Manhattan

• 1. Introduction

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  Manhattan counted 1,694,250 residents in the 2020 census, all of them living on 22.66 square miles of land. That makes it the smallest of New York City's five boroughs and the most densely populated. Its county, New York County, is the smallest in New York State by area. Yet the borough has been called the cultural, financial, media and entertainment capital of the world. How did one narrow island come to carry so much? Who fought over it, who reshaped it, and who pushed it to change? And what happens to a place this crowded when fire, riot, attack and storm arrive?

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• 2. A Place for Bows

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  Long before any European ship arrived, the island belonged to Lenapehoking, territory inhabited by the Munsee, Lenape and Wappinger peoples. The Lenape kept several settlements in the area, including Sapohanikan, Nechtanc and Konaande Kongh. A series of trails linked them. The main trail ran from what is now Inwood in the north to Battery Park in the south, and it later became Broadway. The Lenape also maintained sites for fishing and planting across the island.

  The name Manhattan most likely reached English by way of Dutch, from manaháhtaan in Munsee, the Lenape's local language. The word breaks into parts: manah- means gather, -aht- means bow, and -aan forms verb stems. It has been translated as "the place where we get bows," or as a place for gathering wood to make bows. In the 19th century, Albert Seqaqkind Anthony recorded a Munsee tradition that the island was named for a grove of hickory trees, considered ideal for bowmaking. Another theory points to a Delaware source akin to the Munsee munahan, meaning island.

  In April 1524, the Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano became the first documented European to visit the area that would become New York City. He sailed in the service of Francis I of France. Verrazzano entered the tidal strait now called The Narrows and named the land around Upper New York Harbor New Angoulême, after the king's family name. He sailed far enough to sight the Hudson River. He also named the Bay of Santa Margarita, now Upper New York Bay, for Marguerite de Navarre, the king's elder sister.

  Henry Hudson made the first map of Manhattan on a voyage in 1609. He met the native people living on the island and then continued up the river that would later bear his name. An officer on that voyage, Robert Juet, recorded the island in his logbook as Manna-hata. That logbook entry is the earliest written appearance of the name.

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• 3. Colony and Capital

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  A permanent European presence in New Netherland began in 1624, when Dutch colonists founded a fur trading settlement on Governors Island. In 1625, work started on the citadel of Fort Amsterdam, on Manhattan Island in what is now Lower Manhattan. The settlement around it came to be called New Amsterdam, or Nieuw Amsterdam. The founding of Fort Amsterdam is recognized as the birth of New York City. Peter Stuyvesant was appointed the last Dutch Director-General in 1647, and New Amsterdam was formally incorporated as a city on the 2nd of February 1653.

  English forces conquered New Netherland in 1664 and renamed it New York, after the Duke of York and Albany, the future King James II. The Treaty of Breda, signed on the 31st of July 1667, ended the Second Anglo-Dutch War. Under it the Dutch gave up New Netherland, which covered modern New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware. In exchange they received Suriname and control of the Island of Run in the East Indies, known for the spices nutmeg and mace. In August 1673 the Dutch retook the colony and renamed it New Orange. The following year the Treaty of Westminster, which ended the Third Anglo-Dutch War, returned it to England for good.

  On the 16th of November 1776, the Battle of Fort Washington forced the Continental Army to abandon Manhattan. The fight belonged to the New York Campaign, a series of major battles in the early American Revolutionary War. The Great Fire of New York badly damaged the city during that campaign. Afterward the city served as the British military and political center of operations in North America for the rest of the war. The occupation ended on the 25th of November 1783, when George Washington returned to Manhattan. The date is celebrated as Evacuation Day.

  From the 11th of January 1785, New York City was the fifth of five capitals of the United States under the Articles of Confederation. The Continental Congress met there. Under the new Constitution, New York was the first capital, from the 4th of March 1789 to the 12th of August 1790, with Congress sitting at Federal Hall. At Federal Hall the United States Supreme Court met for the first time, and the Bill of Rights was drafted and ratified. The Northwest Ordinance was adopted there too, setting out how new states would be admitted to the Union.

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• 4. Grid and Gateway

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  By 1810, New York City, then confined to Manhattan, had passed Philadelphia as the most populous city in the United States. Much of that growth followed the policies of Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, who expanded the city's role in commerce and industry. The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 then laid out the island in its familiar grid.

  The Erie Canal opened in 1825 and cut transportation costs by 90% compared with road transport. It tied the Atlantic port to the vast farm markets of the Midwestern United States and Canada.

  In 1854, voters elected Fernando Wood, the first mayor backed by Tammany Hall. Tammany was a Democratic Party political machine that had grown in influence with the support of many Irish immigrants.

  Central Park opened its first portions to the public in 1858. It became the first landscaped public park in an American city, covering 840 acres in the center of the island. Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed it. In the 1850s some 20,000 workers moved about 5 million cubic yards of material to shape its topography. Much of the park looks natural, yet it is almost entirely landscaped in the English-style pastoral manner the two designers wanted.

  In July 1863, the New York Draft riots lasted three days and ranked among the worst incidents of civil disorder in American history. The city had strong commercial ties to the South. Anger over conscription, resentment of Lincoln's war policies and fear that free Blacks would take the jobs of poor immigrants all fed the violence.

  After the Civil War, immigration from Europe climbed steeply, and Manhattan became the first stop for millions seeking a new life. The dedication of the Statue of Liberty in 1886 acknowledged that role. In tenements packed with poorly paid laborers from dozens of nations, revolution, syndicalism, racketeering and unionization all took root. Anarchists and communists were among the revolutionaries.

  The Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883 and gave Manhattan a road connection to Brooklyn and the rest of Long Island. In 1898, New York City merged with three neighboring counties to form the City of Greater New York, and Manhattan became one of its five boroughs. The Bronx stayed part of New York County until 1914, when Bronx County was established. The subway, which opened in 1904, helped bind the new city together. So did the Williamsburg Bridge of 1903 and the Manhattan Bridge of 1909, both reaching Brooklyn. The Queensboro Bridge, also from 1909, linked the island to Queens.

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• 5. Skyline and Setbacks

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  The Equitable Building of 1915 rose forty stories straight up from the sidewalk. Its sheer bulk prompted the 1916 Zoning Resolution, which required new buildings to step back at a defined angle as they climbed. The aim was to preserve a view of the sky at street level.

  The Woolworth Building of 1913-40 Wall Street and the Chrysler Building of 1930, and the Empire State Building of 1931 leapfrogged one another as the world's tallest. The race began in the boom of the 1920s Prohibition era. Despite the Great Depression, the 1930s still brought numerous Art Deco masterpieces, including 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The Empire State Building now sees about 4 million visitors a year.

  Beneath the towers lies bedrock of three formations: Inwood marble, Fordham gneiss and Manhattan schist. This rock suits skyscraper foundations well. Central Park Tower, topped out at 1,550 feet in 2019, is the world's tallest residential building. Two other Midtown towers, 111 West 57th Street and 432 Park Avenue, follow it in height. The Bank of America Tower was the first skyscraper designed to attain a Platinum LEED Certification.

  In 1961, the struggling Pennsylvania Railroad unveiled plans to tear down the old Penn Station and replace it with a new Madison Square Garden and office complex. Designed by McKim, Mead & White and completed in 1910, the station was widely considered a masterpiece of the Beaux-Arts style. Organized protests failed, and demolition began in October 1963. Its loss led directly to a 1965 local law creating the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. The preservation movement it triggered has been credited with saving some one million structures nationwide, including over 1,000 in New York City.

  New York Penn Station is now the busiest transportation hub in the Western Hemisphere. In 2017, a multibillion-dollar plan was unveiled to restore its historic grandeur. The 700,000-square-foot Moynihan Train Hall opened in January 2021 as a $1.6 billion renovation and expansion into the James A. Farley Building, the city's former main post office.

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• 6. Crisis and Return

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  On the 25th of March 1911, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Greenwich Village killed 146 garment workers. It led to overhauls of the city's fire department, building codes and workplace safety regulations. In 1912, about 20,000 workers, a quarter of them women, marched on Washington Square Park to commemorate the fire. Many of the women wore fitted tucked-front blouses like those the company made. The style became the working woman's uniform and a symbol of women's liberation.

  By the 1820s, the Five Points neighborhood, between Broadway and the Bowery northeast of City Hall, held many gambling dens and brothels. Charles Dickens visited in 1842 and was appalled by the living conditions. The predominantly Irish Five Points Gang became one of the country's first major organized crime entities. Al Capone got his start in crime with that gang. Lucky Luciano later established Cosa Nostra in Manhattan and formed alliances, including with the Jewish mob led by Meyer Lansky. Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933, created a thriving black market in liquor that the Mafia was quick to seize.

  During World War II, the borough gave its name to the Manhattan Project, the top-secret U.S.-led program that developed the first nuclear weapons. The name came from the Manhattan Engineer District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, initially headquartered in Manhattan. After the war, a boom led to huge housing developments for returning veterans. The largest, Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village, opened in 1947. The United Nations moved into a new headquarters, completed in 1952 along the East River.

  In the 1970s, job losses from industrial restructuring brought economic trouble and rising crime. The murder rate in Manhattan hit an all-time high of 42 per 100,000 residents in 1979. Times Square and 42nd Street, with sex shops, peep shows, adult theaters, street crime and public drug use, became emblems of the decline. A 1981 Rolling Stone article called West 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues the "sleaziest block in America." The 1980s brought a rebirth of Wall Street, where employment doubled from 1977 to 1987. They also brought the AIDS crisis, with Greenwich Village at its epicenter.

  By the late 1990s, efforts led by the city and the Walt Disney Company had revived Times Square as a center of tourism. The New York Times described it as "arguably the most sought-after 13 acres of commercial property in the world." Murders in Manhattan fell from 503 in 1990, the citywide peak, to 78 in 2022, a decline of 84%. Crime rates remain high in Upper Manhattan neighborhoods such as East Harlem, Harlem, Washington Heights and Inwood. Violent crime rose there after the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020.

  The 1993 World Trade Center bombing killed six people when a van bomb exploded in a parking lot below the North Tower. The FBI described it as "something of a deadly dress rehearsal for 9/11." On the 11th of September 2001, hijacked aircraft struck the Twin Towers, which collapsed in the attacks launched by al-Qaeda terrorists. Of the 17,400 people in the buildings when the planes hit, 2,606 died, in addition to those on the planes. In 2014, the new One World Trade Center, at 1,776 feet to the top of its spire, became the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere.

  The Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park began on the 17th of September 2011 and spawned the Occupy movement worldwide. On the 29th and the 30th of October 2012, Hurricane Sandy ravaged parts of Lower Manhattan with record-high storm surge, severe flooding and high winds. It cut power to hundreds of thousands of residents, caused gasoline shortages and disrupted mass transit. The storm prompted discussion of seawalls and other coastal barriers around the borough's shorelines.

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• 7. Money, Media and Learning

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  At US$1.007 trillion in 2024, New York County had the highest total GDP and GDP per capita of any county in the United States. Its 2.45 million workers, drawn from across the metropolitan area, hold about half of all jobs in New York City. In 2010 the daytime population swelled to 3.94 million, with commuters adding a net 1.48 million people. The inflow of 1.61 million commuting workers was the largest of any county or city in the country.

  The New York Stock Exchange sits at 11 Wall Street, and Nasdaq is now at 4 Times Square in Midtown. In 2023 they were the world's largest and second-largest stock exchanges, by trading value and by the market capitalization of listed companies. The NYSE American, the New York Board of Trade and the New York Mercantile Exchange are also downtown. Manhattan had more than 520 million square feet of office space in 2022, the largest office market in the United States. Midtown, with more than 400 million square feet, is the largest central business district in the world. Lower Manhattan ranks third in the country, behind the Chicago Loop. The advertising industry goes by the shorthand "Madison Avenue."

  Silicon Alley once served as shorthand for the region's high-tech industries, but the name no longer fits a tech scene that has expanded in both location and scope. In 2015 it generated over US$7.3 billion in venture capital investment, most of it based in Manhattan. New York City hosted 300,000 tech-sector employees. Biotechnology is growing too. By mid-2014, the investment firm Accelerator had raised more than US$30 million, including from Eli Lilly, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, to start companies at the Alexandria Center for Life Science on East 29th Street. In 2011, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced that Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology would build a US$2 billion graduate school of applied sciences on Roosevelt Island.

  The New York Times has won the most Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and is considered the newspaper of record. The New York Daily News and the New York Post are also headquartered in the borough. The Wall Street Journal, the nation's largest newspaper by circulation, is based there as well. The New York Amsterdam News, in Harlem, is one of the leading Black-owned weekly newspapers in the country. In 2017 The Village Voice, historically the largest alternative newspaper in the United States, announced it would end its print edition and go fully digital. ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and Univision all have headquarters in Manhattan, as do CNN, MSNBC, MTV, Fox News, HBO and Comedy Central. WNYC has the largest public radio audience in the nation. The Manhattan Neighborhood Network, founded in 1971, is the oldest public-access cable channel in the United States.

  A record 66.6 million people visited New York City in 2019, bringing in $47.4 billion in tourism revenue. Visitor numbers fell by two-thirds in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic and climbed back to 63.3 million in 2023. Broadway shows sold approximately US$1.54 billion in tickets in each of the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 seasons, with attendance near 12.3 million each.

  When 450 Park Avenue sold on the 2nd of July 2007 for US$510 million, about US$1,589 per square foot, it broke a record set barely a month earlier. That record belonged to 660 Madison Avenue, at US$1,476 per square foot. In 2019, the most expensive home sale ever in the United States took place in Manhattan, at US$238 million, for a 24,000-square-foot penthouse overlooking Central Park. In October 2014, the Waldorf Astoria New York became the most expensive hotel ever sold, bought by the China-based Anbang Insurance Group.

  Columbia University, New York University, Rockefeller University and The Juilliard School are among the borough's many colleges. The City University of New York is the largest urban university system in the United States, serving more than 226,000 degree students. About 59.9% of Manhattan residents over age 25 hold a bachelor's degree, according to 2011-2015 survey data. The New York Public Library has the largest collection of any public library system in the country. Besides the five units of its Central Library, more than 35 branch libraries serve the borough.

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• 8. Neighborhoods and Culture

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  Manhattan Island runs 13.4 miles from north to south and measures 2.3 miles across at its widest point, near 14th Street. The Hudson River bounds it on the west, the East River on the east, and the Harlem River on the north. Fifth Avenue splits it into an East Side and a West Side, until it ends south of Waverly Place and Broadway takes over as the dividing line. In Manhattan, uptown means north and downtown means south. Most American cities use downtown for the central business district.

  Marble Hill once formed the northern tip of the island. The Harlem River Ship Canal, dug in 1895, cut it off from the rest of Manhattan. Before World War I, the old river channel between Marble Hill and the Bronx was filled in, and the neighborhood became part of the mainland. A May 1984 court ruling found it was simultaneously in the Borough of Manhattan and in Bronx County. Later that year the New York Legislature settled the matter, overwhelmingly passing a law that made it part of both New York County and the Borough of Manhattan.

  TriBeCa stands for TRIangle BElow CAnal Street, and SoHo for SOuth of HOuston. NoLIta means NOrth of Little ITAly, and NoMad means NOrth of MADison Square Park. Harlem takes its name from Haarlem, a city in the Netherlands, a legacy of the Dutch colonial era. Hell's Kitchen has a more official but lesser-used title, Clinton. None of these neighborhoods has official boundaries.

  Washington Heights is home to the largest Dominican immigrant community in the United States. Koreatown is roughly centered on 32nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. A stretch of Lexington Avenue between 25th and 30th Streets, lined with Indian restaurants and spice shops, has become known as Curry Hill. Since 2010, a Little Australia has emerged in Nolita. Harlem is the historical epicenter of African American culture. As of 2015-40.0% of residents aged five and older spoke a language other than English at home, and 22.63% spoke Spanish.

  Poet Walt Whitman described the streets of Manhattan as traversed by "hurrying, feverish, electric crowds." The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s established the African-American literary canon and introduced the writers Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. In the 1950s and 1960s the visual art scene was a center of pop art, which produced Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. Andy Warhol later socialized at clubs such as Serendipity 3 and Studio 54. Plays and musicals run in 39 larger professional theaters with at least 500 seats, almost all in and around Times Square. Lincoln Center is home to 12 arts organizations, including the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic and the New York City Ballet. Chelsea has more than 200 art galleries.

  In the early morning hours of the 28th of June 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. Members of the gay community answered with a series of spontaneous, violent protests. The Stonewall riots are widely considered the single most important event leading to the gay liberation movement and the modern fight for LGBT rights. The annual NYC Pride March travels southward down Fifth Avenue and ends in Greenwich Village. Stonewall 50, also called WorldPride NYC 2019, drew 150,000 participants and five million spectators, making it the largest international Pride celebration in history.

  The phrase "melting pot" was first popularly coined to describe the immigrant neighborhoods of the Lower East Side, in Israel Zangwill's 1908 play The Melting Pot. The play adapted Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and set it in New York City. The "Big Apple" dates to the 1920s, when a reporter heard New Orleans stable-hands use the term for New York's horse racetracks and named his racing column "Around The Big Apple." Jazz musicians then adopted it for the city, and a 1970s ad campaign by the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau helped popularize it. The Flatiron Building is said to be the source of "23 skidoo," from what cops shouted at men trying to glimpse women's dresses blown up by the wind around the triangular building.

  The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is the world's largest parade. It starts alongside Central Park and moves southward to the Macy's Herald Square flagship store. The St. Patrick's Day Parade, held every March since 1762, is the world's oldest. Ticker-tape parades for sporting champions and national accomplishments march northward on Broadway from Bowling Green to City Hall Park, along the Canyon of Heroes.

  Madison Square Garden is the only major professional sports arena in the borough. The New York Knicks started play in 1946 as one of the NBA's original teams, and the Rangers have played in the Garden since the 1926-1927 season. The team now called the Yankees began in 1903 as the Highlanders, named for Hilltop Park. They moved to the Polo Grounds in 1913 and to Yankee Stadium across the Harlem River in 1923. The original New York Giants played at the Polo Grounds from 1883 until they left for California after the 1957 season. Rucker Park in Harlem is a playground court famed for its streetball style, where many NBA athletes have played in the summer league.

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