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, whose work has been closely linked to New York and its cultural dynamism since the late 1960s.

In the comic book

While some of the most important superheroes such as Spider-Man live in New York or in fictional doubles such as the corrupt and dark Gotham City, where Batman's adventures take place, and, to a lesser extent (initially inspired by Toronto), Metropolis de Superman, the founder who broke with the tide described as childish, and in this way the passage of the media to A Pact with God by Will Eisner, considered to be the first graphic novel, is a reminder of the daily life of New York and its neighborhoods, as well as of numerous subsequent works by the same author (Big City, Dropsie avenue...).

As in television or film, the city's important criminal history is an important source of inspiration for various narratives. The story of organized crime in New York was told in detail in the series What is ours of David Chauvel and Erwan Le Saëc. From a parody perspective, Tome and Janry also evoke this aspect by pitting their heroes Spirou and Fantasio against the Italian mafia and Chinese triads in two episodes (Spirou in New York and Luna fatale). Tome will also place his black murderous gangster (designed by Ralph Meyer) triptych telling the hate of a New York taximen and his wife seeking to kill each other. The NYPD is not left behind with the adventures of the fake pastor but a real cop Soda drawn by Luc Warnant and Bruno Gazzotti and screenwritten by Tome).

In a fantastic setting, the 1930s city also serves as a setting for the adventures of Capricorn d'Andreas.

Several historical events have been recounted in comics. For example, the Draft Riots that occurred during the Civil War are featured in the album Riots in New York of the series The Blue Tunes by Raoul Cauvin and Lambil. Moreover, the attacks of 11 September 2001 inspired Art Spiegelman's album In the shadow of the dead towers.

Cinema

Robert De Niro, one of America's most famous actors, has filmed numerous films with a plot set in his hometown of New York.

Many actors, directors, screenwriters come from New York, although most of the activities of the seventh art are located in Hollywood, California.

Among the most famous filmmakers are Woody Allen, born in Brooklyn in 1935, Martin Scorsese, born in Queens in 1942, László Benedek, of Hungarian origin but died in New York, Stanley Kramer born in Brooklyn, Stanley Kubrick born in the Bronx, Jerome Robbick In, Herbert Ross, Oliver Stone, Spike Lee, Jerry Schatzberg or George A. Romero, master of the zombie film.

Famous actors and actresses from Big Apple are numerous. The most famous are Humphrey Bogart, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, David Schwimmer, Jack Nicholson and Sylvester Stallone for men, Shirley Booth, Joan Crawford, Susan Hayward, Anne Hathaway, Judy Holliday, Fran Drescher, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Scarlett Johansson or Jennifer Aniston for men women.

Physical

New York City has won numerous Nobel prizes in physics, including the Bronx High School of Science, and the prestigious Columbia University. Among the great physicists of New York City are Richard Feynman, Melvin Schwartz, Sheldon Lee Glashow, Steven Weinberg, Charles Harding Townes, Russell Hulse, H. David Politzer or Roy J. Glauber, all Nobel laureates.

Journalism and literature

The New York Times is one of the most read and prestigious newspapers in the world. However, it is only one example of the power of the New York press. For example, many brilliant journalists come from the Big Apple, including William Sherman, William Safire, Joseph Lelyveld, and William Taubman, all Pulitzer Prize winners, who are awarded annually to Manhattan at Columbia University.

New York is also home to many publishing houses (such as Penguin Random House).

Musicians

Big Apple is a world city, a crossroads of cultures and civilizations, which is found in the arts, especially music, song, so that many artists, from their parents in different parts of the world, from different states of the United States, were born, grew up, studied or lived for a long time in New York City. As in other cultural fields, styles and influences are classified according to the currents (folk, jazz, soul, funk, rock, pop, disco, rap, dance, techno, R&B...), but also according to the districts (Greenwich Village, Harlem, Brooklyn, Bronx or Queens). From the 1930s to the 1990s, this metropolis provides many artists of national and international reputation: the success of jazz, orchestras, clubs, conductors and soloists began in the 1930s, especially in the 1940s and 1950s. One example is the singer and composer Carole King, born in the Brooklyn neighborhood, Lou Reed des Velvet Underground, from the Kiss group formed in Queens in 1972, Barry Manilow, composer, singer, actor, presenter and producer born in Brooklyn, from the Blondie group formed in Manhattan en 1975, of The Fleshtones, formed in 1976 in Queens neighborhood, of the Beastie Boys group formed in Brooklyn in 1979, Barbra Streisand, singer, actress, producer and director born in Brooklyn, Moby, DJ and electronic music producer born in the Manhattan neighborhood, all such as singers Lana Del Rey and Lady Gaga, Queens-born Art Garfunkel singer, Brooklyn-born Blondie Jimmy Destri pianist, Harlem-born rapper P.Diddy, Prodigy-born Mobb Deep rap group, Queensbridge-Queens-based Havoc-born, Brooklyn-born Jay-Z rapper n, diva Christina Aguilera was born in the Staten Island neighborhood, Brooklyn-born jazz singer Norah Jones, although she spent her teenage years in Texas, Jennifer Lopez, Bronx-born singer and actress, Julian Casablancas and Nick Valensi, founding members of the rock band The Strokes were born in Manhattan, Soul/R'n'B singer and occasionally actress Alicia Keys born in Harlem neighborhood north of Manhattan, 50 cent (Curtis Jackson), Queens-born rapper, Notorious B.I.G, Brooklyn-born rapper (murdered), John Frusciante, Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist born in Queens Tens, upac Shakur (2 Pac), rapper (murdered) born in East Harlem, Nas, rapper born in Queens, Stretch, rapper (murdered) born in Queens, as well as rappers of the Wu-Tang Clan in Staten Island. The punk group, Ramones, formed in Queens and whose two original members, singer Joey Ramone and guitarist Johnny Ramone, were born in Queens and Long Island respectively, can be added. Other members of the group also come from Big Apple: C. J. Ramone and Richie Ramone (Queens) and Marky Ramone (Brooklyn), Amy Lee of the Evanescence group, has lived in New York for many years.

These artists, however, represent only a tiny fraction of the singers from the city. Some have performed famous concerts at Central Park, in the presence of a huge crowd; In 1973, for example, Carole King did a free open-air concert that attracted more than 100,000 people.

New York City is twinned with twelve cities (sister cities):

• Tokyo, Japan (1960)
• Beijing, China (1980)
• Madrid, Spain (1982)
• Cairo, Egypt (1982)
• Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic (1983)
• Budapest, Hungary (1992)
• Jerusalem, Israel (1993)
• Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israel (1996)
• London, United Kingdom (2001)
• Johannesburg, South Africa (2003)
• Montreal, Canada (2005)
• Limerick, Ireland (2006)

Since 2006, these partnerships have been reformed within "New York City Global Partners".

Gallery

• View of Midtown from the Comcast Building (HDR.).

• View of Midtown Manhattan from the Empire State Building.

• The Statue of Liberty.

• View of the Financial District, with the World Financial Center and the One World Trade Center (center), from Jersey City, New Jersey.

• View of Lower Manhattan from Ellis Island.

• Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree.

• Brooklyn Bridge.

• The New York Marathon on the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge.

• The hall of the Grand Central Terminal.

• Central Park seen from Rockefeller Center.

• Downtown Brooklyn panorama.

Panoramas

360° view from the Empire State Building.

From the Comcast Building at sunset.

Midtown Manhattan from the Empire State Building.

References