New York City

New York City is the largest city in the United States. It sits at the mouth of the Hudson River on the Atlantic coast, in the state of New York. About 8.3 million people live inside the city, and more than 19 million live in the wider area around it. That makes it one of the most crowded and most famous cities on Earth.

The city is made up of five parts called boroughs. They are Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Manhattan is the smallest of the five, but it holds many of the city's most famous places. Four of the boroughs sit on islands. Only the Bronx is attached to the mainland of the United States.

New York started as a small Dutch trading post in 1624. The Dutch called it New Amsterdam. They bought the island of Manhattan from the Lenape people, who had lived there for thousands of years. The English took the town in 1664 and renamed it after the Duke of York. For a short time after the American Revolution, from 1785 to 1790, New York City was the capital of the United States. George Washington was sworn in as the first president on Wall Street.

The city is known for its skyscrapers. A skyscraper is a very tall building with a steel frame. The Empire State Building, finished in 1931, stands 1,454 feet tall. That is taller than four football fields standing on end. One World Trade Center, finished in 2014, reaches 1,776 feet, a number chosen to match the year the United States declared independence.

Millions of immigrants have passed through New York. Between 1892 and 1954, about 12 million people arrived at Ellis Island, a small island in the harbor where newcomers were checked before they could enter the country. Nearby stands the Statue of Liberty, a copper statue given to the United States by France in 1886. Many arriving immigrants saw the statue first, before anything else in America.

New York City is also a center for money, news, theater, fashion, and art. The New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street is one of the largest in the world. Broadway, a street in Manhattan, gives its name to dozens of big theaters nearby. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds more than two million objects, some of them thousands of years old.

The city never really sleeps. Its subway runs all day and all night, every day of the year. On the streets above, you can hear dozens of languages within a single block, which is one reason people call New York City the crossroads of the world.