Setting

New York City, the Big Apple

New York City (officially The City of New York) is the largest city in the United States, with the New York metropolitan area ranking among the largest urban areas in the world. For more than a century, it has been one of the world’s major centers of commerce and finance. New York City is rated as an alpha world city for its global influences in media, politics, education, entertainment and fashion. The city’s cultural centers for arts are among the nation’s most influential. The city is a major center for foreign affairs, hosting the headquarters of the United Nations. Residents of the city are known as New Yorkers. The current mayor of New York City is Michael Bloomberg.

Many of the city’s neighborhoods and landmarks are known around the world. The Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at Ellis Island. Wall Street, in Lower Manhattan, has been a dominant global financial center since World War II and is home to the New York Stock Exchange. The city has been home to several of the tallest buildings in the world, including the Empire State Building and the former twin towers of the World Trade Center, which were destroyed in the September 11, 2001 attacks.

New York City is comprised of five boroughs, each of which is coterminous with a county: The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island.

The Bronx

The Bronx is New York City’s northernmost borough, coterminous with Bronx County. The Bronx is located Northeast of Manhattan. It is the only one of the city’s five boroughs situated primarily on the United States mainland rather than on an island. As of 2006, the United States Census Bureau estimated that the borough’s population was 1,361,473.

If all five boroughs were independent cities, the Bronx would rank as the ninth most populous city in the United States. Recently, its population, which had been in decline since the 1960 census, has increased. The borough had its peak population in 1950. The Bronx is the fourth most populous of New York City’s five boroughs, and Bronx County is the fifth most populous county in the New York Metropolitan Area.

  • Yankee Stadium
  • Bronx Zoo

Manhattan

Manhattan is loosely divided into *downtown, *midtown, and *uptown, with Fifth Avenue dividing Manhattan’s east and west sides.

Downtown Manhattan

  • Battery Park City
  • Brooklyn Bridge
  • Chinatown
  • City Hall
  • Financial District
  • Greenwich Village - Bohemian days of Greenwich Village are long gone, because of the extraordinarily high housing costs in the neighborhood. Residents of Greenwich Village still possess a strong community identity, unique history and fame, and its well-known liberal live-and-let-live attitudes
  • Little Italy
  • New York Harbor
  • Soho
  • TriBeCa
  • Wall Street

Midtown Manhattan

  • Central Park
  • Hell’s Kitchen and Chelsea on the West Side
  • Radio Music Hall

Murray Hill, Kips Bay, Turtle Bay, and Gramercy on the East Side

  • Diamond District
  • Garment District
  • Koreatown
  • Madison Avenue
  • Madison Square Garden - often abbreviated as MSG, known colloquially simply as The Garden, has been the name of four arenas in New York City, United States. It is also the name of the entity which owns the arena and several of the professional sports franchises which play there. There have been four incarnations of the arena. The first two were located at the Northeast corner of Madison Square (Madison Ave. & 26th St.) from which the arena derived its name. Subsequently a new 17,000-seat Garden (opened December 15, 1925) was built at 50th Street and 8th Avenue, and the current Garden (opened February 14, 1968) is at 7th Avenue between 31st and 33rd Streets, situated on top of Pennsylvania Station.

The arena lends its name to the Madison Square Garden Network, a cable television network that broadcasts most sporting events that are held in the Garden, as well as concerts and entertainment events that have taken place at the venue.

  • Meatpacking District
  • Museum of Natural History
  • Park Avenue South
  • Radio City Music Hall
  • Rockefeller Center - is a complex of 19 commercial buildings covering 22 acres between 48th and 51st Streets in New York City. Built by the Rockefeller family, it is located in the center of Midtown Manhattan, spanning between Fifth Avenue and Seventh Avenue. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1987. It is the largest privately held complex of its kind in the world, and an international symbol of modernist architectural style blended with capitalism.

Most of the lower floor of Rockefeller Center qualifies as an underground city, as it features connections to subways, an extensive underground concourse, building connections, and several restaurants, all below ground.

  • Times Square - s a major intersection in Manhattan, New York City at the junction of Broadway and Seventh Avenue and stretching from West 42nd to West 47th Streets. The Times Square area consists of the blocks between Sixth and Eighth Avenues from east to west, and West 40th and West 53rd Streets from south to north, making up the western part of the commercial area of Midtown Manhattan.

Like the Red Square in Moscow, Trafalgar Square in London, and Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Times Square has achieved the status of an iconic world landmark and has become a symbol of its home city. Times Square is principally defined by its animated, digital advertisements.

  • Union Square

Uptown Manhattan (above 59th Street.)

More northerly region of Manhattan, could be described as the “non-tourist” section of Manhattan. The Bronx, though not in Manhattan, is often colloquially referred to as “Uptown”

  • Harlem
  • Inwood
  • Marble Hill
  • Spanish Harlem (El Barrio Formerly Italian Harlem)
  • Upper West Side (Morningside Heights and Manhattan Valley, American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) )
  • Upper East Side (aka ‘Silk Stocking District’) between Central Park and the East River. Much of the most expensive real estate in the United States.
  • Washington Heights
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