New York metropolitan area

• 1. Introduction

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  The New York metropolitan area generates more than $2.6 trillion in economic output each year, making it the largest metropolitan economy on the planet. That figure alone raises a set of questions: how did a handful of counties straddling three states accumulate this much weight? What holds this sprawling region together when its geography, its politics, and even its weather pull in different directions? And who actually lives in the 23.6 million-person urban agglomeration that the Census calls the New York-Newark, NY-NJ-CT-PA combined statistical area?

  The region answers to several names. Locals call it the Tri-State area; official documents call it Greater New York or Metro New York. The U.S. government calls it the only metropolitan statistical area in the country with more than 20 million residents, a distinction confirmed by the 2020 Census count of 20.1 million, or slightly over 6 percent of the entire national population. None of those labels fully captures what the region is: a place where a family in Sussex County, New Jersey wakes up to a fully humid continental climate while a family in Hudson County, just forty miles east, wakes up to something closer to the subtropics.

• 2. A Harbor Built by Ice

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  During the Wisconsinan glaciation, an ice sheet more than 1,000 feet deep sat over the region. As it retreated, it scraped away soil down to bedrock, and its slow work split apart what are now Long Island and Staten Island. The same glacial moraines enclosed what became New York Bay, which is technically the drowned lower valley of the Hudson River. This accident of geology created one of the most extraordinary natural harbors on the North American continent.

  Giovanni da Verrazzano, sailing for France in 1524, was the first European to enter these waters, though he did not come ashore. Henry Hudson, sailing for the Dutch in 1609, visited and eventually helped establish a settlement on Lower Manhattan that Dutch colonists renamed New Amsterdam by 1626. In 1664, England took control and renamed the territory New York, a gift from King Charles II of England to his brother, the Duke of York. The fur trade drew a diverse mix of settlers, including Africans, Jews, and Portuguese traders. By 1792, a group of merchants gathered under a buttonwood tree and signed the agreement that created what is now the New York Stock Exchange. New York had been the country's largest city since 1790, and by 1884, more than 70 percent of all American exports passed through ports in New York or its surrounding towns.

• 3. Consolidation and Consequence

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  On the 1st of January 1898, the five boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island were consolidated into a single city. The newly unified New York encouraged both physical connections between boroughs and the growth of outlying bedroom communities. Grand Central Terminal opened in 1913, and the New York City Subway launched in 1904 under the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, one of three independent systems eventually absorbed by the city. The Broadway Theater District took shape alongside that subway expansion, eventually hosting productions like Ziegfeld Follies and Show Boat in extravagantly decorated theatres spanning from 42nd to 47th Streets.

  The population peaked in 1950, then a significant share of residents left for the suburbs over the following decades. Industry and commerce declined. Urban renewal projects promised to fix decaying neighborhoods but instead frequently produced ghettoization, informal racial segregation, and the destruction of cohesive community fabric. The city suffered back-to-back blackouts in 1965 and 1977; the 1977 event triggered massive rioting, looting, and arson across parts of the city. The Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team left for Los Angeles after the 1957 season, a departure that struck the borough as both an economic and psychological blow. Crime surged through the 1980s, fed in part by a crack epidemic that made New York City one of the main entry points for narcotics entering the United States. Beginning in the 1990s, however, crime dropped substantially, and that decline has continued through the 21st century.

• 4. The Gateway for the World

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  New York has been the premier gateway for legal immigration to the United States for most of its modern history, and the metropolitan area today holds the largest foreign-born population of any metropolitan region in the world. As of 2010-26.7 percent of the combined population, or roughly 5.9 million people, were born outside the United States. Of those, 50.6 percent arrived from Latin America, 27 percent from Asia, 17.4 percent from Europe, and 3.8 percent from Africa.

  Queens is the most ethnically diverse urban area in the world. The borough is home to the largest Andean populations in the United States, covering communities of Colombian, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Chilean, and Bolivian descent. Manhattan's Chinatown, along with satellite Chinatowns in Brooklyn and around Flushing, Queens, represents the largest Chinese population outside of Asia, with the wider metropolitan region holding an estimated 819,527 uniracial overseas Chinese as of 2014. India Square in Jersey City is known as Little Bombay and holds the highest concentration of Asian Indians in the Western Hemisphere. The metropolitan area also houses the largest Jewish community outside of Israel, numbering over 1.5 million in 2012, alongside the largest Russian American, Italian American, Dominican American, and Puerto Rican American populations in the country. Roughly 4.8 million Hispanic residents make this the second-largest overall Hispanic population in the United States.

• 5. Long Island's Contradictions

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  Long Island extends 118 miles east-northeast from Roosevelt Island, Manhattan into the Atlantic Ocean. With 8,063,232 residents counted at the 2020 Census, it is the most populous island in the United States and the 17th most populous island in the world, ahead of Ireland, Jamaica, and Hokkaido. If it constituted its own metropolitan statistical area, it would rank fourth in the country; if it were a state, it would rank 13th in population and first in population density.

  The island holds its extremes close together. The Town of Hempstead in Nassau County had an estimated population of 770,367 in 2016, making it the most populous municipality in the metro area outside New York City itself. A few miles to the east, the 11962 zip code covering Sagaponack in Southampton was listed by Property Shark as the most expensive in the United States in 2015, with a median home sale price of $5,125,000. Along the North Shore, the Gold Coast once featured lavish mansions built by wealthy business tycoons in the early 20th century; the Otto Kahn Estate there served as partial inspiration for the Gatsby estate in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel. Three major airports serve the island: John F. Kennedy International and LaGuardia in Queens, and Newark Liberty International in New Jersey, all operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

• 6. Wall Street and the New Economy

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  In August 2013, the securities industry employed 163,400 people in the New York area. That year, it accounted for 5 percent of private sector jobs, 8.5 percent of the city's tax revenue (US$3.8 billion), and 22 percent of total wages. The average salary in the sector reached US$360,700. Manhattan had approximately 520 million square feet of office space in 2013, the largest office market in the United States, and Wall Street investment banking fees that year totaled roughly US$40 billion.

  Parallel to Wall Street, Silicon Alley grew from a cluster of internet firms in the Flatiron District into a broader label for the metropolitan region's technology sector. On the 19th of December 2011, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a US$2 billion partnership between Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to build Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island. Meanwhile, the biotech firm Accelerator raised more than US$30 million by mid-2014 from investors including Eli Lilly and Company, Pfizer, and Johnson and Johnson to fund startups at the Alexandria Center for Life Science on East 29th Street. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island's North Shore has produced eight Nobel Prize winners in Physiology or Medicine, illustrating the density of scientific talent distributed across the wider region. Verizon Communications, headquartered at 140 West Street, was completing a US$3 billion fiber-optic upgrade throughout New York City in 2014.

• 7. Crisis, Storm, and Recovery

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  On the 29th and the 30th of October 2012, Hurricane Sandy struck the metropolitan coast with record-high storm surge, severe flooding, and high winds. Power failed for millions of residents. Gasoline shortages paralyzed transport networks. Damage to physical infrastructure and private property in New York and New Jersey, including interrupted commerce, was estimated at several tens of billions of dollars. The storm's scale prompted serious discussion about constructing seawalls and other coastal barriers around the region's shorelines. One World Trade Center, known as Freedom Tower, was completed in 2014, replacing the Twin Towers destroyed in the 11th of September 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

  The 2017-2021 New York City transit crisis began with what news outlets called the 2017 summer of hell, prompting New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to declare a state of emergency. The crisis traced its roots to long-term neglect of subway infrastructure and chronic underfunding, affecting not just the subway but bus lines and Penn Station. The state of emergency was formally lifted on the 30th of June 2021. Even as the transit system struggled, the metropolitan airspace accommodated over 130 million passengers in 2016, and the combined statistical area's population reached 23.6 million by 2020. In 2014, eight of the top ten U.S. zip codes by median housing price were located in the New York metropolitan area, with six of those eight in Manhattan alone.