Founding
borough of New York City, New York, United States
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Manhattan is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. Manhattan is coextensive with New York County, which is the smallest county by area in the U.S. state of New York, and one of the smallest in the United States. Located almost entirely on Manhattan Island near the southern tip of the state, Manhattan is centrally located in the Northeast megalopolis and represents the urban core of the New York metropolitan area. 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.
Before European colonization, present-day Manhattan was part of Lenape territory. European settlement began with the establishment of a trading post by Dutch colonists in 1624 on Manhattan Island; the post was named "New Amsterdam" in 1626. The territory came under English control in 1664 and was renamed "New York" after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, the Duke of York. New York, based in present-day Lower Manhattan, served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790.
The Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, part of Manhattan, greeted millions of arriving immigrants in the late 19th century and symbolizes the United States and its ideals. 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. Harlem in Upper Manhattan became the center of what is now known as the cultural Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. The Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, is considered the birthplace in 1969 of the modern gay-rights movement, cementing Manhattan's central role in LGBTQ culture. Lower Manhattan was the site of the original World Trade Center, which was destroyed during the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
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. Manhattan Island is divided into three informally bounded components, each cutting across the borough's long axis: Lower, Midtown, and Upper. 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 km2), or 72,918 residents per square mile (28,154 residents/km2).
Manhattan is known for its fast pace and continuous urban energy. New York County is by a significant margin the most expensive U.S. county for the average home price per square foot, and produces the highest U.S. county GDP by both absolute and per capita measures. The borough houses Billionaires' Row and Wall Street, as well as the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization, the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. Many multinational media conglomerates are based in Manhattan, as are numerous colleges and universities, including Columbia University, New York University, Rockefeller University, and the City University of New York. The headquarters of the United Nations is located in the Turtle Bay neighborhood of Midtown Manhattan.
Manhattan hosts three of the world's top 10 most-visited tourist attractions: Times Square, Central Park, and Grand Central Terminal. New York Penn Station is the busiest transportation hub in the Western Hemisphere. Fifth Avenue is an ultra-luxury international shopping corridor that is undergoing additional infrastructure investment. Chinatown has the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere.
The borough connects with many well-known bridges and tunnels. Manhattan's numerous notable skyscrapers include the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and One World Trade Center. It is also home to the National Basketball Association's New York Knicks and the National Hockey League's New York Rangers.
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 etymology of the name Manhattan is most likely – amongst other theories, and via loaning by Dutch — from the Lenape's local language Munsee, manaháhtaan (where manah- means "gather", -aht- means "bow", and -aan is 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 for a grove of hickory trees that was considered ideal for bowmaking. An alternate theory claims a "Delaware source akin to Munsee munahan ("island")."
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. The Treaty of Breda, signed on July 31, 1667, ended the Second Anglo-Dutch war. The Dutch ceded New Netherland (encompassing modern-day New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware) to England in exchange for the territory of Suriname and control of the spice-producing Island of Run in the East Indies, known for its production of nutmeg and mace. 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. In 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.
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 consolidated 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), the 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. In 1912, about 20,000 workers, a quarter of them women, marched upon Washington Square Park to commemorate the fire. Many of the women wore fitted tucked-front blouses like those manufactured by the company, a clothing style that became the working woman's uniform and a symbol of women's liberation, reflecting the alliance of the labor and suffrage movements.
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 30 Rockefeller Plaza. During World War II, the borough gave its name to the Manhattan Project, the top-secret U.S.-led research program that developed the first nuclear weapons. The project was named after the Manhattan Engineer District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which was initially headquartered in Manhattan. 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 as the world's financial center, 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 between 7th and 8th Avenues the "sleaziest block in America". By the late 1990s, led by efforts by the city and the Walt Disney Company, 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 began 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 bonus payments to fuel the growth of the real estate market. Important new sectors, such as Silicon Alley, emerged in the Flatiron District, cementing 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.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Manhattan”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.