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New York
New York City, officially the City of New York, is the most populous city in the United States, and the most densely populated major city in North America.
The city is at the center of international finance, politics, entertainment, and culture, and is one of the world's four major global cities (along with London, Tokyo and Paris) with an unrivaled collection of museums, galleries, performance venues, media outlets, international corporations, and stock exchanges. The city is also home to the United Nations and many global organizations.
Located in the state of New York, New York City has a population of 8.1 million[1] within an area of 321 square miles (approximately 830 km²)[2]. It is at the heart of the New York Metropolitan Area, which at a population of over 18.7 million is one of the largest urban conglomerations in the world. The city proper comprises five boroughs: the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. Each of these boroughs, except for Staten Island, contains over a million people and would each be among the nation's largest cities if considered independently.
New York City attracts large numbers of immigrants from over 180 countries, as well as many people from all over the United States, who come to the city for its culture, energy, cosmopolitanism, and by their own hope of making it big in the "Big Apple." The city is also distinguished for having the lowest crime rate among major American cities[3].
Serving as an enormous engine for the global economy—with an estimated Gross Metropolitan Product of nearly $500 billion within its city limits[4]—New York City is home to more Fortune 500 companies than any other place in the United States. If the city were a nation, it would have the 17th highest gross domestic product in the world based on current exchange rates, exceeding that of Switzerland ($377 billion) and nearly equaling that of Russia ($582 billion).

History
At the time of initial European explorations, the area had long been inhabited by the Lenape. The Dutch established New Amsterdam and New Netherland in 1613. In 1640, Peter Stuyvesant was appointed governor and the colony was granted self-government in 1652. In 1664, the British conquered the area and renamed it New York after the UK city of York. The Dutch regained it in August 1673, renaming the city "New Orange", then ceded New Netherland permanently to the English in November 1674.
Under British rule the newly renamed City of New York and surrounding areas continued to develop. There was a growing sentiment for greater political independence among some, but the area was decidedly split in its loyalties. The site of modern New York City was the theatre of the New York Campaign, a series of major battles in the early American Revolutionary War. After that, the city was under British occupation until the end of the war, and was the last port British ships evacuated in 1783.
New York City became the temporary capital of the newly formed United States on September 13, 1788 under the U.S. Constitutional Convention. New York City remained the capital of the U.S. until 1790. The city grew as an economic center with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, and Tammany Hall began to grow in influence with the support of many of the immigrant Irish, a trend culminating with the election of the first Tammany mayor, Fernando Wood, in 1854.
There was chaos during the American Civil War, with major rioting in the New York Draft Riots. Later years saw the rise of the Gilded Age which saw prosperity for the city's upper classes amid the further growth of a poor immigrant working class, and an increasing consolidation, both economic and municipal, of what would become the five boroughs in 1898.
A series of new transportation links, most notably the New York City Subway, first opened in 1904, helped bind the newly consolidated city together. The height of European immigration brought social upheaval, and the anticapitalist labor union IWW was fiercely repressed. Later, in the 1920s, the city saw the influx of African-Americans as part of the Great Migration from the American South, and the Harlem Renaissance, part of a larger boom time in the Prohibition era that saw dueling skyscrapers in the skyline. The city suffered during the Great Depression, which saw the election of Republican reformer Fiorello LaGuardia and the fall of Tammany Hall after eighty years of political dominance. The city also played a significant part in World War II.
After World War II New York emerged as the unquestioned leading city of the world. However, after peaking in population in 1950, the city slowly declined with changes in industry and commerce, suburban flight outside the city, and rising crime rates reaching something of a crisis period in the 1970s.
The 1980s was a period of modest boom and bust, followed by a major boom in the 1990s. Racial tensions calmed in latter years; a dramatic fall in crime rates, improvements in quality of life and a major reinvigoration of immigration and growth pushed the city’s population past the eight million mark for the first time in its history. In the late 1990s, the city benefited disproportionately from the success of the financial services industry during the dot com boom, one of the factors in a decade of booming residential and commercial real estate values.
The city was the site of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history on September 11, 2001, when almost 3,000 people were killed in the destruction of the World Trade Center. Among those who died were workers in the buildings, passengers and crew on two commercial jetliners, and hundreds of firemen, policemen, and rescue workers who responded to the disaster. The families of some rescue and cleanup workers who died later claim the acrid smoke that rose for months from Ground Zero, the site of the Twin Towers' fiery collapse, was also a cause of death. The city's economy was substantially hurt but has since recovered and the physical cleanup of the disaster site was completed ahead of schedule. The Freedom Tower, intended to be exactly 1,776 feet tall (a number symbolic of the year the Declaration of Independence was written), is to be built on the site and is slated for construction between 2006 and 2010.

Climate
New York has a humid continental climate, though being adjacent to water it experiences less temperature fluctuation than inland areas. New York winters are typically cold, but milder than inland Eastern and Midwestern cities at similar latitude such as Cleveland, Detroit and Pittsburgh. Temperatures below 0 °F (-18 °C) occur once per decade on average, but daytime low temperatures in the 10s and 20s °F (-12 to -2 °C) are common at the height of winter. Springs are typically mild, with high temperatures averaging in the 50s °F (10 to 15 °C) in late March to the lower 80s °F (25 to 30 °C) in early June. Summers in New York are hot and humid, with temperatures commonly exceeding 90 °F (32 °C), though high temperatures above 100 °F (38 °C) are somewhat rare. Autumns are comfortable with sunshine and average temperatures in the 50s °F (10 to 15 °C).

Culture
The people of New York City, New Yorkers, share a unique culture rooted in centuries of immigration and city life. There is considerable diversity in this local culture, varying by ethnic group, social class, and neighborhood.
To some observers, New York, with its large immigrant population, is more a quintessentially cosmopolitan, global city than something specifically "American". But to others, the city's very openness to newcomers makes it an archetypal city in a "nation of immigrants". Among American cities only Los Angeles receives more immigrants, but immigration to New York is far more diverse; the city government maintains translators in 180 languages. The term "melting pot" was first coined to describe Manhattan’s densely populated Lower East Side.
Everyday life for New Yorkers is often compared to that of urban Western Europeans. The “car culture” that dominates most of the United States is displaced by New York’s overwhelming use of public transit. Many New Yorkers live in compact rental apartments, not sprawling suburbs. The city’s food culture, influenced by its immigrants and vast number of demanding dining patrons, is complex. Jewish and Italian immigrants made New York famous for bagels and pizza. More recent arrivals have made falafels and kebabs standbys of contemporary New York street food.
There are many stereotypes about "The City That Never Sleeps." The American idiom "in a New York minute" means "immediately." The "hard-boiled New Yorker" writes off other cities as "not real", is tough, rude, and impatient, and takes pride in the crowds, noise, and hardships of city life. The "sophisticated New Yorker" often defines American notions of urbanity.

Arts
New York City’s density and size, multicultural history, and wealth of arts institutions makes it the cultural capital of the United States and a global crossroads for music, film, theater, dance and visual art. Among the nation’s most important art collections are those held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. The first and largest performing arts complex in the United States is Lincoln Center. The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs has a larger annual budget than the National Endowment for the Arts.
Tom Wolfe wrote of New York that "Culture just seems to be in the air, like part of the weather." Important cultural movements have long been part of the city’s history. The Harlem Renaissance established the African-American literary canon in the United States. The New York School of painters, which developed abstract expressionism in the post-World War II period, became the first truly original school of painting in America. African-American jazz greats likes Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald and Lena Horne found refuge in mixed communities in Queens in the segregated America of the 1940s. American modern dance developed in New York during that same time. New York was a hub for the counterculture of the 1960s. Its downtown music scene established punk rock in the United States in the 1970s. In the Bronx, meanwhile, hip-hop was emerging and would go on to take the world by storm by the 1990s. While the big-budget mainstream film industry consolidated in Hollywood, New York became the capital of American independent cinema.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a vast assemblage of historic art, while the Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim and Whitney Museum of American Art house important collections of 20th century art. There are an additional 2,000 arts and cultural non-profits and 500 art galleries of all sizes.[3] The city’s performing arts venues are equally numerous and varied. These include the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, actually a complex of buildings housing 12 separate companies, among them Jazz at Lincoln Center, the New York City Opera, the New York Philharmonic and the New York City Ballet. Carnegie Hall is a smaller but prestigious venue. The Brooklyn Academy of Music is known for its cutting edge programming. Downtown clubs such as CBGB and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe are the city's destinations for rock, blues, jazz, mixed media and experimental theater.
New York is also the center of American theater. Broadway theatre, referring to performances in one of New York’s 39 large-scale theaters with more than 500 seats, is often considered along with London's West End to be the highest professional form of theater in the English language. Off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway productions are often more experimental and are staged in the city's many smaller theater houses.

Tourism
Some 39 million foreign and American tourists visit New York each year. According to some estimates, as many as one in four Americans can trace their roots to Brooklyn. Many visitors investigate their genealogy at historic immigration sites such as Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. Other tourist destinations include the Empire State Building, for many years the world's tallest building after its construction in 1931, Radio City Music Hall, home of The Rockettes, a variety of Broadway shows, the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum, housed on a World War II aircraft carrier, high-end shopping districts around Fifth Avenue, and city landmarks such as Central Park.
28,000 acres (113 km²) of parkland and 14 miles (22 km) of public beaches in the city provide recreational space. Prospect Park in Brooklyn, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, has a 90 acre (360,000 m²) meadow thought to be the largest meadow in any U.S. park. Flushing Meadows Park in Queens is the city's third largest park and hosted the World's Fair in 1939 and 1964. Historically, some of the most visited waterfront was around the Coney Island boardwalk. The area was an immigrant and working class resort with amusement parks and ocean atmosphere. It went into decline in the 1970s, although the beach has always remained popular in the summer and Russian immigrants have begun revitalizing area businesses. The popular Brooklyn Cyclones minor league baseball team now plays there. Fishing, swimming and rowing are increasingly popular as the water quality of the city's waterways improve. Several canoe and kayak clubs offer nighttime circumnavigations of Manhattan and tours of the East River.
Shopping is popular with many visitors. Fifth Avenue is a famous luxury shopping corridor. Macy's, the nation's largest department store, and the surrounding area of Herald Square is a major destination for more moderately-priced goods. Greenwich Village is home to hundreds of independent music and book stores, while the East Village has many purveyors of rare and hard-to-find items. Union Square is known for its large farmer's market. The "diamond district" around 47th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenue is a major destination for jewelry, and SoHo, formerly the center of the New York art scene, is now known for high-end clothing boutiques. The art galleries are now concentrated in Chelsea. There are also large shopping districts in Downtown Brooklyn and along Queens Boulevard in Queens. Many of the city's ethnic enclaves, such as Jackson Heights, Flushing, and Brighton Beach are major shopping destinations for first and second generation Americans up and down the East Coast, who seek out stores such as Aji Ichiban, the sleek Hong Kong chain, sari shops, and indigenous food markets.

Wikipedia.org