Anchored by
Wall Street in the
Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York City has been called both the most economically powerful city and the leading
financial and
fintech center of the world,
[21][22][23]and Manhattan is home to the world's two
largest stock exchanges by total
market capitalization, the
New York Stock Exchange (at $25.0 trillion as of August 2023) and
Nasdaq ($21.7 trillion).
[24] Many
multinational media conglomerates are based in Manhattan, as are numerous colleges and universities, such as
Columbia University and
New York University; the
headquarters of the United Nations is also located in the borough. Manhattan hosts three of the world's most-visited tourist attractions in 2013:
Times Square,
Central Park, and
Grand Central Terminal.
[25] Penn Station is the busiest transportation hub in the
Western Hemisphere.
[26] The borough hosts many prominent
bridges and
tunnels, and
skyscrapers including the
Empire State Building,
Chrysler Building, and
One World Trade Center.
[27] It is also home to the
NBA's
New York Knicks and the
NHL's
New York Rangers.
Manhattan Island is divided into three informally bounded components, each cutting across the borough's long axis:
Lower,
Midtown, and
Upper Manhattan. Manhattan is one of the most densely populated locations in the world, with a
2020 census population of 1,694,250 living in a land area of 22.66 square miles (58.69 km
2),
[3][18] or 72,918 residents per square mile (28,154 residents/km
2), and its residential property has the highest sale price per square foot in the United States.
Chinatown incorporates the highest concentration of
Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere.
[20]
Situated on
one of the world's largest natural harbors, the borough is bounded by the
Hudson,
East, and
Harlem rivers and includes
several small adjacent islands, including
Roosevelt,
U Thant, and
Randalls and Wards Islands. It also includes the small neighborhood of
Marble Hill now on the
U.S. mainland.
The area of present-day Manhattan was originally part of
Lenape territory.
[11] European settlement began with the establishment of a
trading post founded by
Dutch colonists in 1624 on lower Manhattan Island; the post was named
New Amsterdam in 1626. The territory and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King
Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, the
Duke of York.
[12] New York, based in present-day Manhattan, served as the
capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790.
[13] The
Statue of Liberty in
New York Harbor greeted millions of arriving immigrants
in the late 19th century and is a world symbol of the United States and its ideals.
[14] Manhattan became a borough during the
consolidation of New York City in 1898, and houses
New York City Hall, the seat of the
city's government.
[15] The
Stonewall Inn in
Greenwich Village, part of the
Stonewall National Monument, is considered the
birthplace of the modern
gay rights movement, cementing Manhattan's central role in
LGBT culture.
[16][17] It was also the site of the
World Trade Center, which was
destroyed during the
September 11 terrorist attacks.
Manhattan () is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the
five boroughs of
New York City. The borough is coextensive with
New York County of the
U.S. state of
New York, the smallest
county by land area in the
contiguous United States. Located almost entirely on Manhattan Island near the southern tip of the State of New York, Manhattan constitutes the geographical and demographic center of the
Northeast megalopolis and the urban core of the
New York metropolitan area, the largest
metropolitan area in the world by
urban landmass.
[6] Manhattan serves as New York City's
economic and
administrative center and has been described as the cultural, financial,
media, and
entertainment capital of the world.
[7][8][9][10]About Manhattan
Manhattan was historically part of the Lenapehoking territory inhabited by the Munsee, Lenape, and Wappinger tribes. There were several Lenape settlements in the area including Sapohanikan, Nechtanc, and Konaande Kongh, which were interconnected by a series of trails. The primary trail on the island, which would later become Broadway, ran from what is now Inwood in the north to Battery Park in the south. There were various sites for fishing and planting established by the Lenape throughout Manhattan. The name Manhattan originated from the Lenape's language, Munsee, manaháhtaan (where manah- means "gather", -aht- means "bow", and -aan is an abstract element used to form verb stems). The Lenape word has been translated as "the place where we get bows" or "place for gathering the (wood to make) bows". According to a Munsee tradition recorded by Albert Seqaqkind Anthony in the 19th century, the island was named so for a grove of hickory trees at its southern end that was considered ideal for the making of bows.
In April 1524, Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, sailing in service of Francis I of France, became the first documented European to visit the area that would become New York City. Verrazzano entered the tidal strait now known as The Narrows and named the land around Upper New York Harbor New Angoulême, in reference to the family name of King Francis I; he sailed far enough into the harbor to sight the Hudson River, and he named the Bay of Santa Margarita – what is now Upper New York Bay – after Marguerite de Navarre, the elder sister of the king.
Manhattan was first mapped during a 1609 voyage of Henry Hudson. Hudson came across Manhattan Island and the native people living there, and continued up the river that would later bear his name, the Hudson River. Manhattan was first recorded in writing as Manna-hata, in the logbook of Robert Juet, an officer on the voyage.
A permanent European presence in New Netherland began in 1624, with the founding of a Dutch fur trading settlement on Governors Island. In 1625, construction was started on the citadel of Fort Amsterdam on Manhattan Island, later called New Amsterdam (Nieuw Amsterdam), in what is now Lower Manhattan. The establishment of Fort Amsterdam is recognized as the birth of New York City.
In 1647, Peter Stuyvesant was appointed as the last Dutch Director-General of the colony. New Amsterdam was formally incorporated as a city on February 2, 1653. In 1664, English forces conquered New Netherland and renamed it "New York" after the English Duke of York and Albany, the future King James II. In August 1673, the Dutch reconquered the colony, renaming it "New Orange", but permanently relinquished it back to England the following year under the terms of the Treaty of Westminster that ended the Third Anglo-Dutch War.
Manhattan was at the heart of the New York Campaign, a series of major battles in the early stages of the American Revolutionary War. The Continental Army was forced to abandon Manhattan after the Battle of Fort Washington on November 16, 1776. The city, greatly damaged by the Great Fire of New York during the campaign, became the British military and political center of operations in North America for the remainder of the war. British occupation lasted until November 25, 1783, when George Washington returned to Manhattan, a day celebrated as Evacuation Day, marking when the last British forces left the city.
From January 11, 1785, until 1789, New York City was the fifth of five capitals of the United States under the Articles of Confederation, with the Continental Congress meeting at New York City Hall (then at Fraunces Tavern). New York was the first capital under the newly enacted Constitution of the United States, from March 4, 1789, to August 12, 1790, at Federal Hall. Federal Hall was where the United States Supreme Court met for the first time, the United States Bill of Rights were drafted and ratified, and where the Northwest Ordinance was adopted, establishing measures for admission to the Union of new states.
New York grew as an economic center, first as a result of Alexander Hamilton's policies and practices as the first Secretary of the Treasury to expand the city's role as a center of commerce and industry. By 1810, New York City, then confined to Manhattan, had surpassed Philadelphia as the most populous city in the United States. The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 laid out the island of Manhattan in its familiar grid plan. The city's role as an economic center grew with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, cutting transportation costs by 90% compared to road transport and connecting the Atlantic port to the vast agricultural markets of the Midwestern United States and Canada.
Tammany Hall, a Democratic Party political machine, began to grow in influence with the support of many of the immigrant Irish, culminating in the election of the first Tammany mayor, Fernando Wood, in 1854. Covering 840 acres (340 ha) in the center of the island, Central Park, which opened its first portions to the public in 1858, became the first landscaped public park in an American city.
New York City played a complex role in the American Civil War. The city had strong commercial ties to the South, but anger around conscription, resentment against Lincoln's war policies and paranoia about free Blacks taking the jobs of poor immigrants culminated in the three-day-long New York Draft Riots of July 1863, among the worst incidents of civil disorder in American history. The rate of immigration from Europe grew steeply after the Civil War, and Manhattan became the first stop for millions seeking a new life in the United States, a role acknowledged by the dedication of the Statue of Liberty in 1886. This immigration brought further social upheaval. In a city of tenements packed with poorly paid laborers from dozens of nations, the city became a hotbed of revolution (including anarchists and communists among others), syndicalism, racketeering, and unionization.[citation needed]
In 1883, the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge across the East River established a road connection to Brooklyn and the rest of Long Island. In 1898, New York City consolidated with three neighboring counties to form "the City of Greater New York", and Manhattan was established as one of the five boroughs of New York City. The Bronx remained part of New York County until 1914, when Bronx County was established.
The construction of the New York City Subway, which opened in 1904, helped bind the new city together, as did the completion of the Williamsburg Bridge (1903) and Manhattan Bridge (1909) connecting to Brooklyn and the Queensboro Bridge (1909) connecting to Queens. In the 1920s, Manhattan experienced large arrivals of African-Americans as part of the Great Migration from the southern United States, and the Harlem Renaissance, part of a larger boom time in the Prohibition era that included new skyscrapers competing for the skyline, with the Woolworth Building (1913), 40 Wall Street (1930), Chrysler Building (1930) and the Empire State Building (1931) leapfrogging each other to take their place as the world's tallest building. Manhattan's majority white ethnic group declined from 98.7% in 1900 to 58.3% by 1990. On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Greenwich Village killed 146 garment workers, leading to overhauls of the city's fire department, building codes, and workplace safety regulations.
Despite the Great Depression, some of the world's tallest skyscrapers were completed in Manhattan during the 1930s, including numerous Art Deco masterpieces that are still part of the city's skyline, most notably the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the 30 Rockefeller Plaza. A postwar economic boom led to the development of huge housing developments targeted at returning veterans, the largest being Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village, which opened in 1947. The United Nations relocated to a new headquarters that was completed in 1952 along the East River.
The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous, violent protests by members of the gay community against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. They are widely considered to constitute the single most important event leading to the gay liberation movement and the modern fight for LGBT rights.
In the 1970s, job losses due to industrial restructuring caused New York City, including Manhattan, to suffer from economic problems and rising crime rates. While a resurgence in the financial industry greatly improved the city's economic health in the 1980s, New York's crime rate continued to increase through the decade and into the beginning of the 1990s. The 1980s saw a rebirth of Wall Street, and Manhattan reclaimed its role at the center of the worldwide financial industry, with wall Street employment doubling from 1977 to 1987. The 1980s also saw Manhattan at the heart of the AIDS crisis, with Greenwich Village at its epicenter.
In the 1970s, Times Square and 42nd Street - with its sex shops, peep shows, and adult theaters, along with its sex trade, street crime and public drug use - became emblematic of the city's decline, with a 1981 article in Rolling Stone magazine calling the stretch of West 42nd Street in the area the "sleaziest block in America". By the late 1990s, led by efforts by the city and the Walt Disney Corporation, the area had been revived as a center of tourism to the point where it was described by The New York Times as "arguably the most sought-after 13 acres of commercial property in the world."
By the 1990s, crime rates started to drop dramatically and the city once again became the destination of immigrants from around the world, joining with low interest rates and Wall Street bonuses to fuel the growth of the real estate market. Important new sectors, such as Silicon Alley, emerged in the Flatiron District, adding technology as a key component of Manhattan's economy.
The 1993 World Trade Center bombing, described by the FBI as "something of a deadly dress rehearsal for 9/11", was a terrorist attack in which six people were killed when a van bomb filled with explosives was detonated in a parking lot below the North Tower of the World Trade Center complex.
On September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers of the original World Trade Center were struck by hijacked aircraft and collapsed in the September 11 attacks launched by al-Qaeda terrorists. The collapse caused extensive damage to surrounding buildings and skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan, and resulted in the deaths of 2,606 of the 17,400 who had been in the buildings when the planes hit, in addition to those on the planes. Since 2001, most of Lower Manhattan has been restored, although there has been controversy surrounding the rebuilding. In 2014, the new One World Trade Center, at 1,776 feet (541 m) measured to the top if its spire, became the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere and is the world's seventh-tallest building (as of 2023).
The Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan began on September 17, 2011, receiving global attention and spawning the Occupy movement against social and economic inequality worldwide.
On October 29 and 30, 2012, Hurricane Sandy caused extensive destruction in the borough, ravaging portions of Lower Manhattan with record-high storm surge from New York Harbor, severe flooding, and high winds, causing power outages for hundreds of thousands of city residents and leading to gasoline shortages and disruption of mass transit systems. The storm and its profound impacts have prompted discussion of constructing seawalls and other coastal barriers around the shorelines of the borough and the metropolitan area to minimize the risk of destructive consequences from another such event in the future.
On October 31, 2017, a terrorist deliberately drove a truck down a bike path alongside the West Side Highway in Lower Manhattan, killing eight.