New York City, officially the City of New York, historically New Amsterdam, Mayor, Aldermen, and Commons of the City of New York, and New Orange, also known as the Big Apple, is a city and port located at the mouth of the Hudson River, southeastern New York State, northeastern United States. It is the largest and encompasses the most influential American metropolis, Manhattan and Staten Island, the western part of Long Island, and a small portion of the New York State mainland north of Manhattan. New York City is actually a collection of many neighborhoods scattered among the city's five boroughs—Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island—each exhibiting its own lifestyle. Moving from one city neighborhood to another can be like moving from one country to another. New York is the nation's most populous and most international city. Its metropolitan area spans New York, New Jersey, and neighboring parts of Connecticut. Located where the Hudson and East rivers empty into one of the world's major ports, New York is the gateway to the North American continent and its preferred exit to the world's oceans. Area 305 sq mi (790 sq km). Pop (2010) 8,175,133; New York-White Plains-Wayne Metro Division, 11,576,251; New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island Metro Area, 18,897,109; (2020)
New York is the most ethnically diverse, religiously diverse, commercially driven, famously congested, and, in the eyes of many, most attractive urban centers in the country. No other city conjures up more images in the collective consciousness of Americans: Wall Street is synonymous with finance, Broadway is synonymous with theater, Fifth Avenue is automatically associated with shopping, Madison Avenue is the advertising industry, Greenwich Village is the bohemian lifestyle, Seventh Avenue is fashion, Tammany is the machine that defines politics, and Harlem depicts the Jazz Age, African American aspirations, and the slums. The term tenement evokes both the plight of urban life and the upward mobility of striving immigrant populations. New York has more Jews than Tel Aviv, more Irish than Dublin, more Italians than Naples, and more Puerto Ricans than San Juan. Its symbol is the Statue of Liberty, but the metropolis itself is an icon, the arena in which Emma Lazarus's "Tempest-Toast" transforms people of every nation into Americans — and if they live in the city, they become New Yorkers.
For the past two centuries, New York has been America's largest and wealthiest city. More than half of the people and goods entering the United States came through its ports, and that flow of commerce made a steady presence in the city's life. New York always meant possibility, because it was an urban center on the way to something better, a metropolis too busy to admire those who stood in the way of progress. New York—though the most American of all the nation's cities—thus acquired a reputation as both exotic and terrifying, a place where chaos, arrogance, vulgarity, and cruelty tested the endurance of everyone who entered. The city was inhabited by strangers, but they were, as James Fenimore Cooper explained, "essentially national in interest, location, pursuits. No one thinks of the place as belonging to a particular state but to the United States. Once the capital of both its state and country, New York Such status has transcended to become a global city, both in terms of commerce and views, with the world's most famous skyline. It has become a target of international terrorism – notably the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001, which for three decades was the most prominent symbol of the city's global prowess. However, New York remains for its residents a collection of local neighborhoods that provide familiar cuisine, language, and experiences. A city of stark contrasts and deep conflicts, New York is perhaps the most apt representative of a diverse and powerful nation.
