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This article documents the history of New York City part of present day New York State. For the history of the State of New York, see the article History of New York.
About 75,000 years ago, during the last ice age, the area of present day New York City was at the edge of the ice sheet that stretched down from Canada. The ice sheet covered the city to a depth of approximately 1000 feet. The glaciers scraped off much of the top layers of material in the region, exposing underlying much-older bedrock, including gneiss and marble that dates from 500 million years ago.
Approximately 15,000 years ago, when the ice sheet began retreating, the glacier left behind a terminal moraine that now forms the hills of Long Island and Staten Island. The two islands were not yet separated by the Narrows, which were formed approximately 6,000 years ago when the waters of the Upper Bay broke through in the Lower Bay.
Archeological excavations indicate that the first humans settled the area as early as 9,000 years ago. These early inhabitants left behind hunting implements and bone heaps. The area was abandoned, however, possibly because the warming climate of the region lead to the local extinction of many larger game species upon which the early inhabitants depended for food.
A second wave of inhabitants entered the region approximately 3,000 years ago and left behind more advanced hunting implements such as bows and arrows. The remains of approximately 80 such early encampments have been found throughout the city. The region has probably remained continually inhabited from that time.
At the time of the arrival of the first Europeans, the area around what would later be called New York Bay was populated primarily by the Lenape, a loosely connected group of Algonquin-speaking people. The Lenape called the region Lenapehoking, or the "place where the Lenape dwell." The Lenape subsisted mostly on slash and burn agriculture, with the women sowing such crops as maize, sunflowers, and squash. The harbor also provided for rich fishing, especially of oyster and striped bass.
The Lenape lived in small groups and moved seasonally from camp to camp and, according to best historical analysis, had no concept of private ownership of land.
Many of the bands of Lenape would later gave their names for place names throughout the city, including the Raritans on Staten Island and the Canarsies in Brooklyn.
In addition to water travel, the Lenape moved through the region on an extensive system of trails, many of which would later become major roads and thoroughfares of the city.
Although the first European to see the harbor was Giovanni da Verrazano, during his expedition of 1524 and named it Nouvelle-Angoulême, and though Henry Hudson explored the area in 1609, the written history of New York City properly begins with the Dutch settlement of Walloon families in 1624. That town, at the southern tip of Manhattan, was called Nieuw Amsterdam, and was the main city of the Dutch colony of Nieuw Nederland. The Dutch origins can still be seen in many names in New York City, such as Brooklyn (from Breukelen), Harlem from Haarlem (formalized in 1658 as Nieuw Haarlem), the Bronx (from Pieter Bronck), Flushing (from Vlissingen) and Staten Island.
The island of Manhattan was in some measure self-selected as a future metropolis by its extraordinary natural harbor formed by New York Bay (actually the drowned lower river valley of the Hudson River, enclosed by glacial moraines), the East River (actually a tidal strait) and the Hudson River, all of which are confluent at the southern tip, from which all later development spread. Also of prime importance was the presence of deep fresh water aquifers near the southern tip, especially the Collect Pond, and an unusually varied geography ranging from marshland to large outcrops of Manhattan schist, an extremely hard granitic rock that is ideal as an anchor for the foundations of large buildings.
In 1664, British ships entered Gravesend Bay, in modern Brooklyn, and troops marched to capture the ferry across the East River to the city, with minimal resistance: the governor at the time, Peter Stuyvesant, was unpopular with the residents of the city. Articles of Capitulation were drawn up, the Dutch West India Company's colors were struck on September 8, 1664, and the soldiers of the garrison marched to the East River for the trip home to the Netherlands. The date of 1664 appeared on New York City's corporate seal until 1975, when the date was changed to 1625 to reflect the year of Dutch incorporation as a city, and to incidentally allow New York to celebrate its 350th anniversary just 11 years after its 300th.
The British renamed the colony New York, after the king's brother James, Duke of York and on June 12, 1665 appointed Thomas Willett the first of the mayors of New York. The city grew northward, and remained the largest and most important city in the colony of New York.
New York was cosmopolitan from the first, established and governed largely as a strategic trading post. Jews expelled from Brazil were welcome in New York. St. Patrick's Day was celebrated in New York City for the first time at the Crown and Thistle Tavern on March 17, 1756. This holiday has since become a yearly city-wide celebration that is famous around the world as the St. Patrick's Day Parade. Freedom of worship was part of the city's foundation, and the trial for libel in 1735 of John Peter Zenger, editor of the New-York Weekly Journal established the principle of freedom of the press in the British colonies.
Though the lead statue of George III in Bowling Green was melted down for bullets in the first enthusiasm of the Revolution, the city itself was roundly Tory during the war. Five skirmishes comprising the New York Campaign were fought around the city's then limits in late 1776, beginning with the Battle of Long Island in Brooklyn on August 27. A quarter of the city structures were destroyed in the Great Fire on September 21, a few days after the British Landing at Kip's Bay and the Battle of Harlem Heights. Following the highly suspicious fire, British authorities apprehended dozens of people for questioning, including Nathan Hale, who was executed a day later. The British conquest of Manhattan was completed with the fall of Fort Washington on November 16, 1776, and thereafter they held the city without challenge until 1783. 'Evacuation Day', in which the last British troops and many Tory supporters departed in September 1783, was long celebrated in New York.
New York, then the nation's second largest city, was briefly the capital of the new United States of America, in 1789 and 1790, and George Washington was inaugurated as President in New York on the steps of Federal Hall. In 1792 a group of merchants began meeting under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street, beginning the New York Stock Exchange, while a yellow fever epidemic that summer sent New Yorkers fleeing to nearby healthful Greenwich Village.
Even before the opening of the Erie Canal, the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 imposed a surveyed grid upon all of Manhattan's varied terrain, in a far-reaching though perhaps topographically insensitive vision. The Erie Canal, opened in 1825, helped the city grow further by increasing river traffic upstate and to the west, making it the Atlantic gateway to the heart of the continent.
By 1835 Manhattan overtook Philadelphia as the most populous American city and was in the throes of the first of its building booms, unfazed by the summer of cholera in 1832.
Late in the year 1835, December 16, the Great Fire of New York broke out. The temperature was below zero (F), and gale winds were blowing. Firemen, some called from as far away as Philadelphia, were at first helpless to battle the wind driven fire due to icing lines and pumps. The fire leveled most of the city below Canal Street. Some merchandise was carried to churches that were thought fireproof, but several of these burned anyway. Eventually the fire was controlled by blowing up buildings in the fire's path.
Many of the merchants who lost their stores thought they would be covered by insurance, but the tremendous losses, and, in many cases, the destruction of the insurance company headquarters in the financial district, bankrupted the insurance firms and much of the loss was not covered.
The city's development was again stopped by the Panic of 1837. But the city recovered and by mid-century established itself as the financial and mercantile capital of the western hemisphere.
The city and its nearby suburbs grew rapidly for several reasons. The natural harbor at the base of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the New Jersey ports at Newark and Elizabeth provided almost unlimited capacity for trading ships and protection from storms. The city's strong entrepreneurial spirit discouraged family connections that would have stifled innovation and economic ambition. The city's cosmopolitan atitude and tolerance of many different cultures encouraged many different types of immigrant groups to settle in the city, especially German immigrants and Irish immigrants who began arriving in the late 1840s.
The raw excesses of unregulated capitalism created a large upper-middle and upper class, but its need for manpower encouraged immigration into the city on an unprecedented scale, with mixed results. The famed melting pot was brought into being, from which multitudes have since arisen in the successful pursuit of the "American Dream". But countless others failed to rise, or entire generations were forced to plough themselves under for their children or grandchildren to rise. In the mid-1800s these antipodes could be found in the contrast between rich stretches of lower Broadway, Washington Square Park and Lafayette Street (wealth that would later take up more extravagant residences on Fifth Avenue) and the almost unbelievably squalid enclave of Five Points (abject poverty later to occupy the Lower East Side).
In 1857 Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman physician, founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children.
During the American Civil War on July 13, 1863 draft opponents began five days of rioting, the 'Draft Riots' that for a century would be regarded as the worst in United States history. The post-war period was noted for the corruption and graft for which Tammany Hall has become proverbial, but equally for the foundation of New York's pre-eminent cultural institutions, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera, the American Museum of Natural History, while the Brooklyn Museum was a major institution of New York's independent sister city. The Brooklyn Bridge epitomized the heroic confidence of a generation and tied the two cities inexorably together.
New York newspapers were read across the continent as editors James Gordon Bennett, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst battled for readership.
The flood of immigration from Europe passed through Ellis Island in New York Harbor, under the eye of the Statue of Liberty (1886).
In 1874, nearly 61% of all U.S. exports passed through New York harbor. In 1884, nearly 70% of U.S. imports came through New York. The eventual rise of ports on the Gulf of Mexico and on the Pacific coast reduced New York's share of imports and exports to about 47% in 1910.
The city's banking resources grew 250% between 1888 and 1908, compared to the national increase of 26%.
Between 1860 and 1907, the accessed value of the land and buildings on Manhattan rose from $1.7 billion to $6.7 billion.
The modern city of New York — the five boroughs — was created in 1898, as the merger of the cities of New York (then Manhattan and the Bronx) and Brooklyn with the largely rural areas of Queens and Staten Island.
The building of the New York Subway, as the separate IRT and BMT systems, and the later IND, was a later force for population spread and development. The first IRT line opened in 1904.
The world-famous Grand Central Terminal opened as the world's largest train station on February 1, 1913, replacing an earlier terminal on the site. It was preceded by Pennsylvania Station, several blocks to the south. Twice a New York World's Fair has mixed entertainment with a little progressivist instruction.
Starting in the early 1900s, New York City became known for its daring and impressive architecture, most notably the skyscrapers which transformed the skyline, from the Art Deco icon the Chrysler Building to the starkly modernist World Trade Center.
After Jerome Kern's Show Boat, the Broadway musical developed into a characteristically American art, while Tin Pan Alley cranked out the tunes America danced to before rock and roll.
The era of graft and corruption, unfairly epitomized by mayor Jimmy Walker was followed by the reformer Fiorello La Guardia, arguably New York's greatest mayor, and the rise of the bridges, parks and parkways coordinator, Robert Moses, the greatest proponent of automobile-centered modernist urbanism.
Culturally New York became a truly international city, rather than a great American city, with the influx of intellectual, musical and artistic European refugees that started in the late 1930s. After the war New York inherited the role of Paris as center of the art world with Abstract Expressionism, and became a rival to London as an art market. However, the city lost two baseball teams to California, the Dodgers and the Giants, in the late 1950s. They were replaced by the Mets.
On November 9, 1965, the city endured a massive power blackout along with much of eastern North America. The city's experience during the ordeal became the subject of a motion picture entitled Where Were You When The Lights Went Out?
Adult entertainment sites filled the Times Square district beginning in the mid-1960s, and continuing until the Disneyfication of the area in the mid-1990s. There are still such sites in the vicinity.
By about 1970, New York City had become notorious the world over for having high rates of crime and other social disorder, including several incidents in which police officers were ambushed and murdered by black militants. A popular song in the autumn of 1972, "American City Suite," chronicled, in allegorical fashion, the decline in the city's quality of life.
Financial crisis hit the city in the mid-1970s, when it briefly appeared that the city might have to declare bankruptcy (see John Lindsay). The fiscal crisis resulted largely from the combination of generous welfare spending by the city government in the 1960s and the stock market and economic stagnation of the 1970s. President Gerald R. Ford earned the enmity of many New Yorkers when he refused to use federal money to "bail out" the city. On October 30, 1975, the New York Daily News famously summarized Ford's decision in a headline: "Ford to City: Drop Dead".
The blackout of 1977 struck the City of New York on July 13, 1977, lasting for 25 hours and resulting in heavy looting and other unrest.
The period played host to much racial tension in the city, including the highly-publicized murders of three African-Americans in "white" neighborhoods in separate incidents (Willie Turks in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn in 1982, Michael Griffith in Howard Beach, Queens in 1986, and Yusef Hawkins in Brooklyn's Bensonhurst neighborhood in 1989). Homelessness also became a serious problem during this time, specifically in the last two of Edward Koch's three terms as mayor (1978-1990). The city outlawed discrimination against homosexuals in such matters as employment and housing in 1986. In 1989, Koch was defeated by David Dinkins in the Democratic primary in his bid for a fourth term, and then Dinkins narrowly defeated Republican Rudolph Giuliani in the general election to become the city's first-ever black mayor; but a combination of continued racial strife (such as that in Crown Heights in 1991), an extremely weak economy (in January, 1993 the city's unemployment rate reached 13.4 per cent, the highest level of joblessness seen there since the Great Depression) and terrorism (the first World Trade Center bombing on February 26, 1993) caused Dinkins' popularity to seriously decline (including a threat by residents of Staten Island to secede from the city), and he was defeated by Giuliani in a rematch of the candidates in the 1993 election.
The city rebounded somewhat in the mid- and late 1990s due to the steady expansion of the national economy and the stock market boom (or bubble) that took place concomitantly, although stubbornly high unemployment remained a local problem. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor, is credited by many for revitalizing Times Square and making the city more "liveable" by cracking down on crime. Critics argue, however, that the drop in crime came at the price of greater friction between police and some of the city's ethnic groups, and less concern for civil liberties, while others point out that other cities achieved similar drops in crime. Supporters of the former mayor reply that crime in the city fell more rapidly during Giuliani's term than in most other major U.S. cities, such as Detroit or Los Angeles.
New Yorkers lived through the city's bloodiest and perhaps most tragic day on September 11, 2001, when hijackers linked to the jihadist organization Al-Qaeda piloted two airliners into each of the World Trade Center towers. The airplanes, designated for cross-country flights and therefore engorged with jet fuel, slammed into the towers in the early morning hours of September 11. The crashes ripped gaping holes into the buildings, and ignited fires that brought the towers down. Nearly 2,800 people, including both New Yorkers and visitors to the city, perished in the attack, including several hundred police officers and firefighters.
On February 27, 2003, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), after receiving input from thousands of people all over the world, revealed a design for the World Trade Center site. Designed primarily by renowned architect Daniel Libeskind, the plans envision a 1,776-foot-tall tower named the Freedom Tower to help restore the Manhattan skyline to its former grandeur. The site pays homage to the tragedy by leaving intact the slurry wall (which withstood the force of the destruction and held the waters of the Hudson river back), and by keeping the footprints of the towers available as a memorial site.
An electrical blackout rolled through the Northeastern United States and Southern Canada on August 14, 2003 at 4:11 PM, leaving many areas, including NYC, without electricity for over a day. There was no major looting or other crime, unlike in the blackout of 1977 (see 2003 U.S.-Canada blackout).
For each year, this list shows the total number of inhabitants of the five boroughs of New York.
Histories of New York City neighborhoods, such as Harlem, San Juan Hill, Upper West Side, Lower East Side, Chinatown, the Financial District (which includes the South Street Seaport) and others. New York has many famous thoroughfares, including Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue, Broadway and others. The city also has numerous smaller streets with rich histories, including Wall Street.
Some of the islands of the city have surprisingly rich local histories: Liberty Island, Governors Island, City Island, New York, Roosevelt Island, New York and others.
The is also a Timeline of New York City disasters.
Compare history of Brooklyn, New York.
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