Things to do / Travel Guide
Native Americans were the first inhabitants of the area to be known as New York City (NYC). They named it, with a prophetic air, “Manahactanienk” (place of general inebriation). That's how “Manhattan” came into being. The first known Westerner to arrive at the settlement was Giovanni da Verrazano, an Italian explorer, in the 1520s. In 1609, Henry Hudson claimed the area of New York City for his employers, the Dutch East India Company, saying that “It is as beautiful a place as one can hope to tread upon.” By 1625, Dutch settlers had established a fur trade with area's locals, and had named their settlement New Amsterdam. A year later, Peter Minuit of the Dutch West India Company acquired the land, trading goods worth about 60 guilders with the Lenape Tribe.
The Early Days of New York City
It was when New Amsterdam became a British colony in the 1660s that the city was renamed New York. A basis of tolerance was formed when the British took over from the Dutch in 1665. This tolerance has become the great backbone of NYC to this day. The city then retained its British ownership for more than a century. Only two years after the Revolutionary War's conclusion, in 1783, did the last British troops leave town. From the implementation of the United States Constitution (in 1788) until 1790, New York City was the seat of the federal government. At that time, the city was a bustling seaport of 33,000 inhabitants. The city continued to grow at an astounding pace over the next decades.
By the 1820s the city's population had risen to 250,000, and that figure doubled by mid-century. The Industrial Revolution brought money and ingenuity to the city, with newfound millionaires building big, fancy mansions on Fifth Avenue. Despite the region's overall prosperity, NYC's cheap immigrant workers, employed by the industrial businessmen, lived in squalor in the city's already-crowded rows of tenement housing. By the late 1870s New York's population reached 1 million, and it continued to grow quickly, becoming a world-class financial capital by the turn of the 20th century.
New York City in the 20th Century
New York City's subway system was first opened to the public in 1904, helping to bridge the cultural gaps between the various populations. It did so as its many lines extended across the city's area, linking the different ethnic communities. Between 1892 and 1954, 12 million immigrants, refugees, and fortune-seekers alike, passed through Ellis Island. Located at the mouth of the Hudson River in New York Harbor, this is where immigrants underwent physical examinations and official registration before moving on to the mainland to start their lives. Many immigrants, including large communities of Irishmen, Italians, Germans, Poles, and Jews from all over Europe, remained in NYC, bequeathing to it a multicultural heritage it has long taken pride in. In the 1920s, African Americans poured into the city from the South, settling in Harlem and setting the scene for the Harlem Renaissance.
By the early 1930s, when the Great Depression was full-blown across the country, New York City's population had exploded to 7 million. After New Yorkers had gotten rid of Tammany Hall, the family-based political machine that had run the city for 80 years, in 1934 they elected the brilliant and hard-working Fiorello La Guardia as mayor to help turn things around. During his 11-year-long tenure as mayor, LaGuardia transformed the place from a beleaguered city into a rejuvenated city, initiating landmark public works programs such as the building of an airport within city limits.
After World War II, with soldiers coming home to start new and industrious lives, New York City suffered an exodus of its best and brightest to the suburbs. In 1957 and 1958 two of the city's Major League Baseball teams, the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers skipped town. The 1960s saw race riots and disenchantment, and, by the late 1970s, the city was teetering along a chasm of financial ruin and irrelevancy, with frequent brownouts and rampant crime.
Things picked up for the city in the 1980s, thanks to the strong leadership of mayor Ed Koch and the resoluteness of the city's residents. The financial district witnessed rebirth, and crime rates dropped drastically in the following decade. This trend was heightened in the 1990s by mayor Rudy Giuliani, who many extolled for his toughness on crime and aggressive urban reconstruction efforts.
New York City After September 11th
New York shook, and the whole world with it, when, on September 11th, 2001, terrorists hijacked and rammed two commercial jetliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. The towers collapsed, killing over 2,800 people. But New York would not be brought down, and her inhabitants pulled themselves together. Immediately the city began its emotional and financial rebound from the tragedy. With smoke continuing to rise from the disaster site for months, the physical cleanup of the World Trade Center site was completed ahead of schedule. The Freedom Tower, designed to stand at exactly 1,776 feet high (symbolic of the year the Declaration of Independence was written), will eventually occupy the site, as a memorial to the brave men and women who lost their lives in the buildings, in the planes, and in the rescue missions.
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