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New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States. It is located at the southern tip of New York State on New York Harbor, one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs—Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island—each being coextensive with its respective county. It is the geographical and demographic center of both the Northeast megalopolis and the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the United States by both population and urban area. New York is a global center of technology, finance, commerce, culture, entertainment and media, academics and scientific output, the arts and fashion—and as home to the headquarters of the United Nations, international diplomacy. New York City is known for its fast pace and continuous urban energy.
With an estimated population of 8,586,038 as of 2026, distributed over 300.46 square miles (778.2 km2), New York is the most densely populated major city in the United States. New York City has more than double the population of Los Angeles, the country's second-most populous city. More than 20.1 million people live in New York City's metropolitan statistical area, and approximately 22.5 million people live in its combined statistical area, both of which are the largest in the U.S. New York City is one of the world's most populous megacities. The city and its metropolitan area serve as the premier gateway for legal immigration to the United States. An estimated 800 languages are spoken in New York City, making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world. The New York City metropolitan region is home to the largest foreign-born population of any metropolitan region in the world, numbering approximately 5.9 million people as of 2023.
Manhattan Island was inhabited by Munsee-speaking Lenape around 1624. By then, Dutch colonists had established Fort Amsterdam as a center of trade on the island. This was the first European settlement in what would become New York City. The settlement was named New Amsterdam in 1626 and was chartered as a city in 1653. The city came under English control in 1664 and was temporarily renamed New York after Charles II granted the lands to his brother, the Duke of York, James II, before this name was permanently adopted in 1674. Following independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, New York City was the national capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790. The modern city was formed by the 1898 consolidation of its five boroughs.
Anchored by Wall Street in Manhattan's Financial District, New York City has been called both the world's premier financial and fintech center and the most economically powerful city in the world. As of 2024, the New York metropolitan area is the largest metropolitan economy in the world, with a gross metropolitan product of over US$2.44 trillion. The New York metropolitan area's economy is larger than all but nine countries. Despite having a 24/7 rapid transit system, New York also leads the world in urban automobile traffic congestion. The city is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by market capitalization of their listed companies: the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. New York City is an established haven for global investors.
As of 2025, New York City is the most expensive city in the world for expatriates, and there are escalating concerns about affordability in the city. New York County (Manhattan) is by a significant margin the most expensive U.S. county in terms of average home price per square foot and produces the highest U.S. county GDP by both absolute and per capita measures. Fifth Avenue is an ultra-luxury international shopping corridor that is undergoing additional infrastructure investment. New York City is home to the highest number of billionaires, individuals of ultra-high net worth (greater than US$30 million), and millionaires of any city in the world by a significant margin.
In 1664, New York was named in honor of the Duke of York (later King James II of England). James's elder brother, Charles II, appointed him proprietor of the former territory of New Netherland, including the city of New Amsterdam, when England seized it from Dutch control. New Netherland was renamed the Province of New York (now New York State).
In the pre-Columbian era, the area of present-day New York City was inhabited by Algonquians, including Munsee-speaking Lenape. The homeland of the Lenape, known as Lenapehoking, included the present-day areas of Staten Island, Manhattan, the Bronx, the western portion of Long Island (including Brooklyn and Queens), and the Lower Hudson Valley.
The first documented visit to New York Harbor by a European was in 1524, by Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano. He claimed the area for France and named it Nouvelle Angoulême (New Angoulême). A Spanish expedition, led by the Portuguese captain Estêvão Gomes sailing for Emperor Charles V, arrived in New York Harbor in January 1525 and charted the mouth of the Hudson River, which he named Río de San Antonio ('Saint Anthony's River').
In 1609, the English explorer Henry Hudson rediscovered New York Harbor while searching for the Northwest Passage to the Orient for the Dutch East India Company. He sailed up what the Dutch called North River (now the Hudson River), named first by Hudson as the Mauritius after Maurice, Prince of Orange.
Hudson claimed the region for the Dutch East India Company. In 1614, the area between Cape Cod and Delaware Bay was claimed by the Netherlands and named Nieuw-Nederland ("New Netherland"). The first non–Native American inhabitant of what became New York City was Juan Rodriguez, a merchant from Santo Domingo who arrived in Manhattan during the winter of 1613–14, trapping for pelts and trading with the local population as a representative of the Dutch.
A permanent European presence near New York Harbor was established in 1624, making New York the 12th-oldest continuously occupied European-established settlement in the continental United States, with the founding of a Dutch fur trading settlement on Governors Island. In 1625, construction began on a citadel and Fort Amsterdam, later called Nieuw Amsterdam (New Amsterdam), on present-day Manhattan Island.
The colony of New Amsterdam extended from the southern tip of Manhattan to modern-day Wall Street, where a 12-foot (3.7 m) wooden stockade was built in 1653 to protect against Native American and English raids. In 1626 Peter Minuit, the director of New Netherland, as charged by the Dutch West India Company, purchased the island of Manhattan from the Canarsie, a small Lenape band, for "the value of 60 guilders" (about $900 in 2018). A frequently told but disproved legend claims that Manhattan was purchased for $24 worth of glass beads.
Following the purchase, New Amsterdam grew slowly. To attract settlers, the Dutch instituted the patroon system in 1628, whereby wealthy Dutchmen (patroons, or patrons) who brought 50 colonists to New Netherland would be awarded land, local political autonomy, and rights to participate in the lucrative fur trade. This program had little success.
By the authority of a charter granted by the Dutch States General in June 1621, the Dutch West India Company established an exclusive monopoly over colonization and commerce in New Netherland. In 1639–1640, to bolster economic growth, it relinquished its fur trade monopoly, prompting a shift toward the production of food, timber, tobacco, and enslaved labor (particularly with the Dutch West Indies).
In 1647, Peter Stuyvesant began his tenure as the last director-general of New Netherland. During his tenure, the population of New Netherland grew from 2,000 to 8,000. Stuyvesant has been credited with improving law and order; however, he also earned a reputation as a despotic leader. He instituted regulations on liquor sales, attempted to assert control over the Dutch Reformed Church, and blocked other religious groups from establishing houses of worship.
In 1664, unable to summon any significant resistance, Stuyvesant surrendered New Amsterdam to English troops, led by Colonel Richard Nicolls, without bloodshed. The terms of the surrender permitted Dutch residents to remain in the colony and allowed for religious freedom.
In 1667, during negotiations leading to the Treaty of Breda after the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the victorious Dutch decided to keep the nascent plantation colony of what is now Suriname, which they had gained from the English, and in return, the English kept New Amsterdam. The settlement was promptly renamed "New York" after the Duke of York (the future King James II and VII). The duke gave part of the colony to proprietors George Carteret and John Berkeley.
On August 24, 1673, during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, Anthony Colve of the Dutch navy seized New York at the behest of Cornelis Evertsen the Youngest and rechristened it "New Orange" after William III, the Prince of Orange. In November 1674, the Dutch returned the island to England under the Treaty of Westminster.
Several intertribal wars among the Native Americans and epidemics brought on by contact with the Europeans caused significant Lenape population losses between 1660 and 1670. By 1700, the Lenape population had diminished to 200. New York experienced several yellow fever epidemics in the 18th century, losing 10% of its population in 1702 alone.
In the early 18th century, New York grew in importance as a trading port within the surrounding colony. It became a center of slavery, with 42% of households enslaving Africans by 1730. Most were domestic slaves; others were hired out as labor. Slavery became integrally tied to New York's economy through the labor of slaves throughout the port, and the banking and shipping industries trading with the American South. During construction in Foley Square in the 1990s, the African Burying Ground was discovered; the cemetery included 10,000 to 20,000 graves of colonial-era Africans, some enslaved and some free.
The 1735 trial and acquittal in Manhattan of John Peter Zenger, who had been accused of seditious libel after criticizing colonial governor William Cosby, helped to establish freedom of the press in North America. In 1754, Columbia University was founded.
The Stamp Act Congress met in New York in October 1765, as the Sons of Liberty organization emerged in the city and there were skirmishes over the next ten years with British troops stationed there. The Battle of Long Island, the largest battle of the American Revolutionary War, was fought in August 1776 within modern-day Brooklyn. A British rout of the Continental Army at the Battle of Fort Washington in November 1776 eliminated the last American stronghold in Manhattan, causing George Washington and his forces to retreat across the Hudson River to New Jersey, pursued by British forces.
After the battle, the British made New York their military and political base of operations in North America. The city was a haven for Loyalist refugees and escaped slaves who joined the British lines for freedom promised by the Crown, with as many as 10,000 escaped slaves crowded into the city during the British occupation, the largest such community on the continent. When the British forces evacuated New York at the close of the war in 1783, they transported thousands of freedmen for resettlement in Nova Scotia, England, and the Caribbean.
The attempt at a peaceful solution to the war took place at the Conference House on Staten Island between American delegates, including Benjamin Franklin, and British general Lord Howe on September 11, 1776. Shortly after the British occupation began, the Great Fire of New York destroyed nearly 500 buildings, about a quarter of the structures in the city, including Trinity Church.
In January 1785, the assembly of the Congress of the Confederation made New York City the national capital. New York was the last capital of the United States under the Articles of Confederation and the first under the Constitution. As the capital, New York City hosted the inauguration of the first President, George Washington, and the first Congress, at Federal Hall on Wall Street. Congress drafted the Bill of Rights there. The Supreme Court held its first organizational sessions in New York in 1790.
In 1790, for the first time, New York City surpassed Philadelphia as the nation's largest city. At the end of 1790, the capital of the United States was moved to Philadelphia, where it remained while Washington, D.C. was being constructed.
During the 19th century, New York City's population grew from 60,000 to 3.43 million. Under New York State's gradual emancipation act of 1799, children born to enslaved mothers were eventually liberated, but were legally required to serve as indentured servants until age 28 for males and age 25 for females. A significant free Black population gradually developed in Manhattan, made up of former slaves who had been freed by their masters after the American Revolutionary War, as well as escaped slaves. The New York Manumission Society worked for abolition and established the African Free School to educate Black children. It was not until 1827 that slavery was completely abolished in the state. Free Blacks struggled with discrimination, and interracial abolitionist activism continued. New York City's population jumped from 123,706 in 1820 (10,886 of whom were Black and of whom 518 were enslaved) to 312,710 by 1840 (16,358 of whom were Black).
In the 19th century, the city was transformed by both commercial and residential development relating to its status as a national and international trading center, as well as by European immigration. The city adopted the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, which expanded the city street grid to encompass almost all of Manhattan. The 1825 completion of the Erie Canal through central New York connected the Atlantic port to the agricultural markets and commodities of the North American interior via the Hudson River and the Great Lakes. Local politics became dominated by Tammany Hall, a political machine supported by Irish and German immigrants. In 1831, New York University was founded.
Several prominent American literary figures lived in New York during the 1830s and 1840s, including William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, John Keese, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Edgar Allan Poe. Members of the business elite lobbied for the establishment of Central Park, which opened in the winter of 1858 as the first landscaped park in an American city.
The Great Irish Famine brought a large influx of Irish immigrants, of whom more than 200,000 were living in New York by 1860, representing over a quarter of the city's population. Extensive immigration from the German provinces meant that Germans comprised another 25% of New York's population by 1860.
Democratic Party candidates were consistently elected to local office, increasing the city's ties to the South and its dominant party. In January 1861, in the wake of the Southern secession, New York City Mayor Fernando Wood proposed to the Common Council that the city secede from both the United States and the State of New York to become an independent "free city" that could maintain its lucrative cotton trade, but his proposal was not acted on. Anger at new military conscription laws during the American Civil War (1861–1865), which spared wealthier men who could afford to hire a substitute, led to the Draft Riots of 1863, whose most visible participants were ethnic Irish working class.
Text from the Wikipedia article “New York City”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.